Here's the next electronics repair, a NAD 6130 cassette deck.
This NAD gear comes from an original owner that still plays his collection of hundreds of tapes!
I was also handed an original copy of the service manual too
When I plugged the player into my Variac, I noticed that the Recording Level Display was pegged.
I could also hear a slight sluggish groaning sound coming from a motor.
Let's take a peek inside and see what we find!
The first thing discovered was this spring stuck to the side of the chassis with clear Scotch tape. Again, someone has been inside here before me. I didn't ask when the last time this tape deck was played. Maybe it played without it in place?
Here's a shot of the chassis. It appears very clean with no burn marks anywhere on the boards. There are several fuses and they all test good.
The cassette transport has a motor with the same triangle trademark found on components in a recent NAD 3150 amplifier repair. It's Matsushita/Panasonic's trademark from the 1950's.
The gears in the transport appear to be in very good condition too, but when you take a close look at the pulleys, you can see rubber particles everywhere. It's time for a belt replacement. Maybe they are getting worn-down and starting to bind/slip making the motor work overtime and causing it to groan?
I also see an area of the transport where a spring is slightly dislodged:
...and look at this! Here's the location where I think that loose spring found taped to the chassis belongs:
Bd139 mentioned in the NAD amplifier repair that those green blob capacitors are microphonic. There's about 30 of them in here. What I plan to do is to remove a couple of them and attach them to my oscilloscope and then tap them with a pencil to see if it affects the trace. I'll use the little Tektronix 310 tube scope repaired not long ago
If they are microphonic, they'll have no right being in this tape deck!
Now this isn't a very "high-end" model. It's best frequency response is when using a metal tape (40Hz-17kHz +/- 3dB).
I also will try to make a "test-tape" with my Nakamichi LX-5. I've read where a certain frequency is recorded to a cassette tape and that tape is used to align the "speed" of the drive.
Also, if anyone knows what would be the best brand/type of grease to use on these plastic gears, please let me know. All of the old grease is going to be flushed-out ...and a hint where to buy good belts for it.
I read a maintenance manual for a Garrard turntable. It specified 7 different greases to use in it!
That's it for tonight. I'm going to finish the day reading a few pages of the service manual
And since Fedex/Kinkos is just a block from the house, I'll have the schematics scanned in Hi-res and post them here too.