GE Camcorders (Thomson) and the transport gear flaw
 

Growing up we had a GE CG-9908 VHS Camera circa 1989. Some research tells me it was run by Thomson Consumer Electronics during this time as GE had recently sold off that division. Check out their former HQ building in Indianpolis..very post modern!
However, almost all the parts I see on this camera say made in Japan, are these just Matsushita internals?

This camera has a flaw where the gears in the transport will lock up while cueing up a tape causing the transport to jam and then the recorder to shut off. I have had THREE of these now (two are CG-9908s, our family unit and a secondhand one i purchased, and a third CG-9911, all from the same vintage), and all of them have the exact same problem.
My first guess was that the grease had become hard and sticky over the decades. I tried greasing the gear from the visible side, I tried 3 in one oil, I tried shaving down the point where the collision occurs (the gears are a plastic nylon), and nothing seems to help. I wanted to remove the gear to clean out any old grease but the whole transport is so interlocked I fear I will throw the whole thing out of alignment. I can remove the metal bracing across the gears but if I try to activate the transport the gears will pop out and the teeth will become misalinged.

The drawback of this gear issue is that once I put the tape in I cannot remove it unless I want to open the casing and nudge the gear again when I put the tape back. I can get around this by using the AV out adaptor and run the tape from the camcorder to the capture card, however I prefer using my VCR which has more control over the image. If I'm out with my camcorder I'll have to keep a screwdriver on me incase the tape gets ejected by accident. The camcorder also will un-cue a tape after a certain amount of OFF time, I can bypass this by pulling the battery out, but I lose the date/time setting.

see the picture below, these two gears will rotate and get stuck. using a moderate amount of tool (finger) force, it does rotate fully and the recorder works as normal.
Would any of you have a suggestion on how to clean out these gears, or maybe this has happened to you before on other transports?
Attachment 206587
Attachment 206588

I don't have camcorder experience nor time to read the repair issue currently but I can say that we never manufactured consumer VCRs in the USA. We did have some plants where US workers assembled Japanese components to avoid tariffs, but the only Video Tape Recorder makers in the US only cared about TV stations, large corporations, and techie millionaires like Hugh Heffner. Ampex couldn't be bothered to make an affordable VCR for John q public and probably rightly so if you research cartravision.

That makes sense M, all these parts in this camera start with the prefix V, which, at least from my experience, has been found in Panasonic units, and sub labels (Quasar etc)

Well at least you've got others for reference on getting the alignment correct. What I do is scribe a line between the meshing teeth, and also marks between the gears and the chassis. Then take photos and video during the teardown. I also like to take a 9 volt battery and drive the mechanism all the way to one end or the other so that there's less room for error on gear position when I'm assembling.

I've seen some of these gears starting to warp with age, or the bearing holes become oval or loose especially when they are under spring pressure.