'90's Magnavox BPC VCR braking problem

[Blast]

Mag's were made by a number of vendors over the years. At first, mostly Panasonic and a little JVC. Then, sometime in the later 90's by Funai. If memory serves I'm not sure I've ever replaced many Funai heads. Certainly more Panasonics and JVC's.

There was a JVC manufactured machine for Mag in the very early 90's that had a strange head. Every other vendor's head- it never mattered if you turned it back and forth while cleaning it. But, it seems if you turned this JVC backwards (as I later found out) the reverse motion spun a lubricant back out of a spiral groove (per instructions and per my memory) and ruined the head. The 2-head version was the VR9020 and the 4-head the VR9040. This first happened to me in the early/mid '90's while cleaning my friend's 9020. It worked fine before I touched it, I gave it a simple cleaning and BOOM no more video. Gosh, was that head expensive... I think I toasted one more before I figured out what was going on. Fortunately, I didn't see too many of those models...