Sony VCR, model unknown

My lackadaisical camera work came back to bite me on this one. I'm pretty certain there's a model number written on the front, but I didn't get a clear picture of it before I threw the remains of the VCR away. It doesn't really matter so much: this is a fairly generic VCR, inside and out.


It's been a long time since I took this apart, so I don't remember the story of why there is no top panel.


Like I said, I tried to take a picture of the model number, but the autofocus decided to focus on the box fan in the background.


Tape carriage removed. Standard disassembly followed, so I didn't bother to take pictures.


Relatively small parts pile for a VCR.

Montgomery Ward VCR

Symphonic VCR

I've never heard of the Symphonic brand. A quick web search discovers that they started out as an audio company in the 1960s, then got bought up by the Funai Corporation in 1977. And now I know.


Of course, the brand is more or less irrelevant for VCRs like this. They're cheap, low-end, commoditized machines designed to affordably squeeze the last bit of life out of a dying media format. This is what you buy when your nice VCR craps out and you're still in the process of upgrading your movie collection to DVD. (I assume that if you're a fan of the VHS format and your VCR craps out, you go try to find another good one)


Well, there's your problem.


Always nice to get an added bonus thing to take apart. I've shown the guts of a VHS tape in detail before, so I just took the one picture.


The carriage, or whatever this part is properly called. Decent assortment of goodies inside, but not really notable enough to warrant more than one picture.


If it wasn't for the cassette lodged inside, this might have been a disappointingly small parts pile.

Sony SL-HFR70 Betamax player

I chose to do a write-up of this on the Saturday before Halloween because it was as close to thematically appropriate as I could get. You know, a dead media format. Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch, but until someone throws out a PKE meter or proton pack, it's probably as close as I can come.


Okey, let me get this out of the way: Holy crap, it's a Betamax player! I've never even seen one of these up close, let alone had a junker to take apart. And how I found it is kind of weird too. It was just sitting in the grass outside the 7-11 on the corner, all by itself, with no other junk anywhere near it. It was upside down, with the unpainted steel bottom tricking me into thinking it was some sort of traffic monitoring device at first. It was only on the way back home that I decided to flip it over and see what it actually was.


To my non-engineer's eye, all the parts inside look familiar, yet slightly askew, like a fast food franchise in a foreign country. That makes sense, I guess, since the process for playing both Betamax and VHS is basically the same. I honestly don't remember why this is the only picture of the inside that I took; I guess I didn't think about it until I was already done.




A pretty good assortment of parts, though none of them strike me as really eye-catching or otherwise interesting beyond where they came from. That could be a good thing, since I doubt I'll ever see another Betamax player.

Audiovox VCR

VCRs are one of those devices that you would think has a lot more removable parts than it does. And simple tear-downs often make for boring entries, but here we go anyway...

As I picked this up on the side of the road, the top fell off, and I didn't bother to pick it back up, so that's why there's exposed circuitry. The cassette flap thing came off in transit and fell into the inside of the VCR. I'm wondering if these aren't symptoms of why it got thrown out in the first place. I'll also note that this VCR seems to be somewhat unusual in that the circuit board is at the top rather than at the bottom.

Another unusual feature is the fuse access thing on the back. I've never seen one on a VCR before, and certainly not on a relatively new one. User serviceable parts are something I associate with older electronics.

The VCR with the circuit board and top of the cassette carriage removed.

And the chassis totally removed.

Not a bad trophy pile, but not a great one. Then again, I'm running out of room to put all this crap, so maybe small parts piles aren't such a bad thing.

Panasonic VCR

I found this on a bench outside a restaurant, of all places. It was the night before trash pickup, and I was on my way to Wal-Mart when I saw it and a small TV just sitting there. Were these items actually garbage? Did the restaurant owners set them there, but forgot to move them to the curb on the other side of the sidewalk? I made a mental note, then continued on to Wal-Mart. On the way back, they were still there and I stopped and deliberated for a couple of minutes. They looked like trash (i.e. old and a little beat up), but I don't want to grab something that isn't actually being thrown away. Since I'm doing a write-up about it, I assume you can figure out my final decision. I did leave the TV, but more because I don't mess with TVs anyway.

This looks to be a basic low-end model, sort of like the JVC a few entries back. My guess is that the restaurant had it and the TV mounted up on the wall, though playing videos instead of jsut having the TV running in the background seems sort of unusual.

The front panel was sort of a letdown. The buttons were asymmetrical and did not mirror each other, so they weren't worth me saving from a design standpoint. On the plus side, those little black switches popped out easily, and might make nice little detail pieces.

The chassis, removed from the circuit board. Most of the little gears came out.

The trophy pile, which I somehow managed to photograph with simlutaneously too much shadow and too much light. That little group of black things in the lower right corner are the button switches I mentioned earlier.

JVC VCR

I found this a couple of days before I left for the holidays, so it was there waiting for me when I got back. I actually snagged it from a junk pile on the way back from the beach, so it was out of my usual search area. It was housed in some sort of bulky plastic housing that I assume was to let you mount it under a shelf, or from a wall-mounted TV. Either way, I had to get it off before I could carry it back to the apartment. This took a couple of minutes, which irritated me since I like my trashpicking to be as stealthy as possible.

This is very much a no-frills VCR. I don't see any evidence of any features beyond the basics; if this VCR had any, they could only be controlled from the remote, which I didn't find.

Here it is with the top of the case removed.

A somewhat blurry pic of the mechanism that takes the tape in (the actual name of which escapes me). Maybe I should invest in a tripod or something. This is where most of the parts that I can remove (without a hammer or soldering gun) came from.

My new organized trophy pile method looks more impressive here than in the last entry.