Another Generic Stereo From The Early 80's...... The Mighty Bush 7090 Portable Power Compo Repair!! I used to have this model in 1985 when I lived in a grotty bedsit! I was unemployed & very broke but managed to find £60 (A lot of cash back then) by doing odd jobs & washing cars etc enabling me to buy one of these...... Not the last word in quality, these generic boomers sported not only the Bush badge but many others all over europe & this was 1984 when you could still find half decent cheap machines! A great time to be around & love stereo's..... Anyway, this one had a broken cassette key & a dislodged flat drive belt so it was inside we go! Not at all bad build for a cheapie, all unpluggable except the erase head lead.......What was that all about?? An oversight for sure! Anyway it was still possible to remove the deck out enough to repair it Key repaired with superglue & left to set rock hard while a cursory head clean & new counter belt were dealt with! Now just a reverse of the above not forgetting to refit the capstan flywheel belt which was fine - I suspect some one had been in here before & knocked the belt off while trying to fix the broken key! A squirt of servisol in all the switches & a clean up resulted in a half decent ressurection of my days as a young man This is never going to match my heavy hitting boomers but it takes me back to a much more innocent time when we only had cassette as a truly portable format........AND most of it was beautiful silver & chrome which I always loved! Et Viola:
Nice story and resto, it feels good to have something you had back in the day, I quite like these generic boxes I have a very similar Binatone model 01/7604 Mini Combo, it's actually not bad very loud.
It deserves a little more respect, I would say! See the cassette deck - all metal. And the metal speaker latch studs. D8614 influence seen in its design.
Nothing like some Bush from 85, although we never had that brand here. I posted a NIB version of my first box in another thread and I used to live with the thing. One day I left it at work over the weekend and it disappeared. I used to work on the rough side of town in an old building doing odd jobs in addition to the little screen printing shop the owner wanted me to run. He had a few different small businesses with most of them packed in the 2nd floor of a building after his first building burned down. I had the box for a couple years skating around town looking for the bigger better deal but it went a different direction. He stiffed me on my paycheck and I took off but who knows maybe I'll find it on the back of an old thrift store rack...
Does anyone else think that the PCB in that unit is a work of art ? Having been involed in PCB designs for the last 39 years, and using Computer Aided Design since the mid 1980s (which tends to produce straight tracks), I am certain that board was designed by someone with nothing more than drawing film, ink, and a lot of skill.
Looks like this Bush is one or two up the range from the 7070 that my brother used to own in the 80s. It was the loudness switch & detachable speakers that sold it to him...
As others here have stated, Nick: good going with the restoration. Another example of the skill and discipline to open these machines and to not be intimidated by the circuit board, by all those insulated wires and by all those capacitors, resistors or whatever those little blue-sheathed cylinders and those little green "tabs" are that we see, for instance, in photo' 4. (And to not break too many components such as a non-budging "erase head lead".) Now, if Mr Eccles could film his fixed-up finds actually recording audio and then playing it back: better still, no?
That's rough, Mister X: you losing that "new in box" boombox to some prowler on the premises of your old job. It may have happened back in the day (the Eighties?), but it still sucks. Just hope that nothing remotely similar has happened to me with my latest attempt at buying a boombox (a Nineties Panasonic) over on eBay last month. (Sigh) But that hope's fading kind of fast because I've started to suspect that I've been scammed by a non-Stateside eBayer. I posted a message hinting at it earlier today here in the "Chat Area." The message doesn't really name names (eBay handles or the government kind). But it's a start for me to voice my growing concerns and suspicions and to ask for some advice here on Stereo2Go.
You should be covered for your transaction on ebay either through ebay, paypal or your credit card company. I've been on ebay for a long time and when I filed my only complaint they refunded me immediately. I posted another thread where I found a NIB version of the box I lost, you should check that out Easthelp.
Well, well. A Bush 7090 Portable Power Compo is beefy enough to require a 10 "D"-cell diet, same as a decidedly larger (and more gadgety) Sharp WF-939Z? Ah, then again, so, it seems, is a one-piece JVC RC-M50. And that one's "-JW" version only draws on 28 watts to boom away, less than a third of what seems to be a '939's prodigious 90-watt appetite . Good going with the prompt wish response, Mr Eccles.
