Hello everyone, So it's finally time to register on this forum that has helped me multiple times before. So before I proceed, my sincere thank you. I'm not a collector, but I do like putting a nice unit in good shape to use when one comes my way. Thanks to this nice but demanding hobby I was "forced" to learn how to solder along with other requirements, many defeats but also some nice triumphs, and the sweet taste of the latter and that feeling of accomplishment by my own hands is what keeps me going sitting in my basic stool and my professional workbench, aka my folding table, when my vision is getting tired and my back is begging me to walk away. So here's my current predicament: I recently stumbled upon a nice Panasonic RQ-SJ1 that was clearly well loved, and with quite a lot of charm. I was told that it made some brief noise when clicking on the playback functions, power light turns on, but that it all stops a split second later. They weren't sure if it was some kind of protection / detection as they didn't have a cassette to test, so I got it under that context. It had clear signs of battery spillage on the outside shell and it got to the board and the horizontal barrel of the motor itself on the batteries' side. I removed all solder points for the batteries, screws and wires, took the motor out with its capstan feeling somewhat stuck and erratic, ran it with a simple battery for an hour lubing it, cleaned everything, swapped the belt which was deformed but still in one piece, and put everything back together making sure the leaf switches were correctly mounted. It had the exact same behavior: Play, FF, REW all start, light is very briefly on, and stops after a small split second. Then I noticed that some caps were leaking, recapped everything... still the same behavior. The corrosion that had gotten in the board membrane was visible in many places, so in the first disassembly I tested continuity for the most critical spots after cleaning, and they all came back fine... The mechanism side has absolutely no traces of corrosion of any kind... If I desolder the motor wires and attach a battery the mech starts running smoothly in a continuous fashion... So I'm kind of stuck at this point. Do you guys know what might be happening here? What am I missing? I thought that being a simple model with no auto-reverse to give me grief I'd be in the clear but guess not... Still, I can't be that far from getting there surely? Thank you everyone for your time and replies
