Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Part 3 : MCI JH110B rebuild - Update June 27, 2016 We got spin!

By Tim Dolbear
www.timdolbear.com


I had tons of Molex connection issues and after cleaning and tweaking them endlessly we got Spin!

Also the RTZ works. Have yet to test storing locator points but RTZ was the main thing.




I placed a old trash real and the old head stack back on so the old tape would not gum up the new ones. I was worried about snapping the tape on first test. Also I have torque settings to do still.

The transport worked ok but seemed shaky, then after a few days of checking it the FF and RW stopped, the lifters still worked, and the joystick still RW and FW but the motors will not moved when pressing RW or FF.  So its all bad Molex connections.

So I took apart EVERY Molex connector, popped the pins out really, and reshaped and cleaned each pin to bring the connectors full back to life, about 200 pins I estimate. 6 hours later everything runs so much more solid!

Next is the Audio Drawer of DEATH!!!  That's right, no sound even passing on channel 1 and channel 2 shows -20db twitching.

Time to shuffle cards and see if I can find the bad boards then on to fixing 'em.






Sunday, June 12, 2016

Part 2 : MCI JH110B rebuild - Update June 12, 2016

By Tim Dolbear
www.timdolbear.com

Part 2,  Soldering is done, time to clean and put back it back together and test.


The headstack is due back from JRF in a few days. $580! ...basically a new headstack: 2 heads replaced and 1 relapped, Flutter cleansed and all optically aligned...Oh and a new block.
Ouch!  But at least it will be stellar!







So the replacement of the sockets, is done. I replaced most all the chips with new ones. I also went through and re-soldered every Molex connection on the boards, so every pin...about 1000 of them... Then cleaned every connector and connection.










I reassembled the motherboard and daughter boards while looking at the picture I took during disassembly.  You can see my tablet below the Deck.

















With everything back together I was able to place it in the studio even though I need to rebuild the Power supply which had showed weak measurements for the 22volt regulators (only 6v), Powering up the unit, nothing works. The right channel showered a pegged level (oscillating?) and the right side did not... the VU on the right does not light up but the buttons do, so it has power...  more fun, but really I can't know for sure or deal with those issues until I fix the power supply. Then I can test again. Also the heads will be back then.
















But it looks so good in the studio!!!