Matsushita VCRs from mid-80s
 

I had two of the better machines offered in 1986, a Panasonic and a GE with 4-head and stereo HiFi sound. I still have the Panny but scrapped the GE.

Panasonic VCRs and their counterparts labeled GE, Magnavox, Sylvania, Penneys, etc. were workhorses thru the 90's and had only two main issues that I recall. Dirty heads and worn idler pulley-wheels. I was always able to easily find the idler pulley, which was a common failure. The first clue is when the machine plays but does not wind tape back onto take-up reel when ejecting.
Unfortunately, my two developed other issues not so easily solved. I see these for a few bucks at GW, SA and used thrift stores and wonder if there is hope.

The Panasonic appears to have a dirty head and would not respond to the usual swabbing with Freon TF. I'm glad I kept it in light of some great threads found here which discuss the fingernail trick among other methods. I will need to pull it out and try something else.

The GE lasted over 20 years and developed what may have been a PS issue, though I did not check for high-ESR capacitors before scrapping it. At first, it would shut off only when programmed to timer record. The unit would take the program allright, then come on at the right time, begin to record then just shut off as if unplugged. Later on, it started doing this when manually recording. At the end it just would not even respond when the play button was pressed.

Memory cap? Those .047F (47,000uf) 5V caps used to open up, storing very little voltage, and relying on the PS to provide the "keep alive" voltage for the memory. Unit powers up, the PS gets loaded, and the voltage drops (memory cap has opened/gone low value, so not doing it's job...) and it dumps the program. NEC/Panny/Sanyo and some Hitachis had the problem, 4-8 years after new.. A new cap from Digikey for 3 bux solved the problem.

Normally if the power supply was working right, a bad memory "supercap" would just cause instant loss of time and timer settings with a brief power interruption.

On that GE no doubt to me that a few caps in the power supply were failing. Used to see them all the time, plug in clock lit up, power on and it would try to do the power-on mechanism reset routine, and the power demand on the PS would cause the clock to blank out, and shut down.

Since the OP mentioned it, I uploaded a youtube video demonstrating cleaning heads with a thumbnail. The key is to be very gentle. It played fine afterwards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_odc1cZou68

Larry G

I just picked up a Panasonic-built GE. I think the date on the back states 1985 or so. It still uses a counter instead of the time-elapsed display. No on-screen displays at all. It looks like a low-hours unit. It's the only one that plays my el-cheapo Madacy or Goodtimes videos of the WW2. The newer ones I have are always trying to auto-track to compensate for poor recording quality and are impossible to use. This one uses a manual tracking adjustment.

I just got through cleaning up my (2nd) 1985 Panasonic PV-1545. It is a 4 head, Hi-Fi Stereo with all the cool stuff. The first one I got, I've had for years, but the idler tire and power supply capacitors are shot. But this one works almost like brand new! Here is the old beat up one, but both machines are identical.

I've got a 1986 RCA VCR up in my attic right now that wouldn't even power up... I'd. Be willing to bet it was a capacitor issue also, but I have 3 or 4 working VCRs at the moment.


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