Sony SL-300 Betamax VCR eject problems
 

Hello everyone I'm currently working on a mid-1980s Sony SL-300 SuperBeta Betamax VCR that is having issues with not wanting to eject the tape, it plays, rewinds, fast-forwards, and pauses just fine but when you go to try and eject the tape the eject mechanism will load the tape back into the cassette housing and attempt to unload the tape from the VCR but then instead of ejecting the tape out of the VCR it makes a loud clicking noise like the mechanism is jammed or something (its a direct drive loading/eject mechanism with a worm gear that is driven by a small 12 volt Marbuchi motor) and then the tape goes back into the VCR where the mechanism loads the tape back around the heads again.
By the way this my first time ever working on a Betamax machine as I have never seen one in person before until now let alone service one, only thing I know about Betamax is that my parents wedding was filmed on beta, and that's it.

Any ideas as to what could be causing the issues with this Betamax's loading/eject mechanism?

Any help would be appreciated.

-Levi

Others may have better ideas, but I would watch the unloading attempt and reload that happens, and see if that same motor does both actions by reversing direction, and also look to see if it or another specific motor and/or belt setup does the actual cassette raising and lowering or not. If the one motor seems that it should do everything, you could try hitting Eject, and pulling the power plug right when the tape unload is complete, then try manually spinning the motor further in that direction while carefully analyzing/encouraging the cassette raising action. It could be a lubrication problem or something that got jammed.

I had a Sony beta where there was a guide tab broke off on the cassette holder part of the load mechanism that rode in a track (there was one on each side) and that tab being busted off prevented the mech form ejecting.

I have actually tried something similar to that where I tried to raise the mechanism by hand while the motor was running and I would get the tape out but then the mechanism would just go back into the VCR. There's only one motor running the entire loading mechanism from what I could see (besides the motors that are involved in kicking the tape out of the heads and back into the cassette case) and it does reverse itself when you hit the eject button compared to when it loads the tape (which it has no problems loading the tape) but when it comes to ejecting the tape it gets it halfway out of the VCR and the motor for driving the loading/eject mechanism just immediately grinds to a halt and when I try to nudge it along it doesn't help much unless I force it (which I know forcing it won't help it any and will probably make things worse) but it acts like the motor might have a dead spot in it.

Where would that guide tab be? So I could see if maybe that's what happened with this one.

Assuming yours is a front-loader....There is a a tray the cassette rides in between the play position and ejected position. There will be plastic/metal guides/tracks on both sides of that tray. The tracks should have an L shaped slot in them that the tab/pin of the tray rides in as a guide....There is at least one on each side of the tray in most VCRs.

Yes, its a front loader model, and, from what I could see of the unit when I had it open it didn't seem like there was anything broken off although when I took the mechanism apart to check the gears out it looked like something small and black fell out that wasn't part of the gear drive mechanism, was that maybe the tab you were talking about? I didn't see where the tab landed as it fell out before I could see where it landed at.

That small black thing may have been it. My deck was a odd Sony superBETA unit (odd because it did not have HiFi). It had a cap problem with the capstan motor that would stop the capstan at random (needed to be hand spun occasionally to fix it/keep it from interrupting playback) and I ran it on it's side to baby sit that until I fixed it. A couple times it fell over to normal operating position with a tape in it and the weight of the tape in the fall broke that tab, and later the superglue bond I used to fix it.

If you eventually decide you can't fix yours and want to part it out/get rid of it, post some pictures of the capstan motor....If it is the right one I'd be interested in buying it off you.....When I changed the cap my soldering iron melted a bit of the plastic tire on the capstan rotor.....That tire is essentially a loop of magnetic tape that is read by a tape head to make a speed feedback signal...It don't play quite right with a melt spot.

Well I'm going to have to ask my friend what he thinks because it belongs to him not me, so it would be his decision as to whether or not he would want to sell it. But I will keep that in mind, because like I said everything else works fine on it. Your machine wasn't a Sony SL-300 was it by any chance? Because that's what this one is, and this one is a mono SuperBeta Machine.

If "you took the mechanism apart and a piece fell out", then you definitely need to figure out exactly what it is and where it belongs before anything else is done. Of course, it could have even been a piece of a toy that a child put inside once, but you need to find out for sure. There is no point in even thinking about any other repair action until that is known and fixed, first.

This kind of "oops" event has happened to most of us, and the only solution is to learn from it, typically by being even more attentive, even when we though we were paying high attention to detail already.

I was trying to be careful, I was taking the mechanism apart thinking that there wasn't anything broken or loose in the mechanism and then the part whatever it was fell out and I only saw it from the corner of my eye so I couldn't even see where it fell to and it looked like a really small part so even if I were to try and locate that part I doubt I'd be able to find it because I don't even know where to start looking for that part because like I said I didn't even see where it fell.

Well, plan B might be to just look over the whole mechanism to see if a piece might have broken off somewhere. I remember having a part of the mechanism in my first VCR break off, and I rigged something in place to fix it. That was in 1980, on a one-hour Beta machine.

I checked mine earlier and it is a SL-390...It'd be interesting to see how the insides of the two models match up.

I could get a picture of the inside of the one I'm working on if you want so that we could do a comparison. My guess is that they're the same machines with maybe a couple of minor cosmetic differences.

Well monkeying around with the Beta today I looked again to see if those tabs were maybe broken off (now knowing after reading your post what to look for) and they're still there intact, and its acting more and more like it might be a a motor issue than a mechanical issue, because now its doing in load mode now too whereas before it was just doing it in eject mode, so I'm wondering if maybe the drive motor for the eject/loading mechanism isn't maybe starting to go bad (like maybe the brushes are starting to wear to the point that the motor can't get up enough torque to drive the loading mechism anymore.)

Well I could do that but of course it would be even more helpful to know where the part may have come from to begin with. If it was one of the tabs that Electronic M was mentioning then I might know where to look, but if it wasn't then I'm not sure where else to look otherwise.