Zenith VRE205, nifty VCR

[Captainclock]

Originally Posted by Ed in Tx

Those can have intermittent grounds on the deck board on the bottom. Can cause mechanism malfunction. Fix was to add small external star washers under the screw heads to ensure good ground. Also the little load belt can fail and it's not the easiest to get to. See pic:

Although the belt on this unit is a lot easier to get to than the sideways loading model (I believe that was the VR 1830 from about 1986) with that model you actually have to unsolder some wires in order to get the motor assembly out in order to get to the belt whereas in this model you don't have to unsolder any wires, just remove some screws and that's it. Speaking of the VR 1830, I happen to have one of those that seems to have a bad belt or something because it will load the tape into the VCR but then after that the tape itself won't load into the playback heads, the motor just spins continuously thoughout the loading attempt but it doesn't turn the pulley to engage the gears for loading the tape around the heads, whereas at least my VCR that I have that's like the OP's still functions mechanically and has great picture yet just doesn't play very good audio out of the Audio Output RCA jack on the Back of the unit, but the audio plays fine out of the RF (75 Ohm) connections.