HI there,
here it is christmas eve, trying to load a tape into our somewhat
ancent video camera, and darn it if the tape will not load. The
mechanism works completely perfectly when the tape is not in, but as
soon as a tape is in the machine, the door closes, but the mechanism
does not go down. No sounds or anything just will not drop down into
the machine. Pushing the eject pops the door back open.

Any help?

For this Christmas, I will try to hook the camera to a VCR and record
to VHS directly. Hopefully that will work.

thanks