I just got these two beautiful tape players imported from Japanese flea market 
Both need belt replacements of course, however i begin to understand why panasonic players turned out to be the sturdiest. The designs are very compact and straightforward.
Pictured inside is the rq-sx55 model, after receiving new belts. These were not perfect fit but at least i confirmed that it does still play audio! 
Okay this is rather embarrassing interior i must say. I was having issues with it the moment i bought it and decided to have a look inside. Label reads Sony TC-FX120. I ended up selling it, because i couldn't get it to work properly.
At this point, I had sunk so much time and effort in, I didn't want to just ditch it, and nobody would take it off my hands for more than a buck. Luckily, somebody on ebay is selling parts off of one of these amps, and for fifty bucks, I shall have a replacement transformer soon! Two actually, but at that price, it would be stupid to try and wait for a single one to be sold. All in all, looks like this might still have a happy ending.
(3/3)
T1 did compensate for some of that (running the amp proper), but the power indicator runs off T2 entirely. So I had a burned out winding, and the transformer is of course not manufactured anymore and there's no readily available replacement type. Testing the amp for power levels, it made barely 25W, when it is specced at 72W. So while it works for the usual room level of noise, it still bothered me that it was halfway broken.
(2/3)
So here's a bit of a rollercoaster on the #repair of the #Technics SU-8080. Last time I posted about this thing, everything except the power indicator seemed (FORESHADOWING) to work right. The Sm specifies the indicator to be a 6.3V/0.4A bulb, but replacing it did... nothing. As soon as a load of even a few Kohms is in, the voltage just goes away. After some searching and lotsa help from the EEVblog forum, it turns out that the BLU-WHT winding of T2 is shot.
(1/n)
The #Technics SU-8080 is coming along nicely. All switches and pots have been cleaned, many elec caps have been replaced (most of them had started to leak). Replaced the dreadful speaker terminals. Still left to do: bias/DC adjustment and figuring out something really weird going on with the power indicator.
A mess worse than I thought. One channel isn't working on _some_ inputs. One of the protection boards is rattling loose. The input selector feels like it has glue in it and one of the preamp voltage regulators has a corner missing. Fun, fun, fun.
Quick Sunday Morning Project: replacing the speaker terminals on a Luxman LV-103. The original set was vaguely ok, but the Plastic has started to fade, which is always a sign of impending brittleness, and the old set does not accept banana plugs.
So I got a replacement set from https://speaker-terminal.com (highly recommended!). I've already done the L-525 I mentioned yesterday, but it was so simple a procedure that I completely forgot to take pics.
Today's labor: replaced all the elec caps in this pic (this is post-replacement), and replaced some styroflex ones with PP foil caps (blue rectangles). Amplifier is a Luxman L-525 I am refurbishing for a friend.
✨ justada 
Twoowls Elt 🦉 🦉
Tobias Klausmann