WARNING: GEEK STUFF AHEAD
Back in April I picked up this beauty off eBay. The seller indicated it was “fully functional,” but like most vintage electronics on eBay the description was…shall we say, optimistic.
Immediately after unpacking and powering it up I noticed it had severe drawer problems. Yes, it worked, so I guess that would qualify as “functional,” but fully? It definitely struggled with opening and closing so I wouldn’t have decribed it that way. As I’m sure I’ve documented before, I’ve seen enough CD deck repairs on YouTube to immediately recognize a stretched drawer belt when I saw one. I put in an order for a replacement with West Coast Belts and not-so-patiently awaited its arrival.
Replacing the belt after I received it wasn’t all that difficult, even though the belt and pulleys were on the bottom of the CD mechanism itself. Thankfully the original belt hadn’t yet turned to black goo and was easy to swap. The belt I received wasn’t a 1:1 copy of the original; it seemed to have a bit smaller diameter and it was about half the thickness. Still, by this point I had it all torn apart and I wasn’t going to put everything back together without first giving the new belt a shot.
There was an improvement from the old sagging belt, but not much. Using a belt that’s too small is just as bad as using one that’s too big. I emailed the company and pointed out the size discrepancy. They said they’d send out a different one.
Another week passed and the new belt arrived. This one seemed to be the proper diameter, but the thickness was still thinner than the original. “Better than nothing,” I said as I swapped it out. The drawer did work more smoothly now, but it still felt off.
I did one more search on the internet and found a another belt supplier in Germany. They didn’t advertise a belt for my particular model, but rather one for the unit directly above mine. These two decks use the exact same hardware; it’s just this higher end unit just had a few more bells and whistles in its circuitry. So I ordered it.
While waiting for its arrival, I thought I’d try a tech tip gleaned from all those videos: boil the old belt in water for about 5 minutes to rejuvenate the rubber and shrink it back to its original size. I did that, and wouldn’t you know, after putting that one back in the machine, the drawer worked like buttah.
All was good until a few days ago when the drawer started lagging again when opening (or closing, I don’t honestly remember; it was annoying in any case). So much for my quick fix. The German belt had arrived a couple weeks earlier, but since everything was working I didn’t want to tear into the machine yet again, so I put the belt away for future use if my fix didn’t hold—and obviously it hadn’t.
At this point I really didn’t want to deal with this belt issue anymore, so I hauled out my “new” deck from a few years ago and put it in the system. What I’d forgotten about this new Yamaha is that something had changed in their implementation of the optical digital connection. Whereas the old Yamaha with the belt issues could dub optically to my MiniDisc deck and create tracks correctly, this new deck absolutely refused. The MiniDisc deck didn’t detect any track breaks so it recorded a CD as one continuous track that needed to be broken up afterwards. This was always a pain in the ass, so I decided to play around with belts again.
I mean, I had nothing much planned today and nothing else really to do, so I disconnected the player, opened it up and for some reason stupid reason instead of installing the new German belt, reinstalled the older, new, exchanged one. Everything seemed to work fine, so I buttoned everything up and put it back in my system.
It wasn’t five minutes before I realized things still weren’t right. Did I miss something when I was reassembling it? Did I over-tighten a screw somewhere?The drawer started shuddering (it’s the only way to describe it) when it opened. This hadn’t happened when it was installed before, but a shuddering tray is a definite sign of a belt being too tight.
Fuck me.
I pulled it out of the system, popped the cover, and removed the mechanism again. This time I installed the new German belt and it’s been working fine all afternoon. That belt is still a bit thinner than the original, but the diameter is spot on and the shuddering is gone.
So what did I learn? Like in many things in life, sometimes girth is more important than thickness.
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