Fisher FVH-520 VCR
 

Just got this beast up and running. Wondering if anyone knows any interesting info about this era of Fisher VCRs.

I know that Sanyo owned Fisher at this time, so it would have been manufactured in Japan by Sanyo. But when this was made (1982ish) Sanyo was on team Beta, so am I right in assuming this was a unique VHS mechanism? The early Sanyo VHS VCRs I've seen are quite different.

I also remember reading that these early Fisher VCRs were notoriously unreliable (specifically the idler assembly). Not sure if this is exact model is included with that as the idlers all work well and even the tires were in decent shape.

This one does seem to have a pretty big flaw. The motor that moves the tape guides will keep going indefinitely until it detects they are in place. There is no time-out. So if a belt jams up (which I think happened to this one) the motor will just keep going. Even if you turn off the power switch, the power LED stays on, driving the motor. One of the transistors that drives the motor (into the "stow" position) was burnt up and I suspect this is why.

I think I worked on one of these VCRs before (the one I worked on though was a Sharp branded unit) but I definitely remember the wired remote unit, and the one I worked on the drive mechanism worked perfectly yet, the problem was with the head/playback electronics as when it would play a tape it would playback in black and white only and with a slightly fuzzy looking picture, and I couldn't figure out why.

I also worked on a Panasonic VCR from the same time period (that had a knob style tuning mechanism rather than an electronic veractor style tuner) that had the same issue where the picture was black and white only in playback mode.

it was a rather weird symptom because I had never seen a VCR that played back in black and white like that as a mode of failure before, mostly mechanical failures were what i had seen up until that point which were usually belt related failures.

My first VCR as a kid was a (Panasonic-made) RCA VGT-200 which had the exact problem you described - black and white playback only. Which was how 10 year old me could afford it, but that was ok because my bedroom TV was also black and white. Very unusual, this VCR only had forward visual search, no visual rewind search. I wonder if yours was the Panasonic branded version of my RCA and it was maybe a common issue.

When I upgraded to a colour TV I found out that wiggling the tracking control back and forth would cause the colour to "pop" in. Of course, this had no effect on recording which was stuck as black and white still.

I bet the problem would have been a fairly simple fix with what I know now, such as a capacitor in the chroma circuit, or even just a slight adjustment. Oh well.

You live and learn as they say, I'm guessing it was probably something like that on the ones I had that had the video failure issues as well.

But at that time in my life (I was about 16 or so at the time) I was still just learning how to diagnose and repair some of the basics at the time, such as recapping and replacing tubes in old radios and replacing cords on those radios as well and rewiring old lamps and diagnosing mechanical failures on VCRs (the majority of failures on the VCRs I usually got from people or at the thrifts were mechanical failures such as bad belts for example), fixing old TVs that had vertical or horizontal roll issues (mostly 1970s or 1980s vintage solid state portable TVs 13"-19" or so in size) and that was it.

I didn't get too involved in electrical issues with VCRs or TVs until just recently.