I'd mentioned in another thread that I picked up a Yamaha KX-930 last Thursday evening - wound up paying $20 for it. The cosmetics are pristine and it came with a working remote, a demagnetizer, two NOS tapes and he threw in a working Walkman. All of this in the original box.
The quick and short version of the story. This was a Craigslist item that came up recently and I was looking for a decent deck to mess around with and get back into recording. When I showed up at the sellers home he had the deck out and had exercised some of the functions using an unrecorded tape. He did the same when I showed up and all was working well. I wanted to verify that playback worked and check out some of the other deck functions and I had a tape in my car so I retrieved it. We inserted it into the deck and suddenly the deck stopped working - or should I say worked marginally. Playback did not work at all and we tried FF and RW - the tape moved about ten counts in either direction and just stopped. We went back to the sellers tape with the same results in FF and RW. After dicking with it for a bit longer the seller said "Shit" but he still wanted to get rid of the machine as he had not used it in years.
My thoughts about the failure were either a logic problem and that could get ugly or a belt issue which made more sense as I could still see the display indicating the mode that the deck was in while we were trying to get it working. Of course a motor failure was lingering in the back of my mind but it sounded ok during the initial test so I felt the probability of that was small. I figured that giving him 20 bucks and purchasing a belt kit could be an ok investment. So here we are. I neglected to get a shot of the unit before opening it up but here's the sellers photo of it.
The quick and short version of the story. This was a Craigslist item that came up recently and I was looking for a decent deck to mess around with and get back into recording. When I showed up at the sellers home he had the deck out and had exercised some of the functions using an unrecorded tape. He did the same when I showed up and all was working well. I wanted to verify that playback worked and check out some of the other deck functions and I had a tape in my car so I retrieved it. We inserted it into the deck and suddenly the deck stopped working - or should I say worked marginally. Playback did not work at all and we tried FF and RW - the tape moved about ten counts in either direction and just stopped. We went back to the sellers tape with the same results in FF and RW. After dicking with it for a bit longer the seller said "Shit" but he still wanted to get rid of the machine as he had not used it in years.
My thoughts about the failure were either a logic problem and that could get ugly or a belt issue which made more sense as I could still see the display indicating the mode that the deck was in while we were trying to get it working. Of course a motor failure was lingering in the back of my mind but it sounded ok during the initial test so I felt the probability of that was small. I figured that giving him 20 bucks and purchasing a belt kit could be an ok investment. So here we are. I neglected to get a shot of the unit before opening it up but here's the sellers photo of it.
