I bought a Sony Walkman - 82MHz

It keeps happening. I can't control it. Sometimes, I feel nostalgic for some old piece of tech, and before I know what's happening, I'm already browsing eBay looking for one. That's how I ended up with an old Thinkpad from 2004 recently. And now it happened again, and so I'm now the proud owner of a Sony Cassette Walkman. Despite not having any tapes anymore....

Ok, so I got nostalgic for Walkmans (Walkmen?) and tapes recently, and as I was browsing eBay I found this one, sold as not working, and it cost only 17,50€ including shipping. It looks a little beat up, but I'm fine with that. In fact, I prefer it because I noticed that if I buy some retro hardware that still looks pristine, I'm hesitant to use it because I'm scared I will scratch it up. So when a device comes with some cosmetic damage already, that's perfect for me.

Sony WM-EX521

I also bought a tape, because what would I do with a Walkman without a tape? It's one of my favourite albums by Rush, Signals from 1982.

Rush, Signals, 1982

The Walkman is the Sony WM-EX521 from 2002, which is a pretty late model. It's not one of the classics from the 80s, but I really like the design, the case is made out of metal so it looks and feels really solid and with it being relatively young, I don't expect too many problems. In fact, I had a suspicion that the only thing that was wrong with it might be the belt. Tape drives have rubber belts in them which link the motor with the tape mechanism, and these wear out over time. They can become loose or lose their elasticity, some break and some also try to turn themselves back into crude oil, which leaves a giant mess behind.

So when the Walkman arrived, I opened the back to see how it looked on the inside, which required putting it on a heat plate for a few minutes to soften the adhesive, and then I could carefully insert a plastic tool between the frame and the back cover and start prying... nah, I'm kidding. This was made before all of that nonsense. You take out five screws and you're in. Which is how it should be.

Anyway, I took the back off, stuck a battery in, pressed play and I could see that the motor was spinning, but the belt was loose and wasn't moving. Suspicion confirmed, the belt was bad. Thankfully it was just worn out and hadn't disintegrated yet, so that's an easy fix.

I ordered a new belt here, which arrived a few days later from Portugal, and replaced the old one. I also sprayed some contact cleaner into the volume potentiometer while I was at it, because it sounded very noisy and scratchy. Here are some pictures, and you can see the old, worn out belt next to the new one. It's literally twice as long! No wonder it wasn't working anymore.

The inside of the Walkman

New belt vs worn out old belt

After that was done I put in the Rush tape, pushed play, and success! The tape played. Walkman fixed!<br>There was one more problem though: the tape ran slow. I'm very familiar with these songs and I noticed pretty quickly that they sounded kind of slow and tired here. There is a trimmer on the circuit board which adjusts the playback speed, and there are special calibration tapes which have a tone of a precise frequency recorded on them, so you can connect the tape player to some measuring equipment and dial in the speed until the tape plays the tone at the right frequency.

I don't have such a tape however, so I did this: The first song on the album, Subdivisions, starts with a single note, played repeatedly on a synthesizer. I checked the version of the song on Youtube with a guitar tuning app and figured out that this note is an F#. So I played this part of the tape on the Walkman over and over again through a speaker and slowly adjusted the speed upwards until that note also showed as an F# on the tuner (it started out being close to E, so almost a semitone lower and slower than it should have been). This might not be the most precise way to calibrate the Walkman, but it is good enough for my taste.

Adjusting the playback speed

Then I put the Walkman back together and I was done.

Except, it turned out I wasn't quite done yet. I played the tape for a bit, and at first it sounded fine, but after a few minutes it began to slow down and playback eventually stopped. And it wouldn't fast forward or rewind, either. I suspected that the tape might have been lying around unused for years, if not decades and as such might be a bit hard to turn. And maybe all it needed was to be wound back and forth a few times to loosen up.

Now, I could have done that with a pencil like we used to do, but I was too lazy, so I came up with a different solution: I 3D-printed a cog that fit into the tape, attached that to my battery powered drill and wound the tape back and forth a couple of times this way. And I'm happy to report that with this completely sensible and not at all stupidly overengineered solution, the tape plays perfectly now!

I'm an engineer!

And with that, I now...