Adventures in Tape Deck Repair

It was in October 2023 that I was in the market for a cassette player. The reason for this was at the time, although Master Boot Record's discography was available in all every form anyone could possibly want, Victor Love had not yet seen fit to publish anything published under the Keygen Church name on any physical medium other than cassette tape. To my knowledge, no justification for this behaviour had been given. However, it indicated an implicit command to obtain a machine that could read the sacred tapes.

By total coincidence, one of my friends informed me around that time that a local thrift market was running an event for Halloween, and invited me and a few others to participate. We travelled there together and quickly dispersed over the premises in search of reasonably priced goods. After trawling over the building and dismissing most of its contents as tat and junk I neither needed nor wanted, I discovered that one seller was a purveyor of second-hand sound equipment, and in a corner on a high shelve I found a Kenwood KX-620. After a little manoeuvring we got it down and inspected it, but due to a lack of relevant experience in anyone involved none of us could draw any conclusions beyond that it was indeed a cassette deck.

Due to the way the market operated the stall owner was not present, but the venue staff assured me he was legit. Everything he sold definitely worked, and for the low, low price of $38 (half price!) even if it didn't, so what? I figured it was worth a punt, and half an hour later I was manhandling it into the boot of my C200. Once I had taken it home, showed it off, and unstuck the door, I did the obvious thing to do and plugged it in. The lights turned on. Good. But I didn't own any cassettes at that point (not even from the Holy Church of Keygen, since I figured it was a waste to buy a tape I couldn't currently play), I had no way to be certain of the sound quality.

It was only days later that I ventured to my local record shop in search of a cassette to try out my machine. The only tapes they had were a motley selection strewn over the bottom of a single well-hidden cardboard box. After sorting through them and seeing nothing to my taste, I finally settled on Hotel California as a test subject. It was also around this time that I acquired a ¼ inch to 3.5 mm headphone adapter, since that was the simplest way to plug the tape deck into a speaker I already had.

The moment of truth arrived. I plugged everything in, inserted the tape, and hit play. It played! And then, a few seconds later, it stopped. I tried again, to the same effect. After convincing myself that there was nothing wrong with the tape or my procedure, I forced to conclude that despite the assurances I had been given, I had been sold a dud.

It was not until the following weekend that I had an opportunity to return to the thrift market, and return to it I did energised by justified ire. However to my perplexity the stall from which I had made my purchase had disappeared; in its place was a new vendor selling second-hand books. After I conveyed my issues to the venue organisers, they too were bemused by this turn of events. This sort of upping-sticks-and-leaving-in-the-night was completely unheard of in these quarters. At first, they offered me a refund. The rational thing to do would be to take it, but I didn't want a refund; I wanted a working tape deck. They then suggested that I could try tracking down the stall owner, but doing so was likely to be a waste of time as he had recently given up repair work. I eventually left empty-handed.

The next thing I did was the natural thing anyone does in such a situation – I consulted the internet. Hours of research later I had established two things – that this particular model was a major pain to service, and that my problem was likely caused by a perished autostop belt. The job of the autostop belt was to detect when the tape had reached the end, and turn off the motor automatically. My autostop belt had stretched and deteriorated to the point where it could no longer grip to its pulleys, causing the rest of the mechanism to erroneously think that the tape was no longer moving when in fact this was not the case. After unscrewing and removing the outer shell of my tape deck, I established that the autostop belt was indeed both stretched and stiff like an old rubber band. This was doubly reassuring because it lent credence to the idea that my diagnosis was correct, and also because none of the belts had dissolved into black goo – apparently a common problem for old tape decks. I purchased a belt replacement kit online, which included four (four!) separate belts, and waited.

Weeks later, my package arrived and I had new problems. Since as mentioned before the Kenwood KX-620 has four separate belts, and I found all of them except the main drive belt to be perished to the point of uselessness, I knew I would have to replace the other three to restore the machine to factory fresh condition. The main drive belt was the odd one out in that it appeared much newer than the others, and also proved to be totally inaccessible despite my best efforts. I never did replace it. Going back to the three I did need to replace, my internet research had indicated to me that I would need to remove the front panel to access them. After popping off both the top and the bottom panels, I was confronted with a combination of rancid seventies tape, glue, and several inexplicably variable screws. While most of these could be removed by suitable diplomatic methods involving brute force and isopropyl alcohol, one screw in particular proved totally impervious to my attempts. Hoping when I should have feared and fearing when I should have hoped, I persisted, and soon the drive of the screw had been stripped to a mere hole not capable of driving anything.

At this point, I asked for advice from several parties. There was strong support for the use of a dremel, but in the end I opted for something cheaper and less destructive: a new set of screw-removing pliers. By this point the tape deck itself accounted for less than half of my total financial outlay, proof if ever it were needed that cheap things frequently fail to stay that way.

Once I finally got the front off (a task made considerably more difficult by initially failing to realise that I had to pull off the volume knob first), I could finally replace the belts. This proved immensely fiddly even after disassembling the chassis even further, but I did do it. The VU meter dials also fell off at this point, but this was inevitable since they were only attached with the same rotting seventies glue that had been shedding all over the tiles. There was nothing for it but to clean them up and glue them back on, and at the same time reattach the light that was already loose when it arrived.

Finally the time came to put it all back together and see if it actually worked. The disassembly part of the job had taken several weekends just on its own, and it was with a degree of trepidation that I plugged the tape deck in and flipped the mechanical on-switch. The lights came on at least, and I slid in the tape and hit play.

As ways to listen to Hotel California go, 'sitting on the floor because the wires on your headphones you borrowed from your dad who probably got them free with something else don't let you move anywhere else' probably isn't even in the top fifty, never mind the top ten. But in context it was strangely transcendent. Was it worth it? Not by any rational measure, but it stopped being a matter of rationality the moment I decided to buy a cassette player in 2023.