Old Video Machines

Ah, old video machines, the bane of my existence. Basically the story is this, I'm transferring some sticky videotapes for a certain organisation and my contact there put me in touch with a man in Yorkshire who had two video machines he thought might be most useful to me- a Sony AV3670CE (to compliment my AV3620CE and potential replacement should the machine go tits up) and a Sony CV2100ACE, cool machine, different standard to the 3620/3670, rarer,... and almost always with slack belts and often with knackered heads. Well they arrived at the archive last week and I finally got round to checking them out today. Both machines have pros and cons:

AV3670CE:

Pros:
It powers on.
The heads aren't knackered.
The belts are fine.

Cons:
The heads were absolutely f**king filthy.
It took ages to get them clean.
Once I'd cleaned them I discovered the picture didn't reproduce properly, there's some kind of distortion over the picture that might just be fixable if I spent several hours micro-tweaking the head placement but probably isn't. That machine is staying at the archive to be used as a 'sh*t' machine that can be used for all manner of testing an experimenting as needed, then the proper transfers can be done on my AV3620.

CV2100ACE:
This doesn't really lend itself to pros and cons. On the plus side it powers up, the heads were f**king filthy but cleaned up just fine and it gives a picture with no distortion. The other bit of good news is that the belts aren't as slack as they usually are. That's also the bad news, they are a bit slack, the rewind belt is fine, it's the forward belt that's the trouble, it will give a picture with no distortion but only if you assist it by manually turning the take-up reel as it's playing. Doing this for an hour or so is no fun whatsoever. Replacement belts aren't readily available and I don't particularly want to fiddle about with a CV2100 that works as well as I've ever had one working of the three that have been through my hands. On the plus side I still have one of the other two which has much slacker belts so now I have a working one (albeit with a slightly slack forward belt) I can muck about with the other one and try and find a suitable replacement without particularly caring if my endeavours to find said belt completely screws the machine up. And I got a Philips tape with N1500 material on it so I can finally give my N1500 a proper workout!

However old video machines, the chances of being able to just pick one up and have it work are miniscule, usually because of the belts. The other reason of course is:

Nothing's ever f**king easy!