hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2874.txt

Episode: 2874
Title: HPR2874: Repair of G.E. Variable Speed Cassette Recorder
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2874/hpr2874.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 12:36:13

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This is an HPR episode 2874 entitled Repair of GE, Variable Speed Cassette Recorder.
It is the 80th anniversary show of John Colp, and in about 20 minutes long, and Karina Clean Flag.
The summer is, I talk about repairing a 1997 handheld cassette recorder and demonstrated shoes.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hey everybody, this is John Colp in Lafayette, Louisiana, and this morning I'm sitting out on the deck at our house
while our new kittens play in the yard. We're trying to get them where they can be outside and not get lost,
gradually introducing them to the great outdoors, and they're over there having a great time.
Attacking each other, finding bugs, looking at birds, all kind of stuff like that.
It's a good time.
Today I wanted to talk to you guys about something that I found yesterday.
As you guys know, if you've ever heard any of my other episodes before, I really like to hunt thrift stores looking for interesting things.
And yesterday I found a pretty cool little device. I don't know that it's especially high quality, but it had a certain interest to me.
It is a handheld cassette recorder by GE. It is model number 3-5363A, battery operated cassette recorder by General Electric.
It looks kind of like a Walkman. Only most Walkmans don't have the record function.
This one has a record function. It only plays in mono as far as I can tell.
I'm assuming it was meant as a dictation device.
What later would have been people would use micro cassette recorders for recording doctors know its lectures, interviews, and stuff like that.
This records on regular sized cassettes.
And the thing that really intrigued me about this when I decided to buy it was that it has a variable speed playback knob.
So I don't think I had ever seen a handheld cassette thing that had variable speed playback.
So I decided to buy it. It didn't have a price on it, but when I took it up to the register and said this doesn't have a price, but I'd like to buy it.
She said 99 cents and I said, okay, I will buy it for 99 cents.
Of course, it didn't work. What would the fun be if it worked when you bought it?
There were a few things wrong with it. I'm just going to kind of step through.
I've got a flicker photo album that you could follow along with if you'd like to.
Although I don't think I started with the photos of the battery compartment.
As you can imagine, something that hadn't been used in years had a very corroded battery compartment with badly corroded batteries in it.
So I just dumped those out.
The first thing I did was to clean out the corrosion using Q-tips.
That's cotton swabs and vinegar.
And that got rid of it pretty good. So that cleaned it all out.
But then I discovered that there was a piece missing, you know, how for battery packs with AA batteries or AAA or whatever.
There's one end that's flat for the positive end of the battery.
And then the other end is springy for the flat end for the negative part of the battery.
Well, first of all, this is kind of a weird deal in that both batteries go the same direction.
So the negative end of both batteries is at the same side of the device.
Normally one goes one way and one goes the other. But in this one, they both go the same direction.
But one of the springy bits was missing.
It had rusted, I suppose, and broken off.
And so I knew that would have to be addressed before I could get any power.
But I decided to go ahead and open the thing up anyway before addressing the power issue to see what else was wrong.
I suspected that the belt would need to be replaced, but I didn't realize how badly it would need to be replaced.
In case you're not going to be able to look at the photos and are just listening, I've got some...
I'll just kind of describe the device a little bit. It's about the size of a walkman.
It's got buttons for stop, fast forward, rewind.
There's a little slider switch for play or pause.
There's a large play button and then a smaller record button right next to it.
And then next to all the buttons is a knob.
What do you call these kinds of... it's like a volume knob, but it's the kind where you can just access one little part of it.
It's not sticking up out of the device anyway. That's for the variable speed playback.
And then on the top of the device, there's a headphone jack, a microphone, and a minimum and maximum.
That's the volume knob.
And then there is also a place for DC power supply, although I don't have one that will fit this.
It's three bolts, a positive sleeve negative tip, and then there's a battery compartment.
Oh, and there's a speaker on the back. There's a very small speaker so that you can record and listen back immediately without the use of headphones.
Okay, so let me walk through the picture.
So the first thing I found when I opened up the case, one thing that I noticed is it was very easy to open up to me.
That's a mark of quality build. That was kind of a cheap device.
But in the category of cheap devices, the build quality was actually very hacker friendly in that there were four obvious screws after which you could easily take the back off and access the drive belt, which I found was a black gooey mess, the consistency of tar.
And so it took some doing to get that belt out of there.
And I think the longest part of my repair process of this was just getting the belt cleaned out.
That took at least 20, 30 minutes because it's not that easy to access the little wheel and that stuff was kind of difficult.
I kept dipping a scrap of T-shirt into alcohol and then trying to like use my fingernail to slide the T-shirt with alcohol in the little groove and then just gently roll it around and around to clean off as much goo as I could.
Anyway, there's a picture of the gooey bits if you'd like to see.
There's also a picture of the belt in place and you can tell that there's a problem because it's not tight.
It kind of looks thicker on one side and thinner on the other and it's curved in a way that it shouldn't be if it had proper tension.
And then I've got a nice close up of the belt where you can see it kind of shining on there where you know that a shiny belt is a problem.
Either it's got oil on it or it's really in bad condition.
So anyway, I got the belt off of there, cleaned off the drive wheel that is mounted on the motor and then also the large wheel that it turns.
So then replacing the belt was a matter of going into my belt assortment.
It's very convenient that about a month ago I ordered a set of something like 70 or 80 cassette deck belts in assorted sizes.
And so I've got a picture of my bag of cassette belts on the flicker photo album.
There are a lot of belts in there from a great big to little, little bitty.
And I found one that seemed about the right size and put it on and kind of moved the wheels with my fingers and found that it seemed to have about the right amount of tension.
And so I just decided the belt was replaced and moved on.
Looks good. There's a photo of a close up of the belt, new belt in place.
Hey kitty, kitty. There's one of my kitties. He's sniffing around my tablet now and I'm like, oops.
He just flopped. He's found my cassette and the device.
Why don't you go attack your brother over there in the ground cover?
I don't know. The cat's tail is over my tablet. I should take a picture of the cat while just for environment.
Oh, now he's gone. Well, maybe if he comes back.
Let's see, I've got a picture of the cassette loading side of the device also.
There are four screws there that I took out. I don't think I ended up actually removing that side of the mechanism.
I did take the door off, although it ended up being for no purpose.
I thought I would need to take the door off to access the battery compartment, but it ended up that wasn't necessary.
There's a photo of the playback and record heads and controllers and cap stands and all that stuff.
It looks like it only, it looks like a mono tape head.
So it's meant only to record and playback and mono.
And then I get to the real difficulty. Replacing a belt in a cassette deck is pretty much a matter of course.
You're almost always going to have to replace the belt in one of these old tape decks.
This was a more difficult problem, the power pack, because the little springy bit had broken off.
So I managed to get the little battery pack component to slide out of there where I could access the part that I needed and kind of assess the situation.
And I got the old bit of a spring that was still left in there. I pulled that out.
And so there was a socket now where I could slide another springy bit in there if I happen to have one.
And incredibly, I did. I found my old set of electric parts and I had a little like a breadboard and a bunch of little wire bits and LEDs and stuff like that.
That I had kind of misplaced during our move to the new house about a year ago, but then I found it and in there was a bit of some other device.
I don't know if it was a toy or a what, but I saved it thinking that I could use it as a battery pack.
And then incredibly, I did need it for that. So I took the one springy bit out of there.
There's a picture of the springy bit and the original thing that it came from on the flicker album.
And so it looked like it would work, but it was too large. Like it was the springy bit was the wrong size to fit in the slot.
So what I needed to do was to cut the metal thing that the spring is attached to.
So it would fit in the slot for this cassette recorder.
And I found that when I took it downstairs and I thought, well, I'm going to try to do this with my 10 snips.
Even though I thought 10 snips were for much larger, more bulky metal cutting things.
But incredibly, when I tried to cut it with a 10 snips, it cut right off nice and clean.
Didn't bend the metal at all. Just cut it off in a nice neat thing.
So I cut off both sides, went back upstairs and found that it slid right into that little hole.
It just left one little corner poking out that wouldn't fit down in it.
So I'd snip that off with the 10 snips as well.
And I've got a picture of the new spring in place.
And then I've got another picture where it's showing where I soldered it into the black power lead.
And then there's another picture where the power case is back in position in the device.
And then, of course, the next thing is to put batteries in there and see if it works.
And it didn't power on when I pushed play.
But then I took the batteries out and did a little bit more scraping on the positive end of the battery pack thing.
Because it looked like there might be some rust or something on there that was keeping it from getting a good contact.
And after I did that, it played.
So the thing is working. I put it all back together and listened to a tape.
And then I tried the record function and it worked. I would say it worked fine.
I think I would say it worked as intended.
This is not a great recording device.
There was quite a lot of noise from like the microphone picks up the sound of the cassette wheels turning.
And so there's a bit of a rumbly sound to it, which is not ideal.
But anyway, what I'm going to do is record something on this right now.
I have a new old stock cassette here, which I'm going to take a picture of this.
This is going to be the first time I've opened up a new cassette in many, many years, probably more than 20 years.
But I found this at a thrift store, of course, for 50 cents.
Sony 60-minute normal bias tape still in its original shrink wrap.
And that's the perfect kind of tape for this. It's not too long. It's normal bias.
You don't need high quality tape in a machine like this because it won't make any difference.
So here we go. Maybe you can hear the sound of me taking the plastic off.
Or maybe you can't.
Because sets have this little string that helps you turn. There we go.
Okay, the plastic is off. Keep that from blowing away.
Don't want to be a litter bug here.
Okay, I've got a tape, brand new tape in my restored cassette recorder.
Variable speed cassette recorder.
And what I'm going to do now is start recording.
And I will incorporate, I'm sorry, I cracking up at the cats.
They just like running from opposite sides of the yards and then jumped on each other.
They were having so much fun.
I'm going to record on this device and incorporate that into the podcast.
And I will demonstrate the variable speed playback as well.
Let's see, here we go.
All right, the wheels are turning. So it ought to be recording now.
Since it only records in mono and there's a tiny little speaker on the back,
I'm assuming that this was used for dictation.
And the variable speed would probably be so that you could either listen to something very quickly
or maybe you would record at a high speed and then play back at a low speed
if it were something that were difficult to translate or to transcribe.
Let's say I could have used something like this when I did my research in Argentina.
If I had recorded the interviews that I was conducting in Spanish at high speed,
then I presumably could play them back at a lower speed that would make them easier to transcribe.
Now, this is truly just changing speed.
It doesn't keep a level pitch.
And so when you start playing it back at high speed, it also changes the pitch.
I'm not sure how much else to say about this thing.
I don't know how much I'm going to use it, but it was a super fun little project
to take apart, clean out, and make work again.
It's very, very satisfying, especially fixing the electrical problem.
And I had a really good time doing it.
I guess I will just add this to my collection of low-end legacy technology devices.
And we will see how I use them in the future.
I might give them away to my students at school.
I've started doing this thing where students need things nowadays to keep their attention.
And so every Friday we'll play a game where I quiz them over material that we've covered during the week.
And whoever, and we do it using a platform called Cahoot.
Cahoot is this gaming thing where you can set up questions and you show them on the screen
and it keeps track of who is winning and how many points they have and all that.
And anyway, the winner of each Cahoot on Friday gets a prize.
And usually it's something that I've picked up at a thrift store.
I've given away old records of marching bands.
And I gave away a cassette tape called, what was that one called?
It was called Yodeluya.
It was this guy that did yodeling.
And it was like these worship praise songs with yodeling.
And I thought it was hilarious.
And so the kids really liked that.
So just odd things like that.
And so this little cassette recorder might end up being a Cahoot prize for my students.
All right.
So maybe what I'll try to do now is, you know what I'm going to do?
I'm going to start.
I'm going to change the speed while it's recording and see what that does.
So right now it's on normal speed.
I'm going to turn the wheel up to maximum speed.
So it should be recording at a much higher speed now.
What does it do that during recording?
Let me watch.
I'm going to watch the wheels as I'm talking here and see if the wheel speed changes when I do the knob.
It looks like it might only record at one speed and then playback is variable.
Okay.
It does say variable speed playback.
It's a variable speed recording.
So maybe I was wrong about what I thought about that.
Okay.
Anyway, I think I'm going to stop recording on this device now and finish up the podcast.
Actually, you know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to stop it, rewind it, and then play it back.
And that way I can demonstrate the variable speed playback.
Here's, that's what I'll do.
Okay.
Okay. So now it stopped recording.
I'm rewinding the tape.
It looks like I chose the right size belt on the first try because the rewind speed looks fine.
And the playback seems steady.
Okay.
Now let's listen.
We'll just listen to this little speaker.
Where's the volume?
All right.
The wheels are turning.
So it ought to be recording now.
Since it only records mono and there's a tiny herbal speaker on the back,
I'm assuming that this was used for dictation.
And the variable speed would probably be so that you could either listen to something very quickly or make it work.
Okay. So that's me talking.
Now I'm going to speed it up.
We're something that were difficult to translate or to transcribe.
Let's say I could abuse something like this when I did my research in Argentina.
And if I had recorded the interviews that I was conducting in Spanish at high speed,
then I presumably could play them back at a lower speed that would make them easier to transcribe.
Now this is truly just changing speed.
It doesn't keep a level of pitch.
And so when you start playing at high speed, it also changes the pitch.
This is fun.
I'm not sure how much else to say about this thing.
I don't know how much I'm going to use it.
But it was a super fun little project too.
Take a part.
Clean up and make work again.
It's very, very satisfying, especially fixing the alignment.
This is fun.
Okay.
I guess that's probably about enough.
I'm going to stop now.
And that might be all there is to say about this little thing.
Anyway, if you enjoyed that, I hope you will consider looking for little gadgets like this,
wherever you live and trying to bring them back to life.
There's something very satisfying about that.
One of the nice things about these kinds of devices is that there's much about them that is physical in nature
that you fix the physical problems.
It will work again.
So in this case, it was missing that the belt was damaged and that was keeping the parts from turning.
So you fix that.
The parts turn again.
That's one problem.
And then there was a physical connection that was broken on the electrical.
And once you repaired that connection, everything works.
So anyway, that's that.
I've enjoyed talking to you about this device.
And I really had fun doing the project.
It didn't cost me hardly anything.
And it gave me an enormous amount of pleasure.
And that's it.
Here comes the kitty.
I think it's time to say goodbye.
I'll talk to you guys some other time.
Okay?
Bye-bye.
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