Death of a Machine
On a blustery Sunday morning on top of a multistory car park in Sussex, I happened across this beautifully retro piece of kit:
It’s previous owner was clearly a heavy smoker with nicotine stains reaching into every crevice of the device. But the mechanical buttons worked and glancing at the tape heads things looked in reasonable condition. I asked the gaffer how much he wanted for it and before too long he was a fiver richer and I had myself a strongly smelling piece of 90s tech.
I’ve written previously about how I got into cassette players. The pursuit of more that has reached it’s tentacles deep into my soul means that I have since acquired a few more in various states of repair.
I could quickly see that if this trend of purchasing tape players continued that I would end up destitute and having to repurpose the cassette players as bricks for a house made in order to survive the brutally wet British winters so I stopped. Besides, the original one I bought is still going strong and one is really enough.
But don’t have a tape deck and I do have a tape deck shaped hole in my kitchen which could do with a dose of retro, but functional, tech and so for five of King Charles’ finest pounds, I couldn’t resist.
A quick clean got rid of a couple of decades worth of dust but the nicotine stains needed a few hours of isopropyl alcohol and friction. The above photo is from after this initial cleaning process.
I opened it up and had a quick look for signs of electronic damage that would make it dangerous to start and when spotting none, powered it up. Buttons were pressed and unhappy noises drifted out of the player but there was signs of life none-the-less. The most common problem with tape players is the disintegration of the rubber belts that transfer the kinetic energy from the motor to the various moving parts of the device. Since this is so common I thought it would be easy enough to take it apart and replace them.
This is where things started to go wrong.
I would describe myself as an electronics tinkerer who is inspired by the likes of Big Clive and Mend It Mark and I’m confident enough to take stuff apart with the guidance of a good YouTube video of someone else who has already done it. There was unfortunately no such video for this Sanyo player and with service manuals available on eBay for more than I paid for it, I decided to wing it.
Opening the case was easy but I quickly found myself swimming in screws and wiggling in wires whilst taking photos to remind myself of what is meant to go back to where. I was hoping to find that replacing the belts was understood to be a common repair task by the Sanyo engineers but for whatever reason so little thought had been put into this aspect of the device. After a few hours I began to realise that there was no hope of putting this back together yet alone giving it a second life.
When I look at the internals of the machine it is endlessly fascinating at the sheer number of components that are involved and the electrical symphony that is needed in order for the device to work. The mechanical engineering is on par with the electrical where the mechanism is in itself a marvel.
I feel a deep sense of guilt in not being able to breath life into it. It has survived all these years on someone’s shelf. Despite the nicotine cloud that has surrounded it for many years, it is clearly in good condition. No marks or dents on the outer shell. No broken physical buttons. I think it is clear that this was a player that was loved by its owner during its the cassette tape heyday and they could not bring themselves to discard it until the moment that I happened across it. It’s dirty demeanour would probably mean it would have ended up in landfill so I take some comfort that it is unlikely to met a more fortunate end.
It will however live on. The front panel is still in great condition. I have ideas on how it might be repurposed as the UI for a more digital soul. But the original soul has made it’s way to the eternally spinning heaven that all good tape decks go.
RIP Sanyo W10 Tape Deck
