So mad #2

[Dave Bickford]

So, as a last-ditch effort to diagnose this myself before sending it out for repair, I opened it up to poke around a bit. Checked for free movement (no problem). Wiggled the few cable connections. Fired it up and it ran! I can only conclude that some of the cable connections have oxidized over the years and the wiggling around cleaned them up enough to get it running again. Some Deoxit might be in order here to confirm. Could be a loose solder connection too, but that’s not too hard to fix. Should have started simple first before getting mad. 🙄 To be continued. 😀

I’m going to try running some crap film through tonight to see if it runs for a while.

*edit* just, ran a 200’ film without incident.

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

Exactly how those old electronics would behave, at this day and age.

In a similar situation - I had saved an old Panasonic VCR (NV7200 or so, top loader) from being scrapped years ago. After lots of work it eventually got up and running, giving out decent pic & sound for its age - quite pleased with it.

Then one day - all of sudden - it would frequently stop itself mid-run. That happened so randomly that I couldn't find any pattern of this behavior - at all. After weeks/months with LOTS of diagnostic/disassembly (and loads of hair-pulling) later and I still failed to find the root cause.

Only one day when I'm about to give up and throw it away that I did poke all buttons on the front panel, just for the heck of it - that I noticed the pattern. It would immediately act up as soon as I just touched the TIMER function button, no matter how lightly I touched. Further investigation revealed that when this switch is CLOSED the vcr would stay on "normal" mode, but once in OPEN it would enter "timer" mode - which it would stop ANY operation right away. After some 40 odd years the contacts inside that darn switch had some oxide buildup, barely enough to prevent good contact - and normal operation.

Just one blast of contact cleaner and lots of workout on that switch, it's now fully functional again.

So yes, expect to face with other weird things from off/loose connections soon. In this case I would work out all switches/knobs & reseating all available connectors inside, just to be on the safe side then.