In case you are interested in knowing a detailed breakdown (analytical and… mental) of what happened previously, read the previous part of the story HERE!
Before you read, please acknowledge that I am autistic and a bit dramatic and don’t have much knowledge in fixing things. I am an amateur tinkerer, and frankly, kinda dumb at times. This article is a vent and the victorious, heartwarming continuation of a story that was loaded with intensity and stress. This is a kind of non-serious article, so please don’t try my repair methods or anything without thinking about it. For me, it’s just made Taris, my TEAC V-33 tape deck, somehow work.
TL;DR – Previously…
Previously, I had done something stupid. I overestimated my repairing abilities and tried to fix belts that weren’t broken. In my stupidity and impatience I made a tiny piece fly out of the mechanism inside my beloved tape deck Taris, making him unusable. He was a tape deck with which I imagined an entire life. It was heartbreaking. Fixable, but heartbreaking. All repair manuals were locked behind paywalls or a dead internet forum. It had seemed as if all hope for me to make tapes to listen to my favourite music on was lost.
…Until the internet responded.
The Call has Been Heard
Ask and you shall receive: After the Mysterious Piece incident, I had been really stressed. In my worries, I went everywhere on the internet, including Reddit, and asked people to find the TEAC V-33 manual. And of course, when you reach out to a community of people with a burning passion to correct and give advice (asked or unasked for) to people, something usually comes out of it.
This is exactly what happened to me; my calls for help were noticed, and some Redditor who shall not be named (for privacy reasons) hovered down from the analog repair heaven and gave me the manual, like how Moses was given the Ten Commandments by God in the Bible (I am not religious, but this story is really badass).
I am doing my part, and I am providing the manual to all of you to bless you in case you’re stuck in a similar situation where you need to fix something really stupid in your TEAC V-33 and wanted to throw yourself and your device at the wall for the gatekeeping of service manuals about it.
Here you go, my children, click on this image to download the sacred TEAC V-33 service manual (this is not a Rickroll nor risky shit btw, I know what it feels to be desperate to fix something, #respect to everyone who has the same issue right now) ⬇️.
If the epic image link doesn’t work, click here
The funniest part of this whole moment is that I received the Reddit response literally less than five minutes after having posted Part 1 of the story. I had JUST screamed into the void for help over my silly repairing error, and help had ALREADY arrived.
I am honestly really proud of the internet sometimes. Sometimes you don’t get a response, and other times there is a single guy who has just the answer you’re looking for. The same people can solve literal mysteries, track you down and find where you live if you insulted Taylor Swift, or give the greatest help that no person irl near you can provide. It really is a wild place here on the internet.
Achieving the Impossible
Yesterday, right after having gotten the sacred manual in my hands, I excitedly went home and looked at the opened, fragile body of Taris, looked at the manual…
…And was confused as FUCK.
I am very certain that there are more experienced tinkerers out there, who have cried over machines for much longer than I have, who could read diagrams like this. I, however, felt a sense of immediate intimidation and confusion when I faced what in my eyes felt like a LEGO instructions manual on steroids:
When I saw this, my reaction immediately went like “What the actual fuck is this and how can someone with eyes read it?“
Until I noticed a shape in the LEGO instructions from hell that matched the missing piece that had made me lose my mind:
According to the sacred manual from 1982, this piece was called Lever, Record; B and was part of the recording mechanism – a serious piece. This little lever shit was part of a mechanical movement connection, and I had to track its original position by eye.
I couldn’t understand the placement of the lever from the diagram, so I spent at least an hour bending in really questionable positions and rotating my phone with the diagram in it like a pirate treasure map. I was struggling, my back would hurt and Taris was just sitting there patiently while I was poking around in his guts. I was scared of breaking more pieces, so I was trying to be careful. Visually, it looked like me moving that plastic cross around inside the guts with my fingers and tweezers as if I was a priest trying to bless the tape deck’s insides.
After a while, I gave up trying to poke around and searched YouTube to see if I could possibly find a video of someone repairing the same deck, where I could possibly see the placement of the piece. To my luck, apparently, there was a single video I had found with 1.2K views and 25 likes, where some guy called Steve on his channel Steve’s Electronic Repair Shop was reviving the exact same tape deck model as Taris (TEAC V-33). It was this video for those interested:
I felt like I had no other choice but to watch Steve do his thing with that other TEAC V-33 that was in a much worse condition than mine. I stayed there and kept zooming in on this 780p quality video, trying to find all the details I could see, in hopes that I would eventually see the same piece as the one that had flown out of Taris.
I kept zooming in really awkwardly on the heavily pixellated details, stayed there for at least 30 minutes, and suddenly I noticed a familiar shape while Steve was handling the tape mechanism of his tape deck:
HOLY FUCKING SHIT. THIS WAS ACTUALLY THE PIECE.
Same shape, same colour, same emotional weight.
For a moment, I felt as if all my effort had a meaning. I felt like me bending like a shrimp over Taris was not pointless.
However, for me to install this piece, I had to somehow pull out the tape mechanism to hold it properly. That’s where Steve’s whole video came to use beyond just helping me locate the piece; I actually used it to see how he would take the deck apart and where the screws were (with the service manual on the side to confirm the positions) and the method it required to safely put everything back in without breaking anything.
With the power of Steve’s extremely niche 780p video and the Redditor’s TEAC V-33 manual on my side, I achieved more on Taris than I initially expected. Everything clicked into place, no loose screws missing after reassembly. In just an hour, I put Taris’ pieces back together.
I am not affiliated with Steve’s Electronic Repair Shop, but I am giving him credit for his video and the help I received by watching it. Cheers, Steve 🥂
Improved, not just fine
I was so full of motivation that night with the service instructions on the side, that I decided to attempt one more thing before stopping my tinkering session and closing Taris’ lid goodnight: I felt like fixing his speed thing.
I looked at the service manual, found the part where they wrote about fixing the speed of the deck, grabbed a screwdriver, and started working. I had to carefully spin the tuning screw in the back of the motor to adjust the speed.
I needed an audio reference tape to play during the speed adjustment process, so I grabbed my Dire Straits tape. There was a noticeable issue where the constant speed was audibly slower. I tuned Taris by ear while listening to Money for Nothing by Dire Straits. If that’s not badass and completely on brand for me and my 1982 tape deck, I don’t know what is.
I don’t recommend this method if you want to be extra surgical with your tapes, by the way – to actually do it the surgical way, you’d need a tape that plays a 3000Hz sound and a device thing that hears sound frequency and would have to adjust it so that the frequency meter shows 3000Hz.
After this was done, I noticed imbalances in channels when playing tapes and briefly thought that Taris was biased, so I spent an extra amount of time trying to see if he had a channel issue too. Turns out, Taris is okay and some tapes just happen to be slightly louder on either sound channel because of wear and other stuff.
I did some demagnetising and cleaning of his tape path as well, as a little post-surgery treatment after everything he had been through. In this process, I also discovered that the previous person who supposedly serviced the deck had half-assed it and barely cleaned the pinch roller (and possibly the rest of the tape path). I took care of this as well.
I closed his lid and placed him back where he was before the accident, and concluded the tinkering session there. It’s unclear if he has more issues with recording tapes or not for now, but I paused there, as I am currently satisfied with his abilities and sound.
Happy At Last
I felt like this as soon as I was done with Taris and let him sing another Mark Knopfler tape and let my body relax on my hideous mustard colored couch with doilies on it for a bit:
I, once more, gave myself the ability to record on cassette tapes again. I took something that was working imperfectly and was accidentally broken for a while from my own past impatience, and made it work better than it ever did before.
Tapes are an art medium and certainly a great way for me to crystallise my music taste and self expression and anything else I want to trap in magnetic dust, and by putting the effort, obsession and the courage to ask for help, I have gotten my access back to it. Beautiful tapes for me to listen to daily are on their way to exist in this world!
Truth to be said though, I was losing my shit and poking around and tinkering the entire time after I came back from work. I got tunnel vision and forgot to eat and take care of myself when fixing Taris. Between 6PM and 11:30PM, I didn’t drink water nor eat anything. Right now (morning after the Tuesday of the repairs), I am paying the price of accidentally starving myself while in hyperfocus. I’ll definitely keep in mind to take a short break to eat or to cook something before tinkering, so that I won’t have this happen again.
Remember to maintain yourselves, too, folks! Not just your machines need care!
At least, I now have a reliable, beautiful, sexy 80s tape deck to play and record my tapes. My magnetic dreams and aspirations shall continue to exist!
Final words
I really, sincerely hope that this is going to be the last episode from The Tragedy of Taris duology. It was genuinely intense to go through all of this out of simply wanting to make tapes. It’s certain that as someone who is into old stuff from the 70s and 80s, I will continue to have issues and mental breakdowns with old technology, but for the sake of my sanity, I wish that Taris won’t have anything significant happening to him any time soon.
I am really grateful for the people who happen to be in this niche community of old stuff restoration and are posting niche content for those who need it. The internet needs people like you. Without the niche content, people who have interests outside of the norm would be constantly left isolated without any help, advice, or simply someone to talk to who gets it.
So please, do your part and keep sharing this stuff. Share that manual. Make that video. Make that article. THE WORLD NEEDS YOU, like how me and Taris did!
Peace,
Mark