Recent content by Sonarcade

presumably inspired by my raving about my own Tascam 38, my friend got himself one and we figured that the repair on his would be as easy as replacing the capstan belt. Were we wrong! I noticed that though the rewind and fast forward function well enough, when we try to play a reel, the...

so, I've been looking at my Tascam 38 and it seems I haven't given it a proper cleaning, telling from the way the capstan would occasionally seize up. I found that there's a bunch of gooey tar from the last capstan belt that's clogged up the gap between the capstan and the surrounding plate...

I had googled "mackie disassembly" to no avail. I removed the bottom plate and found that the main pcb is soldered onto the top plate in around six places. Is the only way to get access to the capacitors through desoldering these points or is there a special screwdriver that can remove the...

I have a mixer that has gunked up and noisy pots and a defective right channel. I had opened up the bottom to reveal that the pcb (if that's what it's called) for the right channel slider snapped in two. I'm not so sure how this would affect the output of the channel, but I suspect that it...

so guys, I've been bit by the bug. I snagged my second open reel kit yesterday and tested it out. I gave it a good thorough clean (by which I mean, scrubbing the heads, tape leads, pinch roller, capstan shaft, and tape risers, with isopropyl alcohol) and noticed that the levels kind of...

I have two concerns since I started work on the Tascam 38. 1) the rewind mechanism sometimes struggles to get the reel going after having recorded it. It does however start to accelerate once I give one of the reels a good nudge. I'm wondering how common this is and if this should raise some...

I have half a reel of tape remaining on this one reel and am in need of a take-up reel. Now, I was wondering how I could salvage the tape. I had already unscrewed it and removed the core part holding the tape. Is there a way of removing the tape from this core part while salvaging a good...

Hi, I have a Tascam 38 whose capstan and pinch roller don't spin when playing back the reel and was wondering if there are any basic troubleshooting tips people can suggest. I haven't done any repairs on my own and I don't know how easily this stuff can be repaired on the user end. If this is...