Wandering Tracking on Old Beta VCR

AAAARRRGGGHH! the phantom twiddler! A pet hate of all techs! I HOPE you marked the original positions of those pots.....

I admit my

...and still you hope to refurb and resell these beasts? I would forget it if I were you.

I can

....that is not even a theory, that is pure guesswork. have you checked the A/c head? pinch roller? tape path? torque? consumer tracking adjust pot condition?all of these are fundamentals and well known causes for this problem....

B.

Off hand I think the guy is better off just trying to sell it off "as-is".

If it's that series of Sanyo I'm thinking of, those were barely repairable

The main problem with it, it's 100% plastic, everything, the well the transport sits in, the load rings, arms, gears, levers.

Those machines were introduced to be price competitive by being built as cheap as possible to try to get a gain on vhs sales. Other brands like Sony and Toshiba may have been cheaping down, but were smart enough to leave some metal where it was needed (like on the transport).

Although his problem might be electrical, there was a re-occurance of a small cap (either 1uf or 3.3uf) on the pulse line coming from the capstan motor for one of the servo circuits, more likely the machine is just plain warped.

No joke, I saw one so bad it was visible by just eyeballing. The guy who owned it had it on top of the tv and likely between the heat from the machine and what was coming out the vents of the set just warped the chassis in under a year or so.

If you got the tape to load, more or less the same results, looked like some kind of tracking error, enough to be annoying. But I'm telling you, there wasn't a damn thing wrong with it except mechanical alignment which wasn't possible anymore.

Just sell it as-is, I really don't think a Sanyo four-thousand series is worth anything, even in mint condition.

-bruce snipped-for-privacy@ripco.com

Well, I got just over $200 US for a 6310 the other night.... if all Sanyos are worth even half that, it's well worth putting some time and money into them.

Wow! I think I have a couple of 5000's in my loft somewhere...I am rich!! ;0) Roy

Have you changed the pinch roller and all belts? Tracking will try to follow the varying speed of the tape passing the read heads, and if you have an old roller and belt(s), "that have been sitting in storage for years", then you will have tracking problems. tom

I have to admit I'm sort of stumped. Looking at completed auctions on ebay most Sony models, even those with the hi-fi audio don't seem to fetch more than $75-$100 for most of the mid-level machines.

Why the Sanyo's seem to be getting more is an oddity.

Another thing to admit, looking at the picture of the Sanyo 4000, that isn't the chassis I was thinking of, I think.

-bruce snipped-for-privacy@ripco.com

I used to be a Sanyo dealer and I loved them! Everything easy to get at and (mostly) easily repaired when required. Sony on the other hand were a pain in the A**e. Parts were as expensive as hell and service anuals also. Faults were always really obscure and circuitry was weird and super critical. I would rather have a Sanyo any day. As a matter of fact, I still have a Sanyo CRT TV giving as good a picture as good as when I took it home 20 odd years ago!

Roy

Simple. the sanyos unlaced the tape from the head during rewind, which helped save on wear. they were lighter and are as such easier to mail than sony. They are easy to access mechanically. Sony , as Roy says, were expensive and awkward to service , bulkier, and suffer from head wear (I have had at least 6 c-30 betas pass through my hands with useless heads, not one single sanyo with this problem ever). Same goes for the unusually complicated cassette front loading mech which always seems to break. All that makes them generally a worse used buy. (and I have a C9 and 3 HF-100s!)

-B

I have a Sony C-20 in working condition. As an anecdote many years ago I was testing it while I was trying to find the code for an universal remote control. Went through all the codes using the remote autosearch feature while pointing it to the VCR without any success until I realized the machine did not appear to have any IR receiver window. Felt pretty stupid for that...

For as long as i can remember, and i am over 40, Sanyo has always been low end junk for all its products. Sure there are lower end crap, but it rates right down there. I own a Sanyo 7200 and it barely still works

Well, I beg to differ with ALMOST everyone here. The SANYO beta machines were by FAR the BEST beta machines ever on the CONSUMER market. Inexpensive, reliable, easy to work on and most problems could be fixed for less than $100 Canadian. The others (Sony and their re-branded offspring being the WORST) were by and large radically overpriced JUNK, unreliable, a pain to work on,expensive parts and don't get me started about parts availabilty. A Sony typically cost $150+ Canadian to repair and that was just the parts !

Oh, BTW the ' wander tracking ' was usually (99.99999 % ) caused by a defunct capstan motor. Good luck finding one of THOSE these days.

Pardon my pro-SANYO rant but I serviced 'em for many years both in and out of warranty so I am obviously BIASED.

Kevin

As I said in my original post, I swapped the capstan motor with one from a good-working unit, and it made no difference.....

sorry if I came across as insulting, one reads all kinds of things on here and sometimes posts don't convey the OPs real knowledge ... anyway glad to hear you got some progress. However, often, making pot adjustments can mask the real, underlying mechanical or electrical fault, so do bear that in mind to avoid disappointment!

-B

Sanyo's beta heads were by far the worst. They suffered from the comet noise type problems and wore out very freqeuntly