DEMO, DISASSEMBLY and REPAIR: Aiwa Walkman HS-G35MkII

Aiwa Walkman HS-G35MkII

I always had a thing for walkmans, and funny thing is that none of the walkmans that i had when i was little is still with me. They all had horrible deaths...i still remember the one that ended under a bus tire..i didn't know a walkman could do such loud crunshing sounds!
Well today i have with me the Aiwa Walkman HS-G35MkII from 1987 and this was bought on the internet as a COMPLETLY new and NEVER used walkman, only turned on once for testing purposes, and since this was a quite popular walkman from the Aiwa brand back in the 80's, i had to grab it.
Although in really good condition, the seller was lying with all his teeth as the walkman was used quite a bit. The capstan, the pinch roller and the reading head had strong evidence of quite more than "just one minute os use" in it's entire life.
To make matters worse..there was nearly no sound output at all! I had to put the volume all the way up just to hear the tape playing really low and noisy only on the left channel. Not to say that the equalizer controls on the tape door were not functioning correctly. Also, you will notice in the video that something missing on the back....Anyway... i went ahead and tried to fix the poor thing!
 

Can you already guess what was wrong with it?

Yes, bone dried and leaky capacitors. I had to replace a few but since they were all from the same brand, i went ahead and replaced them all. Problem was that i couldn't find exact matches and the replacements were quite bigger...imagine trying to put huge capacitors in the place of little ones next to a walkmans complex mechanism full of moving parts!

Time to tag some wires, because if i was going to recap this walkman then all wires had to be dissoldered!

Strangely but gladly the belts were all in mint condition!

Here is one of the new capacitors in place, and as you can see two others that are laying down on the pcb. I'm not proud of this, but that's what the local store had at the moment. And no, i was not willing to buy capacitors from the internet, not worthy!

Here is another example of two other capacitors struggling to fit!

A closer look.

Now it's all done and working perfectly. Please view the video demonstration!

Walkman vs Ipod Nano :)