I never know what to expect with these old Sharp systems, 40 years ago they were very innovative but gave us a lot of problems under guarantee, so I guess the ones that made it this far are doing pretty well.
First up was the turntable, it would wouldn’t load the tray, there was no movement at all, so I removed the tray motor assembly to find that the loading gear had split and the motor shaft was just spinning within it, someone had tried to glue it into place, this may have worked for a while but it needed to be replaced. I was able to find one in Poland, it looked like it had been 3D printed but as long as it worked (which it did) I didn’t care. So now the tray would move in and out but one of the limit switches had suffered an attempted repair sometime in the past and had fallen apart, I found one of these in Switzerland and fitting it had the tray opening, closing and stopping where it should. Now onto the rest of it, the tonearms have a fine tuning mechanism for their landing point, this was not working. It’s a spring loaded mechanism which is adjusted by a grub screw and on both tonearms a plastic lug had broken meaning the spring had no tension and adjustment wasn’t possible. The problem here was that no glue on earth would be strong enough to hold under the spring’s tension so I had to resort to a bodge, I found the only way to fix this was to solder a strap across the arm with the plastic lug, this would prevent forward and backward movement of the arm as well as prevent it riding up under the tension of the spring. This was far easier on the A side than on the B side as the whole sled mechanism had to come out to access that, but at least at that point it was easy to replace the tonearm belt. There was some further cleaning and adjusting of the various sensors and tonearm positions and the speeds had been tweaked for both 33 and 45 so they had to be set properly but it was now functioning properly.
Moving on to the RT-107 tape deck, I noted sloppy and shiny drive belts so they had to be replaced with new. I thought that would be it but it appeared someone had had a poke around in here as well as a brake arm had been replaced in the wrong position, it took a bit of working out but once repositioned everything worked well, it was now just a matter of cleaning the heads and pinchrollers.
The only problem I could find on the SA-107 receiver was a scratchy volume control, of course being a Sharp the whole front had to come off to access the control, a very fiddly job and even harder to get back together.
The only thing left now was to deal with the speakers, the foam was falling off the drivers so I could either refoam or replace the drivers, I decided to do the latter as there wasn’t much price difference.
