Tascam 112 cassette pitch speed control issues

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technoplayer

Recovering Gear-aholic
I have a pair of 112 cassette decks and both of them have issues with the pitch speed control.

When i bought them, both decks needed belts and the pitch speed control was jacked. When i enabled the pitch control button the motors go into full fast speed with the heads still engaged of course.

Deck #1: I bought the replacement variable pot for the speed control board, and that worked to restore proper operation. Now a few years later i can hear that the normal mode play speed has increased slightly.
Maybe just a tweak to the speed trimmer on the cassette circuit board???

Deck #2: normal play speed is fine, but pitch control enabled speed goes off the rails as deck #1 did. I will try pot replacement there as well IF i can still get it from Tascam parts, but...

The question is....

Has anyone else had these issues with the pitch control? And there any other things I should be looking at?
 
This is a pretty old question, but I'll share my recent findings if someone bumps into this problem. The culprit was the switch in that little speed control board. I had to disassemble that switch, clean it up thoughtfully with IPA and then use DeoxIt to lube it. It's a little deceiving that when using the switch led does turn on, like the switch was working, but switch has multiple poles. Please be careful with that switch since you won't be able to find it anymore. It's very delicate and easy to damage. I crushed one of the internal switches when trying to re-assemble the thing, but I fixed it with a pair of tweezers. I also lubed pots. The bigger pot has some rivets so you won't be able to tear that apart safely. I just injected DeoxIt where I could. What I can say is that this fixed my speed variance problems. One way to test if you have a faulty switch, is to move around the pitch pot with switch in off position. If speed varies, you have a faulty switch and need to clean it up or just bypass it and lose pitch ability which isn't ideal but viable. Hope this helps someone out there.
 
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Thanks for the input ( even if 5 years on). Coincidentally I am currently going thru all my gear and started to address these again. I found a Nortronics AT200 cassette alignment tape which has test tones on it so i have some verifiable reference to try to set the speed on these. I will try the switch clean fix to see if that addresses to wild speed up.
If so then i can try tweaking the speed adjust pot.
On the first unit as i indicated i replaced the main speed adjust pot. Perhaps it did not need it and as a side effect I fixed the switch issue when blowing all that pot cleaner in there. If so then i have a spare (old) pot.
 
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