I had this brought in for repair by a customer, the list of faults was long, starting with the turntable, the drive belt had snapped, the strobe lamp had failed, the auto return mechanism didn’t work and the cartridge was missing. On the tape deck the lid had a broken hinge, all the belts needed replacing, the tape head was pitted, the azimuth adjustment was missing a very small spring, both VU lamps had failed and the record / playback switch was very noisy. The tuner worked ok but some of the tuning dial lamps had failed.
Starting with the turntable, I replaced the drive belt and sourced a strobe lamp and cartridge, those were the easy bits…moving on to the auto return mechanism I found the actuating gear had a split in it which meant that it was not gripping the spindle and therefore would not turn with it, Gentle application of some araldite cured this and that was the turntable section done.
On the tape deck I replaced all the belts, the tape head, the spring under the azimuth adjustment, the VU bulbs, fashioned a new hing for the tape lid and removed, stripped and cleaned the record / playback switch…that was probably the hardest part!
After replacement of all the bulbs in the tuner display, a good clean up and a lot of testing it was looking almost brand new and was ready to be collected by a very happy customer.
That’s interesting! I think my parents had the same music centre. Theres looks mint but the problem main problem is on TAPE mode just hideous loud feedback through the poor speakers (speakers are lousy). Record works fine, radio we don’t have aerial but I think it’s ok. I’d like to get tape working … Any tips!
Sounds like a problem with the record / playback switch, not an easy thing to get to and usually it will need stripping down to clean the contacts properly, this is a multi contact switch and you will need someone that knows what they are doing. As a quick but temporary fix you could try holding in the record protect switch and flicking the record and play buttons a few times.