Tape player hack

Article: 7639 of alt.hackers
From: reckman@res.WPI.EDU (Rob Eckman)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Tape player hack
Followup-To: alt.hackers
Date: 10 Apr 1995 14:43:54 GMT
Organization: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Lines: 31
Approved: elvis@heaven.com
Message-ID: 3mbg7a$kql@bigboote.WPI.EDU
NNTP-Posting-Host: res.wpi.edu
Status: RO

Hope this works.

ObHack:  I got this tape player for free, because it didn't work.
When you put a tape in, the tape either gets eaten, or at least chewed
up.  So I took the deck all apart, and after removing the front panel
and the door to the deck, I notice what it going on.  When the tape
passes over the read head, it goes between this pin thing and this
roller thing.  These aren't the technical names for them.  The
roller is on an arm, and when you press play, the arm swings up and
pinches the tape between the pin and the roller.  The roller serves as
a speed regulator, if you pull it away from the tape, the tape goes by
faster.

So what was happening was that the tape was falling off the front of
the roller.  As the tape played, it would slowly move foreward on the
roller.  So what I figured, after much fiddling with the parts, was
that the roller was out of alignment.  When you pushed back on it, it
would seem to work ok.  So now I had to find some way to coerce the
roller arm into its correct position.  I considered elastic bands, but
I couldn't find anywhere inside the deck to connect them to without
them getting in the way.  There was about a 3/8" slot between the
roller arm and the front of the case.  So what I did was take a
pencil, and jammed this in.  This was almost the right size, so I
wrapped it in masking tape.  Now it fit, and the deck seems to workk.
So I cut a 1" length of the pencil, and jammed it into the case.  The
pencil moves up and down with the roller (as play is pressed) and it
doesn't look like it will fall out.

So for the 5 bucks I spent on RCA cables, I got a tape deck.

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