NEC DS8000U VCR where to find manuals? Belts? Codes?

[n8nagel]

Originally Posted by redk9258

The place I was getting belts from closed. Just have to look online, I guess. It's getting hard to find parts!

I got some good links from Tapeheads, I'll post back when I order.

[n8nagel]

So I took the bottom cover off this unit today and sure enough the big belt is broken and in fact is hard as a rock. I also checked out the Sony cassette deck and all four belts are bad on that as well and that one's going to be a joy to clean up. I found one place that had all the belts I needed

https://www.electronicsupplycorp.com/

This is not an official recommendation as I haven't actually ordered yet, just sent an email telling them what I needed (5 minutes ago). However the prices are reasonable. Thank you to @redk9258 for the catalog, that was super helpful.

Now one question about this unit. Two of the belts look to be replaceable simply by cleaning the pulleys and gently installing the new ones. However there's one (that isn't broken on my unit) that looks like it requires some disassembly to replace, any advice? I have not been able to find a service manual for this unit.

For "Loading Belt 1" any ideas? Or am I just going to have to play with it?

Thanks again guys your help has been very valuable.

[redk9258]

That's great! Looks like a bad assed remote in it's day!

[n8nagel]

Originally Posted by redk9258

That's great! Looks like a bad assed remote in it's day!

yeah I knew without actual knowledge that this was TOTL or close to it just by hefting it and the number of buttons LOL. Having the actual factory remote a) settles down my OCD and b) will make documenting the remote codes MUCH easier (pretty much every piece of gear I have, I try to document the remote codes on the JP1 repository because it's helped me so much in the past, and also many/most mfgrs. don't publish this info. Denon and Oppo being two notable exceptions.)

[n8nagel]

Good afternoon party people. My belts showed up today so of course the first thing I did was see if this thing lived. I replaced the broken drive belt and also the one loading belt that was easy to do, which was still flexible but noticeably harder than the new one. However, one of the pulleys seems to have been damaged either by grease that was on the old belt or some chemicals leaching out of the belt itself as it sat in one spot. I cleaned it up the best I could with isopropanol. Do I worry about it? It appears to be part of the main drive mechanism so I figured this would be important, however, as you can see, it is in fact playing.

Questions:

1. Picture quality is... not great. Am I just spoiled by watching Blu-Rays and 4K streaming, and I've forgotten what VHS looks like? The only tape I have is the one that was stuck in this machine when I got it which is an old pre-enjoyed rental copy of Speed.

2. Tracking seems to be best most of the way to right. Is this a problem or worry about it some other time?

3. FF and REW leave the tape engaged with the heads even if pressed after STOP. Is this correct? The mechanism is working, it loads and ejects properly.

4. I cleaned the heads with isopropanol on a flour sack, but I realized I do not know. Can I use my tape head demagnetizer on a VCR, and should I? Or just stop here and keep playing?

5. Any idea how to replace the last belt? (see previous post with pics)

Thanks guys! So far I'm in (mods, please edit if price discussion is not allowed)

$12.50 for the unit
$10 for belts
$14 for the owner's manual (to get the remote part number, and also because this is kinda complicated)
$22.30 for the remote

so I'm almost $60 in at this point although it does appear to be functional. My rational head says I'm getting close to market value of the thing.

Thoughts?

[Electronic M]

If you're using a modern flat screen to watch it the picture will look worse than on a CRT TV. The only way to mitigate that on a flat screen is with a high end 3 figure S-VHS or D-VHS deck with a TBC/video noise reduction system that averages multiple fields and or frames, and even then resolution is lower so there's going to be half the detail of 1080.

Some decks like to track close to one side with some tapes. Each VCR OEM (including ones that made the industrial duplicators Hollywood used) calibrated their decks slightly different and tracking exists to compensate for that.

[n8nagel]

Yes, I was using a 23" Samsung 1080p monitor/TV to test as it's small enough to fit on my work space. I do not actually own a CRT... this unit actually does have noise reduction but when I tried it it appeared to make the picture worse and smeary.

I'm starting to think it just looked bad because I literally haven't watched TV in less than 1080p in I don't know how long. Shortly after the DTV conversion I bought the Samsung mentioned above, gave my old CRT to a friend, gave my big projector TV to another friend, and my converter boxes haven't been powered up since. It also was more watchable from a couple feet away as opposed to sitting on a bar stool watching it from computer monitor distance as I was at first.

I also got nostalgic because it SMELLS just like I remember a VCR smelling when it got hot. (why do they run so hot anyway?)

Is it normal for the mechanism to leave the tape pulled out when rewinding? I don't remember ever watching a VHS work with the top off before. If so, that seems to be a good argument for getting a separate rewinder. (I know it's a little thing, I also cringe when I see a reel to reel rewinding with the tape spooled, I'm just thinking of the wear on the heads)

[Electronic M]

Some decks both beta and VHS it's normal to keep the drum wrapped all the time the tape is in, others unwrap for Stop-fastwind/non-visual searching. It basically depends on the OEM who made it.
I don't like it when it stays wrapped in those cases either.

I you want a recommendation on a brand that doesn't do that look for a mid-90s Sharp with rapid rewind...I was given a lower tier one new for my 5th or 6th birthday and it STILL works great all these years later. A few years ago I was elated to find one of their S-VHS decks for cheap at a thrift....That thing may outlive me.

[n8nagel]

Hah, this is fine for what I "need" - if I find a tape I want to play, or absolutely have to record something on VHS, I have the ability to do so. I actually have another SVHS deck in my storage locker and now I'm thinking I should pull it out while I'm in the groove because I don't think it's been used for 4-5 years, might as well clean it and see how the belts look. Rewinder is probably the win, I know I've seen them in thrift stores before.

[n8nagel]

I played a whole tape through tonight. I only see one thing that appears to be an actual functional issue. The unit will go into stop mode when I rewind and it hits the beginning of the tape, but it doesn't go into stop mode when playing and it hits the end. Any ideas?

Edit: I'm kind of dumb, I should have stopped at the thrift store on my way home from work and seen if they had any passable looking VHS tapes, but I didn't. Mea culpa.

[Electronic M]

Did you run the tape to it's physical end or just the end of the recorded part?
How the deck knows to stop on rewind is that the black tape material has a clear plastic leader tape at the beginning and end. The deck will try to shine one or more light sources through the tape to detect the leader to know when to auto stop. Older decks the light is visible and incandescent, but most S-VHS era stuff uses IR light. If the light or phototransistor is bad auto stop won't work (though that often causes other issues).

The unrecorded portion of the tape is supposed to play back as noise until it hits the transparent leader tape at the end. Heck if you buy a brand new blank VHS recording tape and pop it in it'll play for a few hours (depends on length) as static until you hit the leader.

[n8nagel]

The counter was no longer advancing, but the display still had the forward arrow indicating play mode.

However you make me think. The counter on this has two modes, "real time" and "normal". Pretty sure it was in "real time". Is that based off of inches of tape fed through, or is it somehow embedded in the tape like the closed captions? If the latter, maybe I should try it again in "normal" as it's entirely possible that the tape was still moving but I couldn't hear it. Seems unlikely, but possible.

Edit: this could be why the tape is still held against the drum in FF and REW?

[Electronic M]

You're making some right and wrong assumptions...
Top loader era VCRS used a mechanical counter tied to the drum reel which advanced a certain number based on take up or feed reel rotation. The normal count is designed to mimick that. Later decks usually used the linear control track to perform Real Time Count and to perform tape counter indexing. VHS tape is typically divided into 3 sections...2 thin stripes along an edge for the linear audio and linear control track read by a fixed head like an audio cassette, and then there's a 3rd region that comprises most of the width of the tape which contains a series of diagonal stripes of video information from the spinning head drum.
If it's reading only the control track then unrecorded sections of tape won't advance the counter even while playing.
Better mechanisms have 3 states to threading: 1.) completely in the cassette, 2.) Capstan and linear head only (Stop-fastwind mode), and 3.) Video drum, capstan and linear heads (playback and visual search). If your mechanism doesn't have state 2 and reads counter off the control track then it has to keep everything threaded to maintain tape count.

The control track was initially a IIRC square wave tone signal designed to aid the head drum and capstan servo in duplicating the tape speed and phase and the head drum speed and phase such that the video head would be able to correctly trace the recorded video stripe (instead of say tracing between 2 stripes and getting noise) when LP and EP/SLP came out the frequency of the tone could be used to figure out which speed, and as digital electronics got affordable engineers started using those digital electronics to count those pulses which were directly tied to frame rate and there's 60 frames a second...So accurate time could be kept (as long as there wasn't long unrecorded static between recorded portions). Eventually they even added indexing to the control track and made provisions to dub index marks in and out.

[n8nagel]

Thanks for the explanation Tom. I really did try to Google this stuff but didn't find much, I now know a crapton more about these things than I did before. So, I popped the covers off this thing again and what did I find?

1) The tape only wraps around the drum in FF and REW when the counter is in "real time" mode not "normal" mode. Now that I know there's a drum and a linear head, I've ID'd the linear head, but on this unit there appears to be no intermediate stage to engage only that head and not the drum. So: lesson, don't leave the counter in "real time" mode when rewinding unless you have a reason to do so.

2) If I leave the counter in "normal" mode, and play or FF the tape to the end, it stops and begins rewinding. I have not seen what happens in "real time" mode with the cover off so I can 100% verify that it has reached the end of the tape. I'm checking that now. So, so far, no problem identified.

3) Unfortunately, while the unit appears to play and REW fine, in FF mode I think the big roller that engages the take up reel is slipping. I've tried to clean it a little but it's not doing the do. What to do here? Would that be the "Idler Assembly"? There is a PRB part for that and also just the tire.

4) the high pitched noise coming from the drum area is now not going away within a few seconds when I start it anymore, it's taking longer and longer each time I play it. What to do here?

I really wish I could find a scan of the service manual for this as I've become accustomed to with audio stuff, but such is life. On the flip side, this is mostly working, whereas the cassette deck I was hoping to revive as well seems to have more major problems.

[n8nagel]

So when I play the tape to the end

in "normal" mode, it stops and rewinds.

in "real time" mode, it stops (display shows square "stop" icon)

Owner's manual oddly doesn't state what should happen at end of a tape, but these actions seem reasonable to me and actually kind of thoughtful - if you were using the real time counter and meant to rewind the tape, you might want to go to "normal" mode before doing so to save head/tape wear.

Apparently before, I must have come back in the room after the tape had passed the end of the recorded program, but before it actually reached the end of the physical tape, and the counter was in "real time" mode and not advancing, and that's what prompted that whole line of questioning. I did notice that the real time counter did not advance after the end of the program, but before the tape actually hit the end. So, mystery solved.

So, other than the noisy drum and the slipping idler, I think I'm good.

I'm pretty sure, having looked up pictures online, that the "Idler Assembly" PRB VA80 and/or replacement tire PRB ST1.205 are what I need. Any advice on removing? It looks like it just pulls straight up with a little plastic friction thingy but not having the manual I don't know.

Any idea on the noise? After picking the unit up and dropping it from about 1" while running (a time honored percussive repair technique) it's quiet again, but for how long?