Tandy CCR-82
[photos: flickr – Tandy CCR-82 tape recorder]
Between VCF West and the Electronics Flea Market I have been inundated with projects! I wasn’t intending to mess with cassette tape on the TRS-80, despite having a cassette of Talking Eliza. At VCF I ran across a Tandy tape recorder in good shape in a box for a great price, so sure why not. It had the original box, manual, packing material, and TRS-80 interface cable. We had one of these, I think an prior generation, once upon a time but I guess it got sold with our old Model 3.
I stuck new batteries in it, hit play and I could feel the motor turning but nothing. Opening it up it was immediately obvious what was wrong, the drive belts were completely stretched out and lost tension. Browsing Youtube for the CCR-82 I happened upon this one from ACs 8-Bit Zone where he replaces the belt and does some other troubleshooting, and I used it as my guide. Later I found Console5 sold a belt kit for the CCR-82 which I bought.
Console5 CCR-82 belt kit
I got all the bits and put it aside for a few weeks. I thought I’d make a repair view, but decided against it since one already existed. Finally tonight I dove in to trying to revive mine.
In AC’s video it shows disconnecting various wires from the PCB with a soldering iron to lift the PCB out of the way. I thought I could get away with doing this and was able to replace the third (counter) belt, but ran into problems with the middle drive belt. It had completely turned into an extremely sticky rubber string that I had to pick off bit by bit with tweezers, which got everywhere. I needed to get the PCB out of the way to clean things up more, fortunately it was just a few quick dabs with the iron to get the four wires loose.
I cleaned the gears up with 91% IPA and got the belts on without any issue. I cleaned up the old grease on all the mechanisms and put new silicone grease on, everything seemed tip top. I flipped it over and play/fast-forward/rewind all worked even with a tape but record was physically not working. Opening it back up and checking the release mechanism I realized the tape I had was write-protected, sticking some tape on the holes later, record worked!
Now I need to figure out how to make it work with the TRS-80. Fiddling around I found I had a version of BASIC that supported CLOAD/CSAVE. I could CSAVE a BASIC program to tape, play it back in all of its FM/MFM audio glory. But for some reason when I tried to CLOAD, I could hear something click inside the TRS-80, the tape would play for a second, stop and the prompt would return on the system. I don’t know if I’m not getting audio back to the computer or there’s some other reason it doesn’t seem to load completely.
This will be the next thing to figure out, but at least the tape recorder is finally working!
