Philips EL-3400 VTR

[Captainclock]

Originally Posted by MIPS

The easiest method I can think of is make a mounting jig for the drill press and first clean the drum using progressively finer pieces of emery paper as the drum spins in the drill followed by a polish. Alternately I could do the same if I had a lathe buuuut my workshop is only so large. It's going to depend on how the upper and lower halves of the drum dismantle and what precision points I find along the way. What I'm really hoping is I end up with two pieces and nothing hanging off it so I can polish it like I did with a copper cigar canister I made in highschool. (Remember when copper was cheap? I do because this baby could pay me through university if sold for scrap!)

Also, I'd attach the PDF of my checker's setup manual because apparently mine is updated with extra tubes but it's almost three times the size of what the forum will allow me to upload.


So long as the drum can be salvaged there's high hopes it can be made useable again. Stuff like the back cover and knobs can be substituted. Belts and belt guides can be cleaned and replaced. Internally aside from age related damage the guts are in fantastic condition.

OK, well yeah I guess if you put it that way, but then you would have to locate some tape for it but from what I've heard the 1" tape is getting harder and harder to find.

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by Captainclock

OK, well yeah I guess if you put it that way, but then you would have to locate some tape for it but from what I've heard the 1" tape is getting harder and harder to find.

1" video tape is probably hard to find, but 1" audio tape had more extensive use, and ought to be easier to find (albeit not cheap).

[MIPS]

I wish I could keep this level of progress for the rest of the restoration but expect things to slow down after this.


You can get reels of 2" tape for not too much if you shop around. I should have a reel of 456 at my door tomorrow in fact that cost $50 shipped albeit it will need a bake.

The red wiring of that guage seems to be related to the drum motors. As I was desoldering the cabling and not clipping them I can only assume this is some relic of some form of conversion or something. Indeed I'll need the manual to know for certain.

Anyways, I was able to strip the drum down almost completely after I pulled out the calipers and micrometer. Having learned a lot from the DVK-2400 restoration I measured and marked down everything before it was removed. The result is below.







The two halves of the drum are press fit and pinned so you won't be able to split it in half or otherwise spin it to clean it up that way. The other problem is that each of the tape guides have small up/down adjustments. Without a proper jig there's no way in all hell I'm going to touch any of them so here we are now. HMMMMMMM....

One idea is that because emery paper is available with a 1" width I can thread it like a piece of tape and clean up the path like that and do the same to polish it. Outside of the path however and around the guides I'm not entirely sure how to do it without possibly marring the surface pretty bad but it needs to be cleaned up or else the corrosion might creep right back into the tape path. We cannot use solvent batch because of both the potted head coil and all my reference marks.