Micro-cassette Recorder Surgery

Over winter break I was sifting around some things I had lying around and I found this

It sadly didnt work when I put new batteries in and tried to use it. I decided I wanted to take it apart and try to fix it. usually with these older reel machines, theres a rubber belt that goes bad with age so that was my first target.

first course of action was to take off the case, this required a few small screws but a good thing about old tech is that they were designed to be assembled and taken apart by hand so its not that difficult.

A good trick to use with these small screws is to attach a magnet to the screwdriver so the screw sticks

after I got in, I removed the old belt (black) and replaced it with a similar sized rubber band I found, this might change the play speed slightly but since it only would record and play on the same machine it didn’t matter much

in case you were wondering, this is what the backside of the PCB looks like

Obviously I could not end this blog without showing it in action so here we go :)