Helllo, fellow VIDEOKARMA Members.
I have here a 1984 Sylvania Model: VC2230SL01 Top Loading VCR. I bought it at my local thirftstore a couple of weekends back. I noticed that it had a VHS tape in it already and decided to plug it in to test if the VCR powered up. Sure enough it did but when I went to eject the tape the machine had eaten it... Never having any experience working on VCR's before I didn't have much clue of what was wrong intill I spent about a week fighting and reading a lot on the net about common problems with VCR's and I found some great resources out there too! First thing I noticed was the pinch roller was all hard and glazed and it seemed to cause the tape to spool out in the one corner when the pinch roller touches the vhs tape, I found out that they don't make pinch rollers for this vcr anymore grrr.... but I did manage to find a replacement, I thought it would fix the problem but it didn't
next thing I read was that the idler tire's go bad and sure enough it had the same problem glazed and hard. I found out you can use O-rings to fix the problem and what a great idea, since it solved the problem
I was able to stop the VCR from eating tapes YEAH! I then proceeded to clean the head and other roller parts using 70% isopropyl alcohol and copier paper.
A new problem has arisen though that I am stumped on and hope someone out there has some common knowledge about. Every VHS tape I have tried to play has resulted in either a jumpy picture which I can not stabilize with the slow tracking or tracking knobs, and also white distortion at the top of the screen. The Audio comes in fine. Just the picture I am having problems with.