Fault and repair guide

No reel rotation

Audio level controls not operating

Deck goes into rewind

No head drum rotation

Failure to load a tape

When this happens the faulty gears must be replaced and the mechanism correctly realigned so that the left and right side "tray arms" are at the same position relative to the front panel. This is done by releasing the plastic tab on the gear away from the motor side and selecting the correct mesh position with the teeth of the drive cog on rod which connects between both sides of the cassette tray.

This problem is also found on the SL-F30, SL-F60 and the SL-HF77.

Loading gear and shaft repair

• Replacement part approach
White plastic gears (for RC toy cars) are available quite cheaply on eBay that have 10 teeth, a 2.5mm hole and 5.7mm in diameter and 4.7mm in length.

In practice the diameter is sufficient and the reduced length does not really matter, just use super glue (or other suitable glue) to glue them to the shaft and protrude the shaft 1mm or so past the end. See: RC-Toy-Car gears


If you don't need 50 then look for a smaller quantity but the price does not seem to change much.

• Repair of the existing gear
Here is how to repair the shaft when it is out of the machine:
• Remove the black plastic gear from the shaft and then clean the shaft of all plastic residue.
• Take the gear and pass a hobby knife (or similar narrow blade) down through the gear crack to remove any plastic residue to allow it to close to its correct gap width.
• Place the gear in a soft jaw vice such that you can apply pressure to close up the gear crack.
• Now use a drill with the same diameter as the outside diameter of metal drive shafts knurled shaft end to clean out the rough plastic residue from the shaft hole.
• Take the gear out of the vice. Take the shaft and put super-glue on it and press the shaft back into the gear.
• Put the assembly back into the vice again (with the shaft facing down flat, gear top facing up) closing up the gap again but leaving about 3mm of the gear exposed above the top of the vice. (note the gap is facing across the vice gap).
• Drill a hole the diameter of paper-clip metal through the top of the gear and shaft but just below the surface of the top disc.
• Insert the wire from an unfolded paper clip and turn both ends hard up, then trim off the excess metal. This will lock the plastic gear to the shaft and should keep tension across the gear and not encourage the gap to open up again.
• Remove any excess super glue from the cracked tooth gap. The repaired gear may make a slight noise in operation but that is only an issue when loading and unloading. It puts the machine back into normal operation versus a scrap heap or spares. The pin clears the drive gear by a good margin and prevents the plastic spinning on the shaft again.

  Thanks go to Noel Higgins for this fix