Sony Beta SL-5200 Doesn't Do Anything

[ESigma25]

I recently got a Sony SL-5200 Beta Hi-Fi deck that seems to have some problems. Tapes will not play or fast-forward (pressing each button does nothing at all), rewind at least tries. Sometimes the tape even gets stuck trying to eject and I have to push a plastic wheel against a rubber idler on the right side to force the tape to thread back into the cassette. The belts on this machine seem fine but is this behavior a sign they aren't as fine as they seem?

[Electronic M]

I've got the non-HiFi model that Sony made for Zenith. Belt and idler slip and lack of lube on the threading mech can be issues, but these have electronic issues too.

The most common issue is the light blue sanyo caps going bad and causing the capstan to not run or be off speed. Those caps are between .1 and 1uF so I replaced mine with film caps instead of electrolytics and it works well (those film caps should last longer too).
Another issue is some of the switching transistors that control which mode (play, ff, rw, pause, record, stop, eject) the deck is in and what motors are running can fail...That happened on my deck and I had to buy the sams to figure out the circuit and troubleshoot it and I did get it working.

If you feel up to trying to understand the electronics I can email you my Sam's.

[ESigma25]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

I've got the non-HiFi model that Sony made for Zenith. Belt and idler slip and lack of lube on the threading mech can be issues, but these have electronic issues too.

The most common issue is the light blue sanyo caps going bad and causing the capstan to not run or be off speed. Those caps are between .1 and 1uF so I replaced mine with film caps instead of electrolytics and it works well (those film caps should last longer too).
Another issue is some of the switching transistors that control which mode (play, ff, rw, pause, record, stop, eject) the deck is in and what motors are running can fail...That happened on my deck and I had to buy the sams to figure out the circuit and troubleshoot it and I did get it working.

If you feel up to trying to understand the electronics I can email you my Sam's.

Yeah, I've been told about the Sanyo caps but usually the symptom for those is video quality issues, and I can't even get the system to play a tape, so I don't think they're the issue this time.

Sure, I'll try my luck with that Sams, thanks.