Magnavox Reel-To-Reel Recorder

[davet753]

Yes. The picture was from the ebay seller, but I got the unit this afternoon. It's very clean! It came from a seller in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, so I guess it might have been owned by someone who once worked for Magnavox. It even has the factory microphone, patch cords, and warranty card with it.

Mechanically, the thing is as noisy as a lawn mower engine with an empty crankcase. I know it needs a full cleaning and re-lube job, but before spending that much time on it I wanted to test play a tape.

After disassembly, I cleaned up the three idler wheels and got it to rewind and FF at the right speed, but it would only play on one of three speeds. The capstan idler wheel is of a rather odd "double jointed" design, and had one of the pivot rods frozen up. I pulled the arm off and soaked it with WD40 until I got it pulled apart. Once it was cleaned up and regreased, I found it plays quite nicely.

Now that I know it works, I'll disassemble the entire mechanical section and clean off the old sticky grease and re-lube everything. I'm hoping that will get things running quietly again. I've also got to figure out something to do about the deteriorated brake pads.

Electronically, the only thing I had to do was clean the track selector switch. It has a really strange sort of selenium rectifier mounted on a heat sink that I definitely want to replace with a new silicon diode. The filter caps are real "heavy duty" jobs for a little solid state amp, and since there isn't any hum I'm going to leave those alone.

I did learn that this machine was not actually made by Magnavox, but sourced from Collaro in England (who Magnavox also bought their record changers from). As I suspected, it will play back tapes in stereo, but will only record in mono. Plus, the built-in amp is only a 1 channel job, even though it has 2 speakers.

All in all, I'm pleased with this tape recorder. I won the auction with a bid of $5.50, so it would be hard not to be happy with this purchase!