Old Tatung
 

I have an old Tatung VCR from the early 80's that was purchased new. I will post pics when I get home.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to make it work again. It served a good 16 years before I bought the Sharp VCR I have now. The problem is, when a tape is inserted and I press play, it will start all of the operations and bring the tape most of the way onto the head, but then it will just sit there for a few seconds before retracting and shutting off. The tape never starts turning.

Any ideas what this could be? Could it be a relay of some kind?

It's possible you have a belt or idler wheel slipping. The rubber perishes after so many years and needs to be renewed. I'm not a VCR expert but this has been my observation.

prb shows an idler tire ST1.77 for model VRH8300U

Close, mine is an 8200U. :) I'm not sure what you mean by "ST1.77" or "PRB". Since I haven't pulled it out for a while, I'm going to go mess with it and maybe even bring back a video.

EDIT: HERE are a couple pictures and a video of what happens. The constant hum/click sound in the video is not the VCR, it's the camera, I don't know why it does that.

In THIS video you can see when I push that black thing in the tape will start moving but it still stops anyway. I guess I should also mention that it does rewind and fast-forward.

PRB is Projector/Recorder Belt

The modern company that owns PRB is:

http://www.russellind.com/prbline/index.html

Thanks, I'm not sure if that's what it is though. It seems like a relay or solenoid not kicking in. Am I totally off base here?

I bet there is a mouse inside jamming it up..
:)

Wiseguy, I'm in serious LUST over yr avatar....

I don't think there is much you can do with an old Tatung. Maybe Viagra?

Come on, I can picture you all falling out of your computer chairs laughing!