Hi there, recently I was given a vintage Hitachi D-E65 cassette deck that seems to be in pretty good shape. However once powered up in I have found that I cannot get the eject button to work on the deck - it simply will not open, and I do not wish to force it. There isn't a tape stuck or anything like that, but the door refuses to open. Any ideas what may be causing this? thank you!
Bad belts. The mech cannot rotate through to lift the pinch roller etc into place, thus it's stuck. To release it, just rotate the flywheel through it's full rotation until the head block falls back down. The flywheel must rotate in the correct direction of tape travel, so do watch that. You might have to tick a solenoid plunger in the middle of all this if the mech locks fully in the PLAY position.
To fix it you'll absolutely need to replace the belts. Hitachi's were pretty notorious for this problem.
Mark Z.
Greetings..
On the older models there is usually a mechanism to physically open the door. I state that since some of the top of the line more expensive (and thus exclusive) models had a servo to even open the cassette door - however, that wasn't all that common.
Simply put, without pulling out the trusty Xcelite phillips-1 head screw driver and removing the top to actually reveal what's going on - it's merely a guessing event. Sooner or later, you, or someone else, is going to have to actually take a look to see what the issue is inside the deck.
I will state that if you're not used to doing this type of work and don't have the tools or experience to do this, save yourself a great deal of heartache and take it to someone that HAS done this type of work before. If it's an acquaintance, there's nothing stating that you can't watch them as they reveal the problem and determine the necessary steps to "fix" the anomaly.
You are correct about one thing here though, it's never a good idea to force anything regarding an audio cassette deck.
Cheers, Mr. Mentor
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