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JVC VCR S-5990AM Counter Problems

Hi All,
I have a JVC S-5990AM VCR. I bought it 2nd hand and thanks to the SCI
Electronics pdf guide, have cleaned the heads satisfactorily and
improved the picture tracking by adjusting the heads and rollers.

However. :)
I'm not sure if it's through my "tuning" or it was an existing
problem, but the counter doesn't work accurately when I rewind tapes.
Generally it doesn't count as the tape starts rewinding and then
'wakes up' after a little while (usually 2-7 minutes of tape, so that
when the cassette is fully rewound the counter reads somewhere between
2 and 7+ minutes instead of 0:00:00.
In forward direction it seems fine.

Any ideas?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

I must say I find Panasonic and Sony machines far more intuitive/
logical to operate, but it is so hard to find a good quality VCR these
days, I want to try and stick with this one if I can.

Many thanks, J
 
J

John Ferrier

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi All,
I have a JVC S-5990AM VCR. I bought it 2nd hand and thanks to the SCI
Electronics pdf guide, have cleaned the heads satisfactorily and
improved the picture tracking by adjusting the heads and rollers.

However. :)
I'm not sure if it's through my "tuning" or it was an existing
problem, but the counter doesn't work accurately when I rewind tapes.
Generally it doesn't count as the tape starts rewinding and then
'wakes up' after a little while (usually 2-7 minutes of tape, so that
when the cassette is fully rewound the counter reads somewhere between
2 and 7+ minutes instead of 0:00:00.
In forward direction it seems fine.

Any ideas?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

I must say I find Panasonic and Sony machines far more intuitive/
logical to operate, but it is so hard to find a good quality VCR these
days, I want to try and stick with this one if I can.

Many thanks, J

Hi
The counter in JVC video recorders works by counting the control pulses
along the bottom edge of the tape. If you fast forward or rewind a blank
tape the counter will remain at 00:00:00
The symptoms you have suggests that the tape to control head alignment is
poor during initial rewind.
Check how the tape travels across the audio control head you will probably
see it riding up or down slightly.
This might be due to a worn pinch roller or some misalignment.

Cheers John.
 
M

Mark Zacharias

Jan 1, 1970
0
John Ferrier said:
Hi
The counter in JVC video recorders works by counting the control pulses
along the bottom edge of the tape. If you fast forward or rewind a blank
tape the counter will remain at 00:00:00
The symptoms you have suggests that the tape to control head alignment is
poor during initial rewind.
Check how the tape travels across the audio control head you will probably
see it riding up or down slightly.
This might be due to a worn pinch roller or some misalignment.

Cheers John.


Definitely skipping control pulses at the control head. My HR-S6600 did the
same thing. I slightly bent the guide arm (half-load arm) to fix it.

Mark Z.
 
Many thanks Mark & John!

I'll open her up again, sounds like i definitely misalligned it when I
tuned the picture when I first bought it.
Bendingthe guide arm sounds scary to an amateur, I assume the idea is
just to put slightly more pressure on the tape at that point. (common
sense prevailing with the amount of pressure applied to the arm) :)

Cheers, J
 
M

Mark Zacharias

Jan 1, 1970
0
Many thanks Mark & John!

I'll open her up again, sounds like i definitely misalligned it when I
tuned the picture when I first bought it.
Bendingthe guide arm sounds scary to an amateur, I assume the idea is
just to put slightly more pressure on the tape at that point. (common
sense prevailing with the amount of pressure applied to the arm) :)

Cheers, J

The idea is to keep the tape from riding up (or down) excessively at the
control head gap during rewind. If you observe the portion of the tape which
is extended to the audio / control head during rewind you can see it sort of
bouncing around.

My HR-S6600U was an early model from around 1991. If it had previously seen
the clear leader at the beginning of the tape, it though it "knew" where the
beginning was and would essentially ignore the reel sensor pulses and "slam"
the beginning of the tape if the counter had not approached zero due to the
inaccurate pulse count from the control head. Slammed it so hard the
mechanism would jam. If the tape had been inserted with no clear leader
showing, it was never a problem. I really fought that one, and even had an
argument with a JVC engineer over it.

(I won the argument. Later models did not suffer from this.)

Mark Z.
 
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