Hello all, It seems again I have purchased another Sony Wm-150 in less than working order....sigh... Everything appears to be fine and working exept the take up reels dont operate correctly. I have tracked it down to an issue in the main (middle) slip gear, when I took the slip gear apart I found the small gear component underneath (the gear underneath the spring in the middle of the entire slip gear), that small gear was split and its causing it to jam.....so if anyone has a model of walkman with the same tape transport (which i believe there is a few) that is unworking that they would be willing to sell to me for parts please contact me! Aswell the Wm-150's transport is the one with the shinny sticker (around the take-up reels) inside, that reads "EX AMORPHOUS HEAD", with "REV" & "FWD" at the take-up reels, and has 5 grey dots inbetween the take-up reels where the sticker is metal looking,....if this makes any sense!

Found a video that show's a good view of this

Sony WM-150

Sony WM-150 Vintage Casstte Walkman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxlllSUfd9E

i dont have this model thought the buttons look similar to a few model's i have somewhere...

Well it has been awhile, but as an update (a very late one) I had/have successfully fixed my Red WM-150! As I mentioned above, it was a cracked middle gear, similar in the vain of the direct drive walkmans. I had found a broken walkman with the same drive, and behold it had the exact same issue... But all was not lost the second cracked gear showed more potential, and with some small modifications and mending the gear was behaving like new again, same can be said for the WM-150!  It has almost been a year and the walkman is still preforming beautifully. Thought some of the fine Walkman folks on here would love to hear a success story, and no doubt one regarding the rather troubled and revered WM-150.

That definitely is good news to hear.  We often do not hear about how the mended gears hold up with use and time.   I have a Black WM-150 that is not working.

Well, the gear is holding up very well. In the Wm-150s the gear I speak of is really the heart of the mechanism, if broken it pays havoc on the auto-reverse (constantly going back and forth from FW to RV), and then ultimately stops the take-up reel from turning, thus eating the tapes...oddly enough the tape will continue to pull unaffected! I also have a black Wm-150 it was my work horse for 2 years, the center gear was and is still good (I did not have the heart to take it out in favour of the red one), it worked very well too, although I stopped using it for a few months (after a acquired the red one) and it has developed some noticeable wow and flutter. I think maybe because it needs to be used and parts need to be moving more often, as I find with all the walkmans I've bought they needed to be constantly used (broken in to say) for a few weeks before they played with little or no wow and flutter. 

Do you have any hint as to what is wrong with yours John? Does the circuit/amp or motor work, or is it a mechanical issue? Because if it powers on, shows movement and has low noise/clean sounding amplification, I would highly recommend looking into fixing it! As when a Wm-150 is working well, they sound beautiful, especially considering their size. Too bad the folks at Sony did not make the mechanical portion more reliable and made of primarily metal like the compact high-end 80s walkmans just a year before.