After some time searching and looking at other machines mentioned about online I'm starting to notice something:
-The videos all play content with european languages
-The names of the owners sound rather european
-Most if not all the photos floating about are of rather low quality
-Many of said photos go back to websites and forums that do not speak english
-Many of the english speaking sites speak of it as a 405 line system or operating at 220 volts which isn't native to North America.
While it's always possible this machine was imported a long time ago this machine
IS wired for 117v 60hz and shows no signs of modification for this so it is probably a machine designed for North American markets. That being said I'm sure as hell not finding anyone else mentioning they have something similar.
The Rewind Museum apparently has a few copies of the service manual. I've yet to contact them about if they've since scanned any of them.
Anyways with all the photos online being absolute crap and I have to clean and better inspect my machine what the hell, lets photograph the crap outta this!
Front of machine (tagged because 15 image limit)
Front with top open and plastic panels removed (tagged because 15 image limit)
Back of machine. No back cover. (tagged because 15 image limit)
While I don't see signs this was powered on recently I do see that something's up with the rubber caps on some of the larger capacitors. There's also a wound resistor that looks suspiciously like a section was either overheated or damaged. Seems to read fine though.
The loose cable I had noticed before was actually the line for the tape counter. No belts here! It just pops back into a keyed rod and advances fine.
All the belts on this were gone. Where they were not fragments scattered about with a fungus or white material leeching out of it it had liquefied and got EVERYWHERE, then hardened up again. At some point someone had added a replacement belt but it was now equally as nasty and not useable. Not sure how to clean this mess up.
Like mentioned someone had taken care to flip the video head around before storing the unit. This probably saved it from any damage but for now I've removed it and put it in an old stylus container.
Here's a good idea of what's all over the machine. What seem to look like more modern carbon resistors, small axial lytics, metal can transistors with a red/yellow/blue color coding scheme, relatively large glass diodes and those yellow capacitors. They are not wax dipped. It's some other hard material that isn't plastic. Anyone seen this before?
(to be continued...)