Hello my fellow Technics owners in Tape Projectdom. Actually, this tip applies to many different machines.
I noticed the other day that when I stop my machine from play that the tape lifters (those little arms that lift the tape away from the heads at stop, rewind and fast forward) weren't lifting the tape as far as they should (or used to). I fooled around with the stopper mechanism which sync's the brakes, reel motors, lifters and pinch rollers when the machine play is engaged. If I'd thought about it, this is an adjustment that shouldn't ever go out (but it is something that I've tweaked a good deal in the past) so I was barking up the wrong tree on that one.
Upon further investigation, I realized that this symptom was only occurring about one out of five times of stopping from play so I checked the brake tension. Sure enough, the brake tension was higher than it should be with about the same frequency as the lifters misbehavior.
Duh,.. when was the last time I cleaned the brake drums? Maybe 2 years ago!
Ok. So here's the deal, because of the machines lid air venting just over the brake/reel motors, dust gets in there. It gets on the brake drums and while the pads/brake strap (depending on the machine) cleans this off for the most part airborne contaminants also mix with this dust and will eventually cause points of higher friction on the drum (sticky spots). These cause the brakes to grab at those points with much higher brake tension. This is the etiology of the symptom with our lifters.
The cure is very easy and should be part of a yearly maintenance program. Remove the back and top (if it's a Technics) and look in at the reel motors. The black, outermost part (that spins) are the brake drums. The brake pads are on the very bottom. What you need to do is to clean that black drum with alcohol. The brake pads are attached with glue so you don't want the alcohol to get on them or it could ruin them.
Put a piece of adhesive tape to hold down one of the tape tensioners to trick the machine into thinking there's tape on it (well technically there is, I mean magnetic tape!).
Get yourself a couple of cotton swabs and some alcohol.
Put the machine in play (the taped down tensioner will keep it in play till you hit stop when you're done)
Dampen a swab with the alcohol (don't drown it or it will drip into places you don't want it to) and hold it against the now spinning black brake drums. Repeat this until the swabs come up white and you've held it against the spinning drum all the way across.
Now use a dry swab just to be sure that the all the alcohol is cleaned off.
Let it air dry (running a couple of minutes), stop the machine and pull off the adhesive tape.
When you do this, bear in mind what you're cleaning off. This shouldn't take much time, maybe 10 minutes total so don't be getting crazy and try and clean the anodized paint off of the drum (as if that could be done with mere alcohol) but it should be done as regular maintenance.
