vinyldavid
09-15-2008, 10:25 PM
I borrowed one from my school because it has a 3 3/4ips and 1 7/8ips speed, and this is the email that I sent the owner....
Any info on this?
"I got the R2R home, and threaded a test tape that I knew was at 3 3/4ips, but not anything vital. Worked. Not well. Lots of wow and flutter, and bad frequency response. But it worked.
Then I started to smell burning. So I shut it down. Knowing quite a bit about basic operation and maintenance of these decks, I pulled off the faceplate and took a peek inside....
What I was greeted by made me groan. Most of the rubber bits inside had tunred to a nasty goop that gets all over everything and is VERY hard to clean. Almost every surface in the deck was covered with it. So I took out the rubbing alcohol, Qtips and paper towels and went to work...
6 and a half hours later.....
I exposed new rubber on the idlers by putting them in rubbing alcohol and then scraping them down to new with paper towels. Idler size does not matter, so long as they are in the general vicinity. And are round.
I Cleaned every important part of it, and some non-important parts, too. Put the 2 idlers back in, and fired it up....
No fast forward or reverse. Looking at how this deck is set up, I can tell that one to 3 rubber bits are missing from this, and are splattered all over the insides that do not need to be clean (the inside of the case). It would be at least $300 in service fees and there would need to be parts custom fabricated to get that function back, and this deck's just not worth it. It's a low end single motor deck. Not worthy of the time I put into it, but I had to have it working.
It needs 2 new belts, which could be worth it, but I don't have ANY money right now. One runs the tape counter, which is fine, but could use a replacement, and the other runs the takeup reel. That winds the tape up from the headblock. Might be hard to replace, but if you ever had any interest in doing much with this deck, I'd recommend it.
Playback at 7.5ips is OK, definitely not up to Teac A-3340S levels, bur decent. Playback at 3 3/4 astonished me....sounds far better than I had ever assumed it would. And it keeps gettin better as time goes on and the caps reform.
1 7/8ips....it emits a high pitched whistle at this speed, even with no tape playing. Something in the caps. Not worth looking at, because I can chop the speed in half on my computer and have no problems with fidelity. It's low enogh to begin with at 1 7/8 anyways.
So all in all, not a bad deck. Got a grounding problem with the RCA outputs (they;re loose!), so if that becomes a real problem, I'll re-solder them.
There's my report on the R2R...It's a Realistic 999..... "
Not too bad....
Any info on this?
"I got the R2R home, and threaded a test tape that I knew was at 3 3/4ips, but not anything vital. Worked. Not well. Lots of wow and flutter, and bad frequency response. But it worked.
Then I started to smell burning. So I shut it down. Knowing quite a bit about basic operation and maintenance of these decks, I pulled off the faceplate and took a peek inside....
What I was greeted by made me groan. Most of the rubber bits inside had tunred to a nasty goop that gets all over everything and is VERY hard to clean. Almost every surface in the deck was covered with it. So I took out the rubbing alcohol, Qtips and paper towels and went to work...
6 and a half hours later.....
I exposed new rubber on the idlers by putting them in rubbing alcohol and then scraping them down to new with paper towels. Idler size does not matter, so long as they are in the general vicinity. And are round.
I Cleaned every important part of it, and some non-important parts, too. Put the 2 idlers back in, and fired it up....
No fast forward or reverse. Looking at how this deck is set up, I can tell that one to 3 rubber bits are missing from this, and are splattered all over the insides that do not need to be clean (the inside of the case). It would be at least $300 in service fees and there would need to be parts custom fabricated to get that function back, and this deck's just not worth it. It's a low end single motor deck. Not worthy of the time I put into it, but I had to have it working.
It needs 2 new belts, which could be worth it, but I don't have ANY money right now. One runs the tape counter, which is fine, but could use a replacement, and the other runs the takeup reel. That winds the tape up from the headblock. Might be hard to replace, but if you ever had any interest in doing much with this deck, I'd recommend it.
Playback at 7.5ips is OK, definitely not up to Teac A-3340S levels, bur decent. Playback at 3 3/4 astonished me....sounds far better than I had ever assumed it would. And it keeps gettin better as time goes on and the caps reform.
1 7/8ips....it emits a high pitched whistle at this speed, even with no tape playing. Something in the caps. Not worth looking at, because I can chop the speed in half on my computer and have no problems with fidelity. It's low enogh to begin with at 1 7/8 anyways.
So all in all, not a bad deck. Got a grounding problem with the RCA outputs (they;re loose!), so if that becomes a real problem, I'll re-solder them.
There's my report on the R2R...It's a Realistic 999..... "
Not too bad....