Seeking advice on Nakamichi 480

[jcarey]

Hello. I have a Nakamichi 480 cassette deck that I purchased new many years ago. It's a lovely machine. For many years I used it to record live concerts from FM radio. More recently I've used the machine intermittently to digitize the tapes so I can burn them to CD and in the future use them on a DS unit. For a while the play function was reluctant to work and I had to try it a number of times before it would work. Now it has stopped working completely. Rewind and FF are still ok.

Any ideas about the cause of the problem and the fix? I intend taking it in for repair but I wondered if the problem had a relatively easy fix that I could try. Thanks in anticipation for any suggestions.

 

[Sam Cogley]

Belt? Idler tire?

 

[dksp]

Hi, I just got myself a 480, but haven't serviced it yet. I searched a little and found that besides the belts and idlers, another common problem on these decks are the "orange caps". Those capacitors tend to fail after 30 years and best is to replace them all.

Example :
http://www.google.com/search?q=orange+caps+nakamichi

 

[jcarey]

Thanks for the responses

Thanks for responding. I've taking the deck to a specialist repairer. Given advice I've been given I suspect the problem is to do with belts or the pinch rollers given the symptoms. However, I had no idea about potential problems with orange caps so if the problem turns out not to be about capacitors I'll keep that advice in mind re future problems.

 

[dksp]

Well, on mine it turned out to be mostly dried out grease that prevented the mechanism to work correctly. I have cleaned the main parts and relubed them, and now it is working again. The belts turned out to be OK, since playback is very nice. Some parts of the mechanics are still a little tight, so I will have to clean more in the details.

 

[dksp]

98% functional… since it still fails to start the first playback when "cold". Second try works.