Next project, turning two Aiwa J9's into one good one. The photos are from the sellers' ads. Obviously the blue one is thoroughly corroded. I don't expect the motor, main board, or motor board to be usable. Even the mechanism would require more cleaning than it's worth. I hope the equalizer is ok because I need one for another unit. The silver one has various bits missing. The missing radio dial knob is irreplaceable. Its insides look clean, but it will require the usual repairs. I hope to use the blue case parts as they are one of the rarest colors and luckily it has the blue battery lid. Fixing the metallic blue paint on the cassette lid will be the most difficult task. I may swap the blue panels with a black J9, since the silver ones are more desirable than black. Missing, irreplaceable dial part Nice clean main board. And the blue one. Corrosion at the farthest areas from the battery compartment and on the motor mounts are very bad signs.
Good luck with this - more than luck required but a little always helps. And I just remembered a box with 4 HSJ202 machines collected years ago in the hope of resurrecting one good example. With battery gondola. Now where's that to-do list...
Both J9's have arrived. The silver one from China took 10 weeks for delivery. Its Goofish purchase and delivery to Superbuy went fine. Air delivery halted when an inspector claimed it could not go by air because it contained batteries. I objected, showing a photo from the seller with the rear case panel removed and an empty battery compartment. To no avail, so it had to go back to Superbuy, back to export inspection, and finally delivery by sea. At least it eventually arrived rather than disappearing. It arrived with an empty battery compartment. Plus there is damage to the radio panel which was not there in the ad photos. It has non-original equalizer panel, radio dial, tape direction windows and motor board. To my great surprise the radio and tape player work. Also ffwd and frwd. Auto reverse does not work, but that's typical for these and I know how to fix it. The irreplaceable equalizer only partly works and I don't know if it can be fixed. The translated Goofish ads do not provide much about working condition, so I don't know whether it was claimed to be working. Obviously someone has worked on it. Out of the 18 other (all lower condition quality) Aiwas I've bought, not a single one has arrived with a working tape drive. All have had fair descriptions from the sellers. The blue J9 from Buyee in Japan isn't such a good story. So far I can't even get the power led to light up. Without that, I can't fully determine what doesn't work. There is corrosion almost everywhere in it. So far everything I check on it is bad. A contact on the leaf switch for Play has corroded away. The motor was seized. Part of the mechanism was seized. A take-up reel was seized. The tuner was seized. An idler pulley was seized. A flat capacitor has fallen apart. Several adjustable resistors are corroded. The gear inside gear assembly A is cracked. The erase head return springs have broken free. There is a list of about 20 problems before even powering it up. So except for maybe the equalizer, I know I can get one fully working blue J9 from these two. Or swap in an equalizer from a less valuable black one. In total, in US dollars and including shipping, these two J9's have cost around $200. A functioning blue J9 is worth several times that. I just wish I could buy good J9 main boards and equalizers. I'll post more as work progresses in these. Edit: Hours later, I've opened up the silver J9. Discovered the replacement motor board is missing the speed adjustment potentiometers. It still runs the tape because they used jumper wires to bypass the missing pots. I've never thought of doing this. And despite this, the default tape speed sounds fine. Why would someone do that when you can buy the pots or the motor board? Anyway, I have a spare new motor board so it will be installed. I took the equalizer apart, cleaned it and found all 5 slide knobs were broken or corroded. Luckily I have spares that I had repaired earlier. Installed them and the equalizer works fine! Now I know this J9 can be refurbished to a high standard, so it will get the blue panels.
Follow up on these two Aiwa HS-J9's. The short version is that I got both of them sorted out. The long versions are in separate posts, so as to not overwhelm and make managing the photos more successful. Resolving them involved a third J9, my older donor unit. I'll describe the electronic and mechanical repairs, but not what I did for the cosmetics. Silver J9, #7: bought a couple of years ago as a donor and repair practice unit. I had refurbished the mechanism and replaced the motor board, but never could get audio out of the corrosion damaged main board. Silver J9, #14: bought recently because it was cosmetically poor very and I expected to replace the innards of the corroded blue one with the innards from this one. Blue J9, #15: bought it cheap, knowing it was badly corroded, just for the rare blue panels, to swap onto a working unit of a less desirable color. Silver #14 J9 The silver #14 J9 arriving in "working" condition, which was an unexpected bonus. I buy low priced units, and it was the first one I've bought that arrived working. However it played only in the forward direction and the Play button jammed. Opening it up exposed many somewhat imperfect repairs. It's good example of a "working" unit that still had many things wrong with it. The difference between "working" and what I call "refurbished", soon became apparent. The chassis and electronics of the other, blue #15 J9 were so corroded they were going to be difficult to impossible to repair. I decided the best approach was to get everything working properly on the "working" silver #14 J9, and put the blue panels from the corroded blue #15 J9 on it. Here's what the "working" silver #14 J9 needed: - the am antenna had been broken and crudely glued back together. I replaced it with the intact antenna from the blue #15 J9. - the AM antenna wires were soldered to the wrong places. - there was a component like a flat 3-leg capacitor (that turned out to be a bypass or ripple filter) missing from the main board. Strange. FM and AM worked ok. The TV band doesn't work in North America. Because it supports TV audio, the HS-J9 main board is significantly different from the HS-J09/600. There are no circuit diagrams for any J9, and this component is not part of the non-TV J09. So I couldn't figure out the purpose of the missing component. I compared the circuitry in a J36 (no TV) with a J85 (TV). Sure enough, the J85 had an extra BPF, and it was even labelled as "TV". Since I haven't heard of anyone using the TV function of these players, I didn't replace it. I have ordered some replacements anyway and will install them eventually. Just so the J9 will be complete. - a rotten belt had mostly been cleaned out. The (5) brass pulleys have tiny grooves at the bottom of the v-groove for the belt. Cleaning out the smaller groove is a hassle, and the tape transport runs fine even if there is gunk in that groove. But I always clean the groove because it doesn't seem right to leave it dirty. - a couple of the tan washers on the capstans were misshapen, so I replaced them with good ones. - there was an intermittent wire connection to the sensor board. - the replacement belt was thicker than spec and risked rubbing on a bracket, so I replaced it with the correct belt. - the equalizer partly worked and all 5 slide knobs were damaged. One knob was crushed. So I disassembled and cleaned the equalizer, and replaced the knobs with spares I had repaired. This is the first time I've successfully restored full function to one of these equalizers. - the flat ribbon equalizer cable had slight damage and had been repaired. It worked fine throughout the repair work, so I didn't replace it. - the cassette detect and recording lockout levers were corroded solid. I cleaned them and got them working properly. - the erase head retract springs had broken loose. A common defect. So the Play button would jam most of the time. I did my standard repair. - gear C in gear assembly A was cracked. This is a standard problem and prevents auto-reverse. It had previously been repaired but cracked again. I did my different and durable repair. - the working auto-reverse gear assembly A, exposed that internal corrosion in reverse switch SW1 was preventing tape reversing from completing. I removed, disassembled and cleaned SW 1, and did SW2 while I was at it. - the original motor board had been replaced with an aftermarket motor board that lacked the two speed adjusters. The previous repair person had bypassed the missing variable resistors. I didn't know you could do that. The motor seemed to run at the right speed anyway. I replaced the motor board with a new fully populated one. - I installed 3 new white control knobs. - the clone tape direction windows don't look great, but they re good enough. - a critical and irreplaceable part of the radio dial knob was missing. It's too complex for me to replicate. I replaced it with one from the #7 donor unit. - the battery compartment lid was missing. I have spares. - the battery lid latch was broken. I did my usual repair on this common damage. After everything was sorted out, the silver panels were swapped with the blue ones from the #15 J9. Before and After photos.
As for the blue #15 J9. This was the first player I've bought that was totally dead. The main board and the mechanism were extensively corroded. As you can see from the photos from the sales ad, the corrosion extended all the way from the battery compartment almost to the head. The sides of the painted aluminum front panel were corroded. Even the power led would not light up. I bought it for the blue panels, but decided to see if it could be coaxed back to life. Not surprisingly it was a big job. Rather than fix up the corroded mechanism, I used the previously refurbished mechanism from the #7 donor. The first repair was to get the power led to light up. First I disassembled and cleaned the corrosion out of the 3vdc socket. This didn't fix the led. (Rather than fiddling with batteries, which is very awkward when these Aiwas are not fully assembled, I use an Aiwa RB-100 charger while working in them.) Physically checking every trace on a populated 2-side main board to find corrosion breaks is just not practical. Instead, the process was to locate on the schematic diagram, components associated with the problem, use their part numbers to find them on the circuit image, map out the order and orientation of those parts, find the actual components on the main board, and finally check for continuity (or voltage, resistance etc.). Eventually installing a jumper wire bridged a break I never found and supplied power to the led. But there was still no audio and I didn't know if the tape drive worked. The earphone socket was also destroyed by corrosion, so I borrowed one from a J36. The tuner was corroded solid so I removed it, and with a combination of vinegar, contact cleaner and brute force, got it rotating. Still, radio silence from the radio. I couldn't tell if the tuner was good. I had bought a cheap J85 because it has tv reception, thinking I could use its FM/AM/TV tuner. But alas, the tuner in the J85 won't fit in the J9. I found the fine metal contacts inside the radio band selection switch and tape/radio switches were damaged from corrosion, so I replaced them with switches from the #7 donor. It was sort of efficient to troubleshoot the main board from the silver donor #7 J9 at the same time. Previous work on it had restored operation of the tape drive, but the unit stubbornly refused to yield audio from the tape or radio. To my dismay, despite both #7 and #15 being early production J9's, the circuit layout between the main amplifier and the earphone socket, were different from each other. This added to the complication that there are no J9 circuit diagrams, and its circuitry is different from the J09, for which there are diagrams. At my level of understanding these circuits, accurate circuit diagrams are essential. So there are as many as 6 circuit layouts for the J9/09/600, and diagrams for only one, the early J09. This made it far more difficult to figure out and troubleshoot the circuitry. Anyway, after a fantastic amount of sleuthing and tracing circuits, making pages and pages of diagrams, identifying components, checking for continuity, and rearranging wires, shockingly, the radio came to life. This was a huge step because it also meant the main amplifier and earphone wiring were good, and the repaired tuner was also working. Now, getting audio from the tape drive should be relatively easy. All this time, to simplify things, I had bypassed the equalizer. Because the unit had been dead, I didn't know if the equalizer worked. I had disassembled and cleaned the equalizer anyway. Now I installed it, and it didn't work. This was quickly diagnosed as a partially rotten flat ribbon cable. So it has a new cable. However I couldn't get the equalizer to work flawlessly. A couple of the sliders vary the balance between the right and left channels. But it's certainly good enough for what was a write-off unit and a lot better than simply bypassing the equalizer. I'm wondering if an application of conductive paint on the carbon elements inside the equalizer might fix it. Its motor board was corroded far beyond repair, but I had a new replacement for it. The motor wouldn't turn. Cleaning some gunk from around the shaft freed it. The rotten leaf switch for the Play button also had to be replaced. After that, the tape drive ran and had audio. Surprisingly at the right speed too. I also replaced two corroded variable resistors or OSC pots, which the J09 does not have. So these must be for TV reception. The only thing that doesn't work is the AM radio. The antenna has continuity. Since I have no circuit diagrams for either version of the early J9, I had to experiment with connection points. None of them worked, except one combination that yields an artifact radio station frequency. I suspect the am portion of the repaired tuner doesn't work. Fortunately the unit is now prepared for when AM broadcasting terminates. The clone radio band dial isn't as nice as the original, but it will do. So this J9 comprises the corroded and repaired #15 main board, the fully repaired mechanism from the writeoff #7, and the silver panels from the #14. I don't think the donor #7 can be fixed. It has too much wrong and is now missing some irreplaceable parts. So it doesn't make sense to put more effort into it. I suppose it can be assembled and sold as a display unit that will never operate. Neither of these units needed capacitors. I did replace a couple in the main amplifier output while troubleshooting, but they were not the problem. Anyway, it was very satisfying to save from the scrap heap, a player that arrived in apparently hopeless condition. *(I haven't found a source for the green plastic earphone jacks/sockets used in these Aiwas. I thought of buying a non-working low quality Aiwa model with the same jack. Probably that would cost the same as just a jack. It seems the Aiwa HS-J36/360/85 are the least valuable models with that same part. As a bonus, they have lots of other parts compatible with the J9/09/600, such as the volume control, capacitors, switches etc. Alas, they have no equalizer. While looking for a cheap J36/360/85, I found a J36 main board for sale, super cheap. (While the J9/09/600 suffer main board destruction from battery leakage, the J36/360/85 have a separate battery compartment, so there is a shortage of J9/09/600 main boards and a surplus of J36/360/85 main boards.) And then I found an ad for a bundle of (6) J36 main boards. Only $30 usd plus s&h. I ordered them asap. So if they ever arrive pending purchase/shipping complications from China, I will have plenty of earphone jack sockets, volume controls, leaf switches etc.)
To illustrate some of the differences between the early production Aiwa HS-J9 main boards, here are two of them. Among other differences, the two inductor coils are mounted on opposite sides of the boards. And again, these are different from the later production, and the J09/600. Of course these differences are concentrated right where battery leakage is most likely to corrode the board.
