I've had this player for awhile now, initially acquiring it in a lot I bought a few years back when I first got back into cassettes. Its complexity was beyond my skill level at the time, and had me bagging up the little pieces to be tucked away in a drawer. Flash forward a couple years and I revisited it, with more experience, better tool selection, and greater confidence than its first go 'round. I got the gooey rubber belt mess cleaned up from the motor and various wheels. A new belt from my Fix Your Audio grab bag got things turning, but no tape play. The rubber tires that operate the take-up reels were slipping. I ordered a bottle of Rubber Renue and moved on to other issues with the player. The radio worked fine, but I only got sound out of one channel. With jumper wires, I narrowed it down to the dual-gang volume pot - this player has independent left and right volume control. I desoldered it from the board and teased the case apart to find one of the pick-ups detached from its shaft. First attempt to reattach with Gorilla Glue ended in failure. Second attempt with JB Weld was more successful - so far. I have a parts player I'd acquired in the interim and it has the same issue. So, now with volume out both sides, and the Rubber Renue having arrived, I still wasn't getting consistent play out of the mechanism. Using my parts player as a reference, I found a small tab that retains one of the tire support frames has slipped off and was holding the tire wheel away from it's driving mate. some pushing and pulling with tiny tools had it snap back into place. I now had consistent playback! Through both channels! Another issue I discovered was that the headphone jack was loose due to a lost soldering pad. Someone had been in there previously and soldered a jumper wire to the endpoint of the pad's trace, but the jack itself was still loose. I filled its pin hole with some model cement to tighten it up - seems to be holding so far! Using the best case bits from both players got me a fairly clean early 1980s Aiwa HS-J02! Getting the case on took a bit of doing as there are numerous PCB switches that need to be aligned with their case-mounted chrome caps. We will see how long my repair holds up on the volume pot. In the meantime, does anyone know where I might find a new dual-gang vertical shaft potentiometer? An hour's worth of Googling around found nothing even close.
Not exactly. I used one as a reference for the other. I’d thought I could rob the volume pot from the second one to use on the first, but it had the same issue. I also disassembled the mechanism on the second to get an idea of how the rubber tires engaged and did their thing. I hope to attempt to reassemble the second at some point. It’s not as nice looking as the first, more wear, the AIWA logo is missing from the front, etc., but I think I can make it work anyway.
