We’ve all heard that, right?
Back in July (seems like a lifetime ago at this point) I picked up this Sony MXD-D40 combo CD/MD deck off eBay for a steal. Normally these go for over $400, but because the seller noted, “needs belts,” it was sitting there with a buy it now price of a quarter of that. How could I say no? Did I need it? No. Did I want it? Of course.
I found a set of belts online, and after finalizing the purchase of the deck, I ordered those as well. Little did I know they’d be coming from Europe and the delivery was more than a month out.
I searched again, and found the MD only belt in the US and ordered that. I figured the CD could wait until that belt arrived, but I wanted the MD portion of the deck working as soon as I received it, and there’d be no harm in keeping a spare belt on hand.
The MD belt arrived, followed by the deck a few days later. It turns out the CD tray (which supposedly needed the belt) worked fine, and after a simple matter of swapping out the MD belt, I had a fully functional deck.
On cue, the belt set arrived from Europe a couple weeks later, and even though the CD was working fine, on principle I went ahead and swapped the old for the new.
Although I didn’t connect it at the time, the CD tray developed a horrible shudder when pulling in a disc.
I tried everything I could think of to fix it to no avail. I even posted on the Reddit CD forum to see if anyone had any suggestions and got no response.
I finally gave up, boxed the unit up and with other, more important things happening in my life subsequently, forgot about it.
Then, a few nights ago as I was falling asleep, a thought popped into my head: the replacement belt was too tight. Even though it seemed to be the same size as the original, it was just enough off to stress the mechanism; hence the shudder.
It turns out that was the problem. Today I opened up the deck…
…and put the original belt back in place.
Problem solved.
Two lessons learned: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and trust those flashes of insight that come as you’re drifting off to sleep.