by Edward Tatnall Canby
FACTORY SERVICE? Definitely. Here is the saga of my own recent bungling with
respect to factory repairs on my own tape recorder and I trust you will find
it instructive. I am all for factory repair service. Now that I have learned.
Readers may recall my story of a certain exquisitely built Japanese capstan motor which, when it failed at the slow speed, I took to a local motor repair service in New York (the easy way out, of course ...). They looked once at the exquisite Japanese craftsmanship and just laffed and laffed. "Fix that? It would cost you a fortune." Well, apparently the Japanese agree, for I now have a new motor and my machine is operative. But this is the third motor, not the second. The first was perfectly OK but it burned itself out after approximately 45 seconds of hard use. It had no choice. The wiring-in was wrong. One slow-speed lead somehow got soldered to a dead-end terminal going nowhere. Hmmm.
Wonder what happened to the first motor, when it failed? It took longer, but it went out with exactly the same symptoms, the fast speed remaining OK.... Whose fault? To this day, as you can see, I am not sure. But in the end, surely, it was my fault. My responsibility. Again, I tried the easy way.
There are plenty of excellent reasons, both positive and negative, for taking many an "easy" way. Don't think otherwise. It will be the same story for you, one of these days, whether for a motor or a tuner-or maybe something entirely different, like a Volkswagen. Same principle.
Who wants to fuss with faceless, efficient (and expensive?) factory authorized service? For unless you are very lucky, that service will be both distant and dismally inaccessible. Let's say, the nearest service center is 1051 miles away. Or 2553 miles, and accessible only via a shipping job, complete with all the original packaging.
Ever try putting one of those things together again, once opened? No, they do not grow factory services on local trees. Whereas, right down your street, lives that engineer and tinkerer buddy of your who is a near-genius at fixing things, and he'll be right over in moments. What a temptation! No packing up, no moving, and it'll cost less.
Better, of course, if you are your own tinkerer and knowledgeable enough to get inside your equipment without outside aid. Then, the temptation to do it yourself is overwhelming.
Now do not misunderstand the implications. Nine times out of ten, the inspired home or near-home repair department does the right thing, quickly and easily. After all, that burning desire to fix for yourself is one of the healthiest things left in our present America, so prone to the prepackaged and the perfected automatic. The home mechanic is still a factor, and so is the more specifically expert local professional, the last manifestation of the one-man enterprise. It is in truth a pleasure to solve a problem in home equipment, even if it is no more than discovering that a "dead" amplifier is dead merely because a speaker lead has come loose.
So who wants Factory Service, unless to get something out of a guarantee. This is normal thinking for most of us. Right, too. Nine times out of ten.
Ah, that tenth time. Reminds me of my local country garage man, a quarter mile down the road from my place in Connecticut. Old-type Yankee, and a total independent. For years Percy kept assorted cranky foreign cars going for me, when there was no Factory Service, even when their carburetors dropped off and their bottoms dropped out. He could improvise, something, to keep me going. Moreover, if I could get the car to him, he'd drive me home again and when the job was done he'd bring the car back, and I'd drive him home.
Cosy and easy. Until I got my first Volkswagen.
The VW is Different. Not very different, just non-standard, as per Chevies and Fords and Dodges. Now the more proficient is your local genius at repair (cars or hi fi) the more is his pride involved. Do you think he is likely to admit defeat? One day, I brought my new VW in with a stuck front-hood latch. I'd jammed it down over some unwieldy object and it wouldn't open. That man got to work and worked a good two hours-still stuck. He swore and he spat and he got out bigger and bigger tools but still it stuck. Finally, CRRACK, and it flew open. HE was happy, but I wasn't.
I ended up thirty miles away at the VW agency, where a new catch was put in after approximately five minutes. That was my first tenth time.
The second time it was a lot more serious, and at last, it changed my mind for me. Much as I love friend Percy, I'm up and out at the crack of dawn, driving those 30 miles to the "local" VW agency. And there I sit, hour after hour, for lack of anybody to drive me home again until the job is done. I hate it! And it costs, too.
Costs have more than quadrupled down at VW. But it pays, I find.
The circumstances concerning my tape recorder motor were similar, only more so. A whopping big machine and heavy, and I have a mildly trick back that objects, say, to reaching for a door handle while trying to hold such a machine safely in the arms. I can move it but I do not relish the thought, and go out of my way to avoid same. Hence, when the motor conked, I got a good engineer friend of mine in to help-right in my home. He tinkered and dickered and, in the end, took out the motor for test, as we know. It came back. So what next? Definitely a bad motor.
Natch, my friend generously offered to order a new one through a local outlet, and he would install it.
What else? He took the old one out.
He is a most meticulous and careful operator, unlike myself, who would have lost half the mounting screws and yanked the connections free by main force out of sheer exasperation.
That's me. This man, Sam, was a hi fi gift from Heaven.
So, after the usual interminable delay, the new motor arrived. Ah yes.
And was installed. Ah yes. We turned it on and noted a peculiar noise-at low speed only, of course-a sort of too-loud grinding. It ran. It seemed entirely OK at the faster speed, 15 ips.
Just as had the original motor. Now, you see, we were really in trouble. For it looked as though the same thing were happening all over again. Why? What? How? Was the capstan at fault, the mechanical drive? How could it be, when all was OK at the faster speed? Then the worst happened. I tipped the machine back on its rear, flat down, which is the way I often use it for editing. Why not? It's supposed to work that way. Instantly, the slow speed grinding increased to a harshness, and the motor quite literally ground to a halt. Crazy. Stand the machine upright and it turned, though still with an uneasy noise, definitely not correct.
Now my friend Sam repairs all sorts of tape recorders as part of his over-all work in recording and electronics and, as I say, he has the meticulous approach which is absolutely necessary if you are to trouble-shoot equipment and, especially, to take it apart and put it back together. He makes a neat pile of the removed bolts and screws, in a dish; he's likely to write down a diagram of connections, color codes, sequences of disassembly, so that nothing untoward can go wrong.
(Whereas, sure as sugar, if I tried to put screws and things in a plate, I would absent-mindly kick it, distributing the contents all over the room. I always do.) I cannot imagine Sam making a drastic MISTAKE in reassembly, a misconnection of major and disastrous proportions! It just ain't in his nature-if it is in mine. Myself, I kept a good three feet away from that machine at ALL times, and did not dare even put my big thumbs on the regular controls, for fear of doing something stupid. Of a certaintly, 1 did not make a wrong connection! But was it Sam? Do you think I know? Do you think he knows? Frankly, when he gave up I was so discouraged that I put the cursed machine in my closet and dropped a big, soggy bathrobe over it to cover the hideous sight. I didn't want to look at the thing ever again. I would wait until I could get another recorder. Maybe the next one would work. Grrrrr.
Well, sanity usually prevails in my case. Later on, sheepishly, I looked down upon that bathrobe in my closet and decided to put in a long distance call. Not a very long distance-just across into the next state, in fact not really very far at all. About the usual half hour by car. I blushed over that phone. Er, you see, I have a little problem with one of your machines.
Some problem! I had done the unforgivable; I had tried to have the thing fixed by myself, and had failed.
It was not a matter of guarantee, for the machine was beyond that. But no Factory Service is going to approve home-based repairs, or even professional ones, that haven't worked. It's no longer their responsibility, though they will do what they can. All this, of course, like the dentist who tells you that your teeth need regular brushing and adds, diffidently, that you have Bad Breath. I had it, all right, and my tail was dragging on the ground.
And so the tide turned. Up came the bathrobe and out came the recorder and down into my double-parked VW with the help of some young muscles that happened along to save my aching back. It was easy, all in all. I was off to New Jersey.
Actually, the factory people were both pleasant and cooperative. But firm. That was understandable. A week later I picked the machine up.
The guy named Dave who had done the work was out--so I did not find out what he had discovered about the original motor. The second one definitely had an N.G. slow-speed winding; the third was installed and running. The entire machine had been checked over and test run for most of a day, the pinch roller replaced, just for good measure, and the bias re-set to my specification; just a bit lower than the bias required for the newer high-bias tapes. (So I could still get reasonable results on older tape.) All in all, a very expert and conscientious job. But best of all, the machine was operative. At both speeds! After so long. That's what Factory Service is all about.
Now this has been written deliberately at a time when I still cannot explain exactly what happened. I doubt if I ever will be able to. It's enough, at this point, that I am back in business, even though I had to pay for my folly (as it turned out) approximately three times the cost of a single, first--off trip to Factory Service.
If the second motor, the first replacement, was wrongly connected to a dead terminal in one of its leads (I think it was the yellow lead), how could it have happened? My friend Sam is of course one logical possibility. But this flies against reason; he isn't that sort of a repair man. And he would have seen the dead-end terminal, even if he was unsure. Moreover, if he made the mistake, and the motor failed at 7 1/2 ips but not at 15 ips, which remained entirely OK--then why did the first motor fail in precisely the same fashion, if over a longer period? An interesting mystery.
There is another alternative, which I put before the Factory Service people. You cynics may have thought of it. The mistake in wiring occurred with the first motor and was the manufacturer's mistake. Then, you see, Sam would simply have restored the same connections, unknowingly faulty, with the same result. I drew only a withering smile from the factory rep- resentative at such an unthinkable thought. And a quick and very deferential reprisal. If, of course, you had brought the machine to us in the first place ... but as it is ... Correct, entirely correct! And my private thought is that if they had made the original mistake I might even have achieved a free repair. They, too, have pride in their own workmanship. But now I will never know.
I will have to admit that the first motor, failing in the slow speed as did the second one, nevertheless took a whole year of gradual deterioration in its torque before its slow speed quit, leaving the fast speed OK. Whereas the second motor's slow speed apparently failed in seconds, leaving its high speed intact. And the grinding noise was new. The first motor simply got quietly tired and wouldn't start unless I first went to the high speed, then back to slow. No grinding. Mysteries.
Anyhow, now all is well and I've been working again with the machine, at last, and with both speeds. It's pleasant! About time. There are moments like this when you feel that RESULTS, positive and definite, are worth any price at all. I think I'd pay six times as much instead of three, just to be able to get back to work this way. I feel GOOD.
P.S. Something has just been bothering me. Do I notice a very faint grinding sound in the new motor when it runs at the slow speed--which goes away at the fast speed?
(Source: Audio magazine, Apr. 1975, Edward Tatnall Canby)
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