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JVC VCR S-5990AM Counter Problems

Hi All, I have a JVC S-5990AM VCR. I bought it 2nd hand and thanks to the SCI Electronics pdf guide, have cleaned the heads satisfactorily and improved the picture tracking by adjusting the heads and rollers.

However. :-) I'm not sure if it's through my "tuning" or it was an existing problem, but the counter doesn't work accurately when I rewind tapes. Generally it doesn't count as the tape starts rewinding and then 'wakes up' after a little while (usually 2-7 minutes of tape, so that when the cassette is fully rewound the counter reads somewhere between

2 and 7+ minutes instead of 0:00:00. In forward direction it seems fine.

Any ideas?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

I must say I find Panasonic and Sony machines far more intuitive/ logical to operate, but it is so hard to find a good quality VCR these days, I want to try and stick with this one if I can.

Many thanks, J

Reply to
jonnybiggs69
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Hi The counter in JVC video recorders works by counting the control pulses along the bottom edge of the tape. If you fast forward or rewind a blank tape the counter will remain at 00:00:00 The symptoms you have suggests that the tape to control head alignment is poor during initial rewind. Check how the tape travels across the audio control head you will probably see it riding up or down slightly. This might be due to a worn pinch roller or some misalignment.

Cheers John.

Reply to
John Ferrier

Definitely skipping control pulses at the control head. My HR-S6600 did the same thing. I slightly bent the guide arm (half-load arm) to fix it.

Mark Z.

Reply to
Mark Zacharias

Many thanks Mark & John!

I'll open her up again, sounds like i definitely misalligned it when I tuned the picture when I first bought it. Bendingthe guide arm sounds scary to an amateur, I assume the idea is just to put slightly more pressure on the tape at that point. (common sense prevailing with the amount of pressure applied to the arm) :-)

Cheers, J

Reply to
jonnybiggs69

The idea is to keep the tape from riding up (or down) excessively at the control head gap during rewind. If you observe the portion of the tape which is extended to the audio / control head during rewind you can see it sort of bouncing around.

My HR-S6600U was an early model from around 1991. If it had previously seen the clear leader at the beginning of the tape, it though it "knew" where the beginning was and would essentially ignore the reel sensor pulses and "slam" the beginning of the tape if the counter had not approached zero due to the inaccurate pulse count from the control head. Slammed it so hard the mechanism would jam. If the tape had been inserted with no clear leader showing, it was never a problem. I really fought that one, and even had an argument with a JVC engineer over it.

(I won the argument. Later models did not suffer from this.)

Mark Z.

Reply to
Mark Zacharias

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