Busy Lately, So Here's Some Music....

 Bonus points if you guess from the name of the song what's got a fire going under me....

Pioneer CT-F950 Rebuild - Those Pesky Pinch Rollers

 Got tied up yesterday with The Little Guy, as he unexpectedly stayed over Friday night, so this is a day late.

In fact, it's now TWO days late as I got sidetracked (what's new?) by some things on Saturday. If this was for a paying customer, it would have been out of here two weeks ago, but I've never worked on a cassette deck before. Which is why it's NOT for a paying customer. These things are a marvel of compact packaging of a complex mechanical assembly, all done to a "High End Prosumer" price level. It's one thing to make an extremely high-quality, rugged, reliable Reel-to-Reel tape recorder, and another thing entirely to do it for a Compact Cassette recorder. I can do all the basic service and repair on a good quality R2R deck as easily as the radio stuff I work on. Think Big-Block Chevy. Getting into one a cassette deck is more like getting in to a DOHC, Direct-Injected, Turbocharged, all aluminum, Indy Car engine. Whole different level of stuff needed. Smaller hardware and smaller components, all metric sized hardware, and different ways to measure things. Doable, but took some time to learn.

ANYWAY.....back to those Pinch Rollers. Yep, I screwed the pooch, f*cked the duck, and shot myself in the foot on this one. Well, gee, Jim........How'd That Happen? I got lazy, and didn't scrupulously clean all the old rubber from the bronze bearings they were vulcanized to.

See all the black stuff on the bearing? Yup....shoulda cleaned it ALL off before I pressed the new rubber sleeves on. I didn't, and I knew better because "They Didn't Look That Bad...".

Well, they were, but I used them anyway. Remember about all these parts being scaled down for a R2R machine? That means the defects on the little rollers "scaled up", and the molehills became mountains, and the audio quality suffered tremendously because of it. These rollers don't keep pressure on the tape; they drive the tape in conjunction with the two capstan shafts. And speed variance, or lumps and bumps in it's operation, directly affects how smoothly the tape goes past the heads. Wow and Flutter, those two dizty twins, made an appearance and wrecked the place. Evan Van Halen sounded horrible!

I tried several solvents to get the rubber loose, but no joy. All they did was clean it. I tried soaking them for 48hrs in a small container with SLW's "Skin-Safe! Non-Toxic!!" "paint stripper", and nada. They're soaking right now in some Aircraft-Grade Coating Remover that I use once in a while.

 

In the meantime....I bit the bullet and ordered a set from Athan, a company that specializes in any-and-all rollers, idlers, and tires for high-end equipment.

They're not only made of a better, longer-lasting Urethane compound, but they ditched the bronze Oilite bearing for a ball-bearing.

The rubber sleeves were about $25 for a pair. The Athan rollers are $50.....each. Plus tax and shipping.

Oh, well, these should last "forever"....

And here they are, living in their Forever Home...

 

With the front panel on:

 And just about ready to begin the Electrical tests as per the Service Manual.

Y'all be safe out there in the coming week!

 

Pioneer CT-F950 Reel Motor Rebuild

 As I mentioned yesterday, the first electrical issue I ran across in rebuilding this deck is that it kept dropping out of Play. A bit of sleuthing around revealed that the Reel Motor was the most likely culprit, so in I went.

These pictures aren't mine. I borrowed them from the HiFi Haven website, where member Pustelniakr was kind enough to document the entire procedure.

It's a small DC motor, with a couple of centrifugal switches on it to control the speed. In "Play", it runs at a reduced voltage, regulated speed, and in "Fast Forward" and "Rewind" it gets full voltage and really spins.

And it's a "can motor" inside another can!

The coiled strip of metal on the right is a strip of Mu-Metal for magnetic shielding. Even though the permanent magnet inside the motor can on the right is pretty well shielded, Pioneer used to the "belt and suspenders" approach to really keep the magnetic flux bottled up inside the cans so it couldn't degauss the tape as it was in the deck.

The two round grey things are silicone rubber shock mounts that suspend the motor can inside the shield can. It mechanically isolates the motor from the chassis, so vibrations from one don't upset the other.
 

The armature assembly out of the case after prying open some crimps:

The small toroid inductor is in series with the DC Voltgae coming in. There's a capacitor to ground on the other brush, and they form a filter to keep the electrical noise from the brushes on the commutator from getting into the other electronics.

Brushes:

My brush plate wasn't this dirty, but I cleaned it very well anyway. The brushes themselves appear to be a carbon/copper composition, they're brazed to the little arms that hold them, and showed practically ZERO wear when examined under  20X magnification.

This is the entire armature for the motor. The centrifugal switches are on the left, and the commutator on the right:

 Yep, the commutator is filthy, grooved, and not as "flat" as it should be. This is the same as on a starter motor for a car. That operation is called "cutting the comm", "turning the comm", or other phases I forget. For a starter motor you chuck the armature into an "Armature Lathe", and use a cutter to refinish the surface.

Before:

 

This is a whole bunch more delicate, so I chucked the motor shaft into my cordless Dremel tool, ran it at the lowest speed possible, and used a strip of 2000 grit sanding film to clean it up.

Again, these aren't my pictures, but this is essentially what I did:

After, but mine has a more uniform nice, bright copper look on all the surfaces:

These are the contacts for the two centrifugal switches. Just clean them gently with a strip of paper, and DO NOT adjust them, or you'll turn the motor into a paperweight:

SO....after spending a week diagnosing this, then taking the transport apart again to pull the motor, rebuilding the motor and reinstalling it, and finally putting the entire transport back together The Verdict Is.....Problem Resolved!

It now stays in play, the voltages across the motor are by-the-book, and Fast Forward/Rewind blast along MUCH faster than they did before.

Tomorrow's installment will be "Those Pesky Pinch Rollers, and What to Do About Them".

Still Tinkering on the Pioneer CT-F950 Cassette Deck

 Kinda shot myself in the foot on one section of this.

These are the "Pinch Rollers" that hold the tape to the Capstan, and pull the tape through the machine. This is the OEM unit, and you can see the wear on it. Yes, they're tiny.

The replacements I bought were just rubber sleeves to fit over the bronze "Oilite" bearing. They came with ZERO instructions, and required you to press off, or otherwise remove, the OEM rubber from the bearing. OEM assembly on your left, removed from the arm it normally resides in, and the new sleeve on the right.

I pressed the bearing out using two properly sized sockets and a small machinist's vise:

BUT.....(always a "but", eh?) I neglected to scrupulously clean the bronze bearing of all traces of the original rubber. The stuff would NOT come off easily, and it may have been vulcanized on to the bearing. I cleaned off as much as I could, pressed the new sleeves back on, and put it all back together.

 I moved it from the "Mechanical Bench" over to the "Final Test and Adjustment Bench".

It randomly dropped out of play, so the testing stopped until I could address that. It would Fast Forward and Rewind properly at a high speed, but sometimes it would play for 2 minutes, sometimes for 10 minutes, but it always dropped out. It was dropping out because the Reel Motor, that motivates the Supply and Take-Up reels inside the cassette  was stopping. When that happens, the tape counter no longer functions, the controller sees "No Tape Motion", and drops everything offline. When it stopped you could always see some slack tape over on the take-up side, which is what clued me into the Reel Motor being flaky.

Using a search of the forums I found several threads on this, and followed their troubleshooting guide. Measured the voltages recommended while trying to play the unit, and those measurements confirmed the Reel Motor needed some serious servicing. Turns out it's quite common in these 40 year old Pioneers. New motors are NLA from anybody, and the ones from a parts unit would be highly suspect. They can be refurbished, however, so I read and re-read the instructions, and printed them out so I could go into the little electric motor and do the work. It's about 75% bigger than the "Mabuchi 540" motors we used in out slot cars, so it didn't bother me to do the work.

I'll go into the "Reel Motor Rebuild" tomorrow, and then back to those pinch rollers.

I'm about 99% finished with the mechanical stuff at this point tonight, and when I button it back up (again....) I can continue on the electronic adjustments, and whoo-boy....there's a whole slug of them to check/adjust.

Welcome To The Weekend!

 And we're off to the Larimer County Fair!

Photo crew will be SLW and my son. TLG has been talking about it all week....

Have fun and be safe out there!

RATS! Bought Wrong Chains for My Chainsaw....

 

 Oh, well....now I understand the difference between .043" pitch, and ,050" pitch. The new chains wouldn't slide easily in the bar, and it drove nuts until I did some googlin', and looked at Gen-You-Ine Makita chains vs the Brand-X chains I bought at Cheapo Depot. The Brand-X chains were poorly marked, and had no "Also Fits" guide on the package. Rookie mistake, I guess.

Proper chains on the way, and I can finally finish cutting up all the logs in the backyard. I'll go rent a splitter later in the year so I can turn them into easily digestible sizes for the fireplace.

The OEM chain got severely dull from cutting out some of the dead juniper bushes earlier this year. Cutting that stuff is like trying to cut steel.....tougher than snot, and rapidly dulls the blade.

Lots of Scanner Radio Traffic Today

 Some kind of accident down by Greeley on US34 requiring two Lifeline flights, numerous cars with expired plates, two of them involved in the same accident, and several SAR teams out looking for lost people.

The award goes to a young woman pulled over for a traffic violation, and she had EIGHT Failure-To-Appear warrants out on her, all with $500~$1000 bonds, over the past year. Most were in different jurisdictions, and all said she was to be extradited.

Wonder who gets first pick?

She was in custody (again), her car was impounded and towed, and a special call was made for an officer to "recover" her license plates which were, you guessed it, expired.

If times are tight, and they are, I can see people letting their vehicle registration slide to pay the rent and feed the kids. Too bad it's going to cost them an additional expense to get things cleared up. Most of the cars were older "small sedan"types, and none of them were on expensive vehicles.

And work proceeds apace on the Pioneer cassette deck. The entire tape transport mechanism has been disassembled, cleaned, lubed, adjusted, and all worn parts replaced. Took considerably longer than I expected, but this is the first one I've taken "down to the frame" to rebuild, and it was a very good learning experience. I had to get a set of spring scales to make some of the adjustments, but fortunately I had all the teeny-tiny metric sockets, wrenches, and hex driver bits from the R/C car stuff. I'll need the spring scales when I go through my TEAC reel-to-reel deck, so they were "needed".

 I'm doing some cosmetic/cleaning work on it now, and I'll get it reassembled and move on the electronic side of things this weekend.

Three Inches of Rain....

 Not here, we only received 1.7", but there's been well over three inches of rain in parts of Larimer County, and some surrounding areas received 6".

And it all came in a couple of hours.

And there's more to come this afternoon and evening.....

Still Here, Still Busy.....

 Been keeping quite occupied doing Grandpa stuff, yard work, and stereo repair. I'm just about finished with the transport mechanism in the Pioneer cassette deck I bought a while back, and it's been tedious, exacting work. It's the first "real" cassette deck I've ever worked on at this level, and it's been a good learning experience for future use. Should have some pix tomorrow.

And I've got everything staged for the Great Antenna Installation that'll be coming up in the coming week.

Little Miss Pebbles The Wonder Dog had surgery last Monday to remove a nasty looking growth on her side. Yes, it's The Big C, but the prognosis is excellent for a dog her age, and the Vet said these growths rarely come back at her age, and she should be OK.

-Whew!-

TLG has been cruising his electric Batmobile around, and Sunday morning's expedition saw him wearing his full Batman costume while SLW escorted him around.

Y'all take care, and I'll have some posts this week....

Empty Nest....Again....

 SLW and I have been helping my son get moved into his new place the last few days. He rented a small U-Haul trailer to get his stuff out of the storage unit, and into his new place, and also for the larger stuff he had here. Today we moved the rest of the smaller items, and SLW measured everything for window coverings. She already has plans to "help" him make it more homey.

It's a small place, one large bedroom, a nice sitting area, a smaller room, and a large kitchen. All the cabinets and sink in the kitchen are new, as are the fridge, dishwasher, furnace, and water heater. The washer/dryer are commercial units by Amana. It's a "basement" apartment, but only about half is below grade. The upstairs people say the apartment he's in is cool in the summer, and doesn't need much heat in the winter. They're moving into a bigger place, so they gave him a kitchen table and chairs, and said they had some other things, like shelves, that they weren't taking, so he's welcome to those, too.

It's in a decent neighborhood. The houses are all kept up nice, the lawns mowed, and no trashcans to be seen. He'll be less than two miles to where he works, compared to 30something from here. He'll save a ton on gas, and no longer has a $150/month payment to the storage place.

We're hoping he'll do fine there, as it's his first place all on his own, and he has a safety net (us) within a reasonable distance.

The dog already misses him (as do we), and TLG will definitely miss him.

Special thanks to Well Seasoned Fool, who has been a great help in advising him on where, and where not to, live in the area.

Gates Are Finished, And More "Small Steps"

 The gates have been completed, and we've already used the new gate on the North side several times.

Makes it MUCH easier to access the backyard when you're in the front.

 

The small shed will go back here late Fall, early Spring.

I'll get one big enough to hold the garden tools and some other items, but small enough to allow easy access to the gate.

The next project will be to get this basement egress window well squared away.

It's been like this since we bought the house almost five years ago, and we're thankful it hasn't gotten any worse.

The aluminum tower is my antenna mount for my satellite antennas. Still not sure what I'll do with it.

And over on the South side of the house, we have the replacement gates.

From the back:

And from the front: 

These should be strong enough to withstand the storms we get here, but I'm still going to use a ratchet strap in the Winter.

Both Little Guys were over for their visit today, and the littlest one is right on the edge of full-fledged walking. He can take three or four steps before he goes down on his rear end, but if he can have one hand on something, it's off to the races!

Just about finished rebuilding the transport mechanism for the Pioneer cassette deck I've been working on. It was dirtier than first examination revealed, so *everything* had to be taken apart, cleaned of old grease and grunge, and put back together. 

And it almost takes a Watchmaker's skill to do so! Many small plastic washers *of various thicknesses* that have to go back where they came from to keep the clearances In Spec, tiny springs and screws, and .....GASP! Numerous "E-Clips" to hold things together.

These things:

One trick I've learned over the years is to have a small, powerful magnet in your hand when you pop them off the shaft. They have a tendency to go sailing across the room, and they're a PITA to find teen-tiny ones in the carpet! The magnet keeps them from getting away, and is a good 'storage space' for them.

My son signed the lease on an apartment today, so he'll be moving out. Living here, he's 30some miles away from where he works. His new place is TWO MILES from his shop. He'll be driving far less, and burning much less fuel. He also won't need to continue renting his storage space, so that's another savings.

I'll sure miss having him around, though.

Y'all have a great weekend, and Be Safe Out There....