Tascam 32 feet and other things

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evm1024

evm1024

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I picked up a Tascam 32 the other day local pickup off ebay. The pinch roller is total goo. Never seen one oozing this bad. Not a problem, belt, roller and washer on order.

However, it turns out that the feet are missing and are discontinued from Tascam! Ouch. Not a killer but I do want to resell this deck once it is ready.

Judging from the heads and the guides this is a low hour machine that has been sitting for most of it's life. It will make someone a great half track mastering deck.

It is missing the feet, the lower half of the head housing (the flip up part) which is also discontinued and the flip up shield (which may be discontinued). If you got a few spares that you can part with let me know.

--Ethan
 
Ethan,

Was this the one that was down in Canby?
 
yup

Ethan,

Was this the one that was down in Canby?

Yes, it was from the guy in canby. He is a straight shooter. Not really into audio but into making money off eBay in a fair way. I would buy from him again.

--Ethan
 
Thats odd. I sold a 32 two months ago on ebay. To make the packing easier, I took the feet off and then forgot to include them when I shipped it. Where do you live. If you pay the shipping, I'll send them to you free...if I can find them now.:p
fitZ
 
Wow

Thanks Rick,

PM'ed you.

-Ethan

PS in the true spirit of Analog Only!
 
Wobble

I got the new belt and pinch roller in and installed them last night. There wasa a bit of a fright when I first started it up. The take-up side had quite a wobble to it. Shoot I thought it will need a new reel table. I did know that the reel tables would need adjustment to bring them in plane but this would add significantly.

Turns out that one of the prior owners did not know how to adjust the reel tables so they pulled the reel table off the hub and inserted 3 washers to get the tape to align with the guides.

I pulled the washers out and reinstalled the reel table, adjusted the hub position and gave it another try.

Poof, no wobble!

I like Tascam 32 half tracks a lot. They are good sounding, light weight (so they can be taken on location) and fun to work on.

This deck has low hours on the heads and guides (which I rotated) and should be a real nice deck once I calibrate it. I'll most likely sell it as that I have 2 other half tracks and use my BR-20 as my mastering and location deck.

--Ethan
 
Found the gremlins in this deck

I got a little time to work more on this deck. It had some odd problems with inputs and the headphones. After a bunch of looking at the schematics and testing I tracked it down to two problems. The first was that one of the bypass caps on the input connector board was shorting to ground intermitantly and the second was that the mother board was not grounded. This caused all kinds of confusing outputs from the headphones depending on which source was selected and which input was fed.

The motherboard is grounded to the case in the corner under the power switch. There is one screw that connects the motherboard ground plane to the chassis. All the other screws do not have the ground plane under them.

This screw looked to be tight but was in fact loose. I took the screw out to be sure there was no corrosion then screwed it back. Poof, it all works now.

Now that these problems are out of the way I can get on with calibrating it.

I think that I'll start a new thread on the calibration that covers some reconditioning (rotation guides and perhaps a head lapping) as well as conversion from NAB to IEC1 with IEC1 calibration using a NAB MRL.

The deck has a few bumps and bangs but is a low hour machine. It should become a very nice mastering deck. Might have to do a side by side with my BR-20....

-E
 
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