Zenith VCR VR 1830 failure
 

I was watching a tape and all of sudden it stop playing. After that you could hit play and it would play but somtimes the unit just stops after a few seconds. I now if the take up hub stops turning it's supposed to stop playing the tape. This unit uses a direct drive motor and one idler tire which I don't think is bad as the tape counter is acting goofy. Sometimes it will play for a while without giving any trouble but when it does act up. the tape counter intermediately begans moving on its own with no tape in the machine or with tape inserted with VCR in stoped mode. When playing it will jumps all over the place as if the sensor was getting stuck on. n
Now main question is what could possibly make the tape counter misbehave. As other then that the VCR works great and it's one of those side loaders so really would like to get it fixed again. Unit I get it fixed I lucky have a working broksonic VCR from 1992 that works but could use a new loading belt.

For one, the reels are not direct driven. There is an idler sitting between the reels which is driven by a "reel" motor. I would pull the cover and look at the take up reel during play as the tape could be seen slacking. I suspect a faulty idler, an idler which is not swinging into position properly or a slightly bent carriage which is preventing the tape from sitting properly on the reels.

After taking the top off I noticed that idler tire was pretty badly wearn out so I replaced it with an o-ring. I'm 90% sure that fixed the problem and tonight I will be testing it out to see how it behaves.

These units tend to have bad PS lytics. I've also seen on other make decks bad motor servo lytics cause sudden stops.

I'm currently not using the VCR as I changed my TV to 19" 1995 Sharp TV/combo unit which happenes to still work fine after a head cleaning. However I do plan to put the zenith back into service soon on my console TV. I have not played any tapes in VCR since I changed the ilder but I did rewind a 2 hour tape and it gave no trouble. If it misbehaves again I will go check the caps in the servo circuit and report back.

I hope its ok buddy!

Update I have been using the the Zenith and for most part it has behaved. What the fault was the reel rotation sensor as when you would flip the the display to the tape conter the counter would randomly start to freak out and didn't matter if it was what in stop, play, rewind, and fast-forward. I don't know what caused it to the reel rotation sensor to act up. So far the Zenith is working fine and reel sensor has only acted up one time since I have made my last post.

If this VCR is based on the JVC HR-D470, maybe the reel rotation sensor is failing. Apparently it does happen. I believe another person on this forum had one fail.
Here is a video showing the symptom and fix on a JVC..
https://youtu.be/FFHd2tOaNdQ?si=l7HG7USS72FVmSTY

I just confirmed that another member had a similar issue with the JVC version of this deck..
http://videokarma.org/showthread.php...05#post3252805