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About a week ago, I decided to finally get started on this project to replace the main drive belt in this Tascam 122 professional cassette deck. This deck was brought to me for repair by my friend who brings me guitar amps to fix.
These cassette decks were just about the best deck that you could buy at the time that they were in use. They were used in various commercial operations such as radio stations before digital media came along. This model has 2 speeds, regular cassette speed, and high speed. The higher speed gives better fidelity and overall bandwidth when recording and playing a tape. These decks also have several different bias settings to match the different kinds of tapes that were made at the time, and also has Dolby noise reduction built in, with a switch so that you can chose to use it or not.
In order to replace the belt, I had to pull the cassette mechanism out of the deck to work on it. The old belt had disintegrated and the remaining sticky gooey mess had to be cleaned off the motor drive pulley and capstan flywheel, which I was able to do with cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol. In order to get to the parts for cleaning, I had to take the mechanism apart to get at the flywheel.
Here's another view of the mechanism, you can see the drive motor in this picture. You can also see that the faceplate of the machine has been removed, which is necessary to get the mechanism out.
Here, I have the mechanism put back together with the new drive belt installed. This cassette mechanism has 2 motors, one to drive the capstan that pulls the tape across the heads, and another motor to drive the take up reel, and for fast forward and rewind operations.
And now the mechanism is back in place and ready for testing.
This isn't the most difficult belt replacement that I've done on a cassette deck. This mechanism was well thought out by the people who designed it, some cassette mechanisms are a lot more of a pain in the butt to take apart and put back together. Other than cleaning up the remains of the old belt, this repair job was fairly simple.
I have 2 more of these machines to look at to see what needs to be done to get them to work. Apparently, this model of cassette deck still has a decent resale value, so if I can get them to work, my friend can sell them.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
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