AIWA HS-J880 repair

Hi everyone,
My brother purchased this AIWA new as a method to record band practices in stereo. He donated it to my hobby of Walkman repair. Disassembly was a bit more challenging than other Sonys I have worked on but was able to get to point of capacitor access without having to do any unsoldering. Ribbon cables on both sides of the PCB had me scratching my head but eventually got it to this point. Not a lot of content on the web or S2GO on these models. Drive system seemed to work fine and belt in surprisingly good shape for being original. Front LCD panel and buttons all work fine. No sound (not even hiss) from either radio or cassette. Following the conventional wisdom that caps are bad. I took some closeups and things look really bad. Lots of tan foamy looking stuff. Not sure if that’s original solder flux? Haven’t ever seen anything like it. My questions are: has anyone successfully recapped one of these more complex AIWA FM cassette recording players successfully? Other question is, does anyone see anything that from your personal experience this is a hopeless case? There is a schematic online for the J800 but not the 880. Not sure of difference. Not interested in paying for a service manual schematic so hopefully someone has one. I’ve repaired a number of Sony’s from various generations and have never lost a part or ended up with extra parts. Unfortunately near my disassembly area I found a very small white plastic bushing. No idea where it came from. Without a BOM will be tough to figure that one out. Will try to get a pic. Any thoughts or advice greatly appreciated. This thing just oozes quality. Super solid and tons of metal. Would love to get it working again. Thanks!

 

Nice unit! Never seen one like this before, but I am used to Walkman models of this vintage, so I can offer some insight.

There is a LOT of corrosion on this PCB. all of the foamy stuff is not flux, it's the corrosion and the electrolyte that has leaked out of the capacitors. ANY Sony or Aiwa product from the late 80s to the mid 90s has these SMD silver type caps that leak terrible. There is a dead fish smell coming from this i'm sure... yuck

You need to remove all of those caps from the board and do some serious cleanup before you will know if this is worth saving. Depending on the level of corrosion you are left with, you may have eaten through traces, missing pads, or shorts.

Here's what you can do:

1. Take detailed photos of the board where you can clearly see each cap and what values they all are, plus the polarity of each. You will use this as a reference photo later.
2. Remove all of the bad caps. (I like to use needle nose pliers and twist them off, but others would cuss me out for that)... look on YouTube for the best way to do this for you, and don't tell anyone how you did it, lest you be criticized by arm chair warriors.
3. Use alcohol and a toothbrush to scrub the board down and remove the most of the corrosion.
4. Inspect, inspect, inspect. Look for obvious signs where the corrosion has eaten through traces on the board.
5. Clean the pads. Put fresh solder over the corroded pads left behind after you removed the old caps, then wick it all off and clean with alcohol and a cotton bud. Doing this a few times to each pad should rejuvenate them back to a flat shiny square if they are still present. There might also be part of the leg of the cap left behind (depending on what method you used to remove them), so when doing the process, just poke the leg off the pad with your solder gun tip, and grab it off the board. (Again, do all of this to your own satisfaction, and whatever way you feel is the safest for the board...)
6. Check continuity with a multimeter between each newly freshened pad with nearby vias and traces.
7. Install new caps using the photos you took at the beginning as a guide as to what caps go where.

You can measure the dimensions of the caps using a mm measuring stick or tape, then goto MOUSER to source new ones. Keep the uf values the same, you can have a higher voltage for each cap.

At any point through steps 1-5, this is where you will find the damage, and determine if the board is too far gone. There's simply no way to know at this point. I've had boards that looked ok, and every trace is eaten, and others that look awful... then cleaned up to look new.

Hope this helps!

 

Thanks so much for the detailed response!

I’ve watched the YouTube videos on methods for surface mount component removal. I think flexibility in method will be key. I also need to see what we have at work for aids. The software guys always have the coolest tools. I wouldn’t be shocked if we have a pair of heated tweezers floating around. My weakness is a lack of familiarity with things but when there is little to lose other than my time, I’m fine getting way outside of my comfort zone. Stay tuned…

 

Hi Dauner,

From my experience this type of Aiwa models are not very easy to repair, neither of Aiwa are, but maybe this is a little more if possible. But the sound quality after repairing is surprisesingly good both, playing & recording.I have several models very similar to yours. In some cases the caps are good, and in others as bad as yours. I have found a very strange case when I have replaced all the caps, the unit plays perfectly till one day one channel was bad and after inspected a screeching sound like when the caps are bad was present. I suspect is related to ground's issue. This models have a spring from pcb to mech metal part for this porpouse, and two small bushes, one between spring and mech and another one (white) at the other side of the pcb to separate pcb from mech, just where another screew places. So, keep your little white bushing, you'll need it! Schematics of similar models could help you, there is not big differences I think. Be carefull, I find the polarity of one cap are not correct in the schematics, is a very strange case, so take pictures in order to avoid any mistakes.

I can say this models save the penny to repair, are real examples of analogues good sound

 

From up to down, HS-J202, not need to change caps, HS-T202, not bad caps, HS-J202 MKII, headphones socket improve compare to HS-J202, but caps went bad, in process to restoration. HS-J505, bad caps, superb sound, but this is the one with fresh caps and screeching sound, unfortunately, don't have so many time to dedicate, waiting for better times...

 

Heated tweezers are truly a God send... but I'm sure you already know to be careful with them. Sometimes, that corroded solder is so cold and dead, it will not heat easily... so when you are applying heat with the tweezers, you may be overheating the pads under the corroded solder, and not realizing it as you are waiting for the old solder to revive. I overheated a board one time with this method, and was very surprised when the pads kept lifting... finally figured out that while I was patiently waiting for the heat to melt the solder, I was cooking each pad underneath...

'This Does Not Compute" on YouTube has a great video on heated tweezers... I think it was a Macintosh Color Classic he recapped? Anyways, he's done a lot of recapping with many methods. Super concise helpful content.

 

Dauner, here you are where the two washers that I told you are located. Hope it hepls

 

Thanks! I have all of the capacitors in my shopping cart on Digikey, but I opted to bring everything in to work to have some of the super skilled folks help me remove some of the caps. if the pads and traces are destroyed and not recoverable, I'll probably hold off on buying anything for now. Plan is to use purpose built heat gun. It is how we remove Surface Mount stuff currently here at work. Also, I'm going to continue to look for the schematic and manual. As the drive mechanism and motor all seem to work properly, I'm not going to swap any of those components at first. Just the signal path stuff. I may also try to get some help here at work doing some signal path tracing from the head or the radio output. Stay tuned! Thanks again for all of the support.

 

Hi everyone, figured I’d let everyone know that I have the Aiwa HS-J880 repaired and working! After a 10 month delay I ended up replacing ALL off the SMD electrolytic capacitors (15 in total) I used a heat gun for removal of old ones, and just my small tipped soldering iron to clean up pads and solder new caps in place. There are several good YouTube videos on replacing SMD components and I followed them to the best of my ability. Good solder, flux, etc. Few if any of the caps were sitting nicely centered after soldering and honestly I was not expecting the unit to work at all, but as it turns out, my soldering must have been good enough. There are several where the clearance between is quite small.

I haven’t done any testing on speed or W+F as I haven’t set up what I need to do that yet any any Walkmans, but when I do I’ll check this one. There is no discernible W+F to my ears. This Portable recording cassette player is incredibly high build quality. Everything about it just feels and looks expensive.

Thanks again to everyone in this forum and to S2G in general for making this repair possible!

Now on to my Sony WM-D3 that has been sitting for several years. I already started a new thread.

Mark