Zenith VRE205, nifty VCR
 

Picked this up a few weeks back from a thrift for $8, mono deck but it looks like it only has one belt for loading with the rest motor driven. Nice big linear power supply. Plays everything I've thrown at it with ease. Nice picture quality too, noticed it seems to have a safety feature that automatically ejects the cassette if the tracking goes too far off (indication of tape damage that could harm the heads).

Those can have intermittent grounds on the deck board on the bottom. Can cause mechanism malfunction. Fix was to add small external star washers under the screw heads to ensure good ground. Also the little load belt can fail and it's not the easiest to get to. See pic:

http://www.videokarma.org/attachment...1&d=1459443260

Those are very nice units, one of the last JVC made Zenith decks.

I have this same exact unit, although the audio on mine is starting to fail because I tried hooking it up to my LCD Projector and there was a really loud hum coming off the audio output of the VCR... :sigh: :tears:

I picked mine up from the Goodwill for about the same price you picked yours up for. The video is indeed very nice on this thing but like I said the audio is about shot though on mine.

This is the best VHS mechanism from JVC! Worth keeping.

Although the belt on this unit is a lot easier to get to than the sideways loading model (I believe that was the VR 1830 from about 1986) with that model you actually have to unsolder some wires in order to get the motor assembly out in order to get to the belt whereas in this model you don't have to unsolder any wires, just remove some screws and that's it. Speaking of the VR 1830, I happen to have one of those that seems to have a bad belt or something because it will load the tape into the VCR but then after that the tape itself won't load into the playback heads, the motor just spins continuously thoughout the loading attempt but it doesn't turn the pulley to engage the gears for loading the tape around the heads, whereas at least my VCR that I have that's like the OP's still functions mechanically and has great picture yet just doesn't play very good audio out of the Audio Output RCA jack on the Back of the unit, but the audio plays fine out of the RF (75 Ohm) connections.

Nice machine there.I remember Zenith had a VCR with all plugin modules .I cant recall the model number but it was different then these one Mobo board VCRs.Also they had a VCR that the video tape went in sideways too.