I recently bought a bunch of old Beta VCRs, hoping to fix them for resale.
Most are Sony's, and the first one I put on the bench was an SL-2300. The
problem is that it's eating tapes; the takeup reel will not turn during
playback, but it works fine during fast forward or rewind. These units use a
flat servo motor (similar to the capstan motor) for the tape drive, and it
soon became obvious that the motor was the source of the problem -the
flywheel was dragging against one of the windings during a certain point of
each rotation. I tried swapping the tape drive unit with one from another
SL-2300, only to discover it had the exact same problem. So I tried putting
several plastic spacers underneath the flywheel, to raise it just enough to
avoid scraping the windings underneath. It solved the dragging problem, but
with the flywheel magnet further from the windings, the motor no longer has
enough torque to turn the tape.
Is there any way of increasing the speed/torque of this motor? This
appears to be a common problem on these units and it would be great to
figure out a viable way to repair them, since replacement is out of the
question.
Thanks for any advice.