Hi There
I have recently made a purchase of an ex-radio station MX5050 BII. It's in good working order but unfortunately there is a bit of a problem with the brakes when the stop button is pushed. Basically, when the stop button is pressed when either in the play or ff/rw function the brakes lock in immediately and the reels come to an abrupt halt. When testing the stop button in ff mode it pulled on the tape and stretched it rather badly. I've just had the unit serviced and the technician seems to think there is not much that can be done... Can some one please shed some light on whether I can make it work any smoother? I'm hoping to use this deck to mix down from my 8 track and don't want to spend money on new tape if it's going to be stretched...
This is the comment on it I got from the tech:
That machine was designed so that when you hit the stop button the motor power switches off and the mechanical brakes are activated. It's a fairly basic mechanism design - on a more sophisticated unit the tape would be slowed down by applying reverse torque, then the brakes would activate just as the tape came to a standstill. The mechanical brakes have a force differential of about 3 to 1, clockwise to anticlockwise. Thus when stopping the tape the trailing brake has more braking effect than the leading brake, to avoid the tape "throwing a loop". This effect is much increased when using 7" reels - you will find it a lot smoother using 10 1/2" reels.
When you dropped the unit to me the brake differential was more like 10 to 1, because of the accumulation of friction material from the brake bands onto the brake drum, resulting in an even more fierce "stop" - so having cleaned the drums, this is about as good as it gets. My recommendation would be to either use 10 1/2" reels (always more preferable) or to hit the opposite fast wind button to slow the tape, then hit stop when the tape has pulled right up.
