This little unit was in my Hornet for a number of years until it developed a flakey Front Right channel in tape playback. Absolute shame as virtually nothing fits in the dash of an AMC Hornet and the fact that this unit, for what it is, makes some great sound.
It developed other issues such as not double-clutching when it came to track 2 in Quad, it would simply progress to track 3 like it was a stereo tape, resulting in me having to press the program button 3 times to get from Quad 2 back to Quad 1.
Barry found other issues like terrible solder joints at the head (which is what caused the bad FR channel), bad solder joints at the pre-amp stage, bad solder joints on one of the FM boards, and one of the switches he talks about in the video; specifically the tape/radio switch was arcing internally due to the amperage draw of the motor! The switch has worn considerably due to that, but he bought the deck some time by adding a separate motor power switch that can handle the amperage draw.
Other than that, he's setting the unit in for 72 hours of contiguous testing before he gets started on some of my other players! I sent him a Pioneer QP-424 that plays too fast, a Big Motorola Quad that even though was NOS, had a bad motor and a little Motorola Quad that has distortion in all four channels. I still have a big stack of tape players that require repairs above what I'm capable of doing.
Some may be coming up for sale eventually as I should probably do some house cleaning!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIyozorm6j4
It developed other issues such as not double-clutching when it came to track 2 in Quad, it would simply progress to track 3 like it was a stereo tape, resulting in me having to press the program button 3 times to get from Quad 2 back to Quad 1.
Barry found other issues like terrible solder joints at the head (which is what caused the bad FR channel), bad solder joints at the pre-amp stage, bad solder joints on one of the FM boards, and one of the switches he talks about in the video; specifically the tape/radio switch was arcing internally due to the amperage draw of the motor! The switch has worn considerably due to that, but he bought the deck some time by adding a separate motor power switch that can handle the amperage draw.
Other than that, he's setting the unit in for 72 hours of contiguous testing before he gets started on some of my other players! I sent him a Pioneer QP-424 that plays too fast, a Big Motorola Quad that even though was NOS, had a bad motor and a little Motorola Quad that has distortion in all four channels. I still have a big stack of tape players that require repairs above what I'm capable of doing.
Some may be coming up for sale eventually as I should probably do some house cleaning!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIyozorm6j4
