my name is Gunther and I'm from Germany.
I have had an N1500 VCR since I was about 12 years old. A friend from school gave it to me, as he knew I really liked old electronics. The threading pulley was broken, my dad helped me fix it, and I had a working VCR. Over the years, other issues (mostly mechanical) appeared. After some time, I lost interest and put the VCR in my mom's basement. Last year, I brought it back out and started on getting it back in working condition. I encountered several capacitor issues (especially the very small electrolytics with 1 - 2.2uF). In oder to get the sync working, I had to adjust the servo controls. After all that work was done, the VCR was working surprisingly well. Before putting everything back together, I did a thorough cleaning and broke one of the heads
. I managed to glue it, so it is still working, but the picture is nothing like it was before...Picture before I broke the head.
Therefore, and also because the housing is in pretty bad shape, I went on a quest to find another machine to be used for parts. I was lucky and found one at a reasonable price. After taking a closer look at this machine, I realized that it was in pretty good shape. Aside from a broken pulley and disintegrated belts, it seemed to be pretty much untouched.
I decided it was in much too good a shape to be used for parts, so I began my quest to get it working. After cleaning out all the old belts, replacing them, fixing the threading gear and other mechanical issues, the machine works from a mechanical standpoint.
However, it has a lot of electronic issues:
- I do get an ok b/w picture when playing back tapes, but there is no color whatsoever. After lots of measurements (not exactly easy to measure on these things while a tape is running), I think that the issue might be around "can" U65. It seems that there is an input signal, but no chroma output. Switching it out for the component from my other machine has not helped though. Do you think it might just be a contact issue?
- While the b/w picture ist not bad, it does appear that some parts are "inverted". Almost seems like this could be a signal level issue. Any pointers on where to look?
- The tuner seems to have some sort of issue. After cleaning and bending the contacts for panel 3, I can at least get a steady picture, however with some noise and unstable color. Any idea what could be the issue here?
I do have part of the manual in German and the full version in Dutch. Even though I really struggle with the language, the troubleshooting section is very helpful.
Thanks for your help,
Gunther