Are you fed up of sifting through all the, often Public Domain, PDF Service Manuals listed on eBay?

Apart from the fact that as many of them are public domain they are freely available to download they get in my way on searches for interesting old stuff. Take a search on Studer tonight, over 500 results and over 400 of these for service manuals or Studer documents for their reel to reel and other audio products from the past all of which can be downloaded from Studer’s public FTP server!!

I know some may call it legitimate business but I feel sorry for anyone who’s paid over a tenner (£10 GBP) for one even if it’s supplied on a nice shiny CDR or printed on laser paper and bound in a plastic wallet!

So, for everyone who likes to understand how things work and fix their own old equipment and not just throw it away, here’s some of my ‘favourite’ manuals that aren’t so easily available on the internet - for FREE!:

Tascam 112 Mk 1 Service Manual

Teac C-3x Service Manual

Nakamichi 610 Preamp Service Manual

Arcam Delta 70 CD player Service Manual

Philips CD104 Service Manual

NAD 3020 Service Manual

Over the last few years we’ve gradually built up our equipment inventory so we can now offer a wide range of audio and video transfers.

We’re very happy to offer all track formats and speeds of 1/4 inch reel to reel tape transfer.

15 inches per second (ips) and 7.5 ips speeds are normally transferred on, our pride and joy, a Studer A80 RC. We also have a Tascam BR20 and several Revox A77’s for backup. The slower speeds and 4 track stereo formats are catered for by Teac and Sony machines.

We take pride in making sure these machines are calibrated and cleaned before each transfer.

Quite often we receive tape in poor condition this is very often a result of splicing tape ‘drying out’ as it’s a bit like sellotape and the splices breaking as the tape is played.
We are able to splice and repair tape before transfer.

Prices are competitive but not published here as we’ve found each job is different and needs certain attentions that need to be quoted for on an individual basis. We are happy though to offer a assess / listen service as many customers don’t know what’s on their tapes and either don’t have a machine or their old machine is broken.

Recent work has included many valuable family history 5 inch reels. Remember tape is fragile, very susceptible to magnetic fields and doesn’t last forever. It’s worth transferring it or getting it transferred now to keep your memories safe.

I’ve had these belts sitting around for a few months now and they’ve finally come around on my to do list. Thinking this would be nice and easy like the Teac C-3x belts I whipped the cover off my 234 eager to put it back to work transferring those thousands of undiscovered bedroom gems that must be around in peoples’ cupboards.

Tascam 234 4 track tape transport

Looked nicely laid out and well constructed as all this old Tascam equipment seems to be. I thought I’d just take the transport out and it’d be easy. There are just two belts in the 234, the capstan belt and the belt that moves the transport up and down. This cam mode belt had stretched and come off and the capstan belt had pretty much disintegrated. Once I start I find it hard to stop and this isn’t a quick job the first time, you need to be methodical and patient, good screwdrivers help too.

Well here comes the process, it seems pretty daunting at first when you see how many boards, cables and bits you have to remove and disassemble to replace the belts.

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently ordered and replaced the capstan and counter belt on this cassette deck. These parts are easily available from Fred Marrs who sells a huge range of correctly sized replacement belts through his eBay shop. He has even gone to the lengths of remanufacturing the Nakamichi OC 8096 capstan belt to the correct specs.

This Teac machine is a really nice 3 head cassette deck, built like a tank, and very similar if not identical to the original Tascam 122. I don’t use this deck for normal cassette transfers as I feel my Nakamichi decks generally sound better but this is one of the few decks that can record and playback at double the normal speed so it’s reserved for these transfers and as a backup.

The transport is quick and easy to remove and the belt was easy once the capstan had been removed - this was also greased and oiled a little too.

Teac C-3x transport removed

Teac C-3x capstan motor with new belt

Everything went well until  I tested it with an old tape - It would play for a few seconds then the take up reel would stop letting tape get pulled around the pinch wheel, well and truly chewed!  It looked like the rubber drive wheel that the reel motor works against has perished at one point or slips. I also noticed that the little rubber sleeves that act as brakes on the reels have perished too. I’m going to have to get it all apart again to fix this - see below for more soon..

Oh and here’s a the service manual for free, so you don’t have to get fleeced by an eBay seller who’s downloaded a load of free manuals.

Teac C-3x Service Manual

altered pc world logo

A customer recently came to me after an unhelpful, incorrect and ultimately expensive experience at PC World.

Their Dell Inspiron laptop had stopped working, after initially refusing to look at it, the ‘tech’ person grudgingly agreed after a complaint to his manager. After being told it was thought the power supply had stopped working, he took it away and ultimately concluded the motherboard needed replacing.

Of course it didn’t and just needed another power supply which was less than £20.00 for a recycled one on eBay!

Unfortunately the customer had already bought another laptop on this expert’s advice which she didn’t need. Please don’t go to PC World for advice!

Health Designs, a local business offering:

… a supportive and down to earth approach to health and wellbeing which can be applied to individuals, therapists, organisations and schools.

is finally live, proudly designed and hosted by us.

This is a standards compliant site powered by the open source content management system, Drupal.

A lot of hard work went into the theme design that’s based on the blank canvas Zen theme. I think we’re all happy with it now, I hope..

Just recently I’d been asked to repair what seems to be a common problem with PC type laptops over a couple of years old. Dust gets trapped in the copper fins and the fan of the CPU heatsink and reduces the efficiency of the cooling resulting in regular power off’s by the laptop as it gets over it’s upper temperature setting.

The fix is relatively easy, remove the heatsink unit, blow it clean with compressed air, clean the old CPU heatsink paste off with isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and spread a thin but even film of good quality heatsink paste on the CPU. Put it all back together, keep your fingers crossed and it should be fine!

This has fixed several laptops permanently and with this Advent I could go ahead and wipe the old Windows XP Home from it and install Ubuntu 8.04 that’s fantastic and  installs perfectly without any ‘geeking around’ necessary. My only problem is the fan control from linux, but that’s another story……

Recently a customer sent me a VHS tape for transfer which looked like this:

I didn’t even attempt to play it in my machines as I didn’t want to be cleaning the transport all day but I did find an interesting U.S. based company that specialises in restoration of very damaged video tape.

http://www.videointerchange.com/video_recovery.htm

I have no direct experience of this company but from their site they seem very knowledgeable and can transfer some very, very obscure formats from the past.

Growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s I had a lot of these and still do but they’re covered in my scrawly handwriting unlike the fine collection here:

http://zabava.septem.cz/Blbustky/obrazky/kazety/

I think this is originally form a Japanese site that ‘disappeared’ from the web some time ago - it’s nice to see it back anyway! I’m tempted to do my own version with the huge piles of tapes I own and love and have collected recently.

I don’t know where it came from but the green and blue style is everywhere at the moment. You must have seen it - a bright lime green and a clean ultramarine type blue. 

Here’s a good example of it - http://www.joomlashack.com/

I’m not even sure if I like it anymore, it’s almost become a ‘blue and red’ type design but not as blunt and common in the Tesco, Screwfix, National Express kind of way.