Beosystem10 said:
Welcome from another GF-9090 owner. They're one of very few decent sounding boxes that are still cheap to buy, I have plenty of spare silicon fuel line - as used in R/C models - if yours needs a fresh capstan sleeve
(they all do sooner or later, the tell-tale sign of when they need this job doing is that they fail to take up the slack tape so tape spills out of the cassette and gets chewed up in the transport). My 9090 was £51 on eBay and was totally filthy when it arrived but it costs next to nowt for a bath full of warm soapy water and some detail cleaning with cotton buds so I was (and remain) still happy with it at the price
The 9090 is not only great to listen to but it's one of the easiest ever boxes to service and repair. Belt & sleeve job plus a head upgrade took me only 40 minutes and my fingers aren't as mobile as they once were so I'm slow these days.
Another box of pretty much the same size and weight which offers similarly good sound and ease of maintenance is the JVC RC656, grab one of those while they still go for loose change on eBay, I bought a really nice one from a forum member at a very fair price but then an even better one from a local seller on the 'bay for 99p as he'd described it as not working. All that needed was a cable reconnecting internally.
Enjoy the forum and maybe get yourself a T-shirt to celebrate joining? It's 2014's "must have" item of casual clothing.
Thanks for the advice
My 9090 arrived on wednesday, initially I was very disappointed as in the ebay pictures it looked pretty good other than the odd scratch, and was listed as working well. The reality was, it was scratched, tweeter trims scraped up, damaged tuner window, battery terminals seriously corroded, battery acid leakage inside which had caused some internal corrosion, and mud/sand in some of the sockets - it looked like it had been used on a building site!
The radio was iffy, right vu meter a little tempramental, scratchy switches and a tape deck that doesn't play (see above!).
The tape deck looks to be the same old thing, as mentioned by yourself, the capstan rubber is slipping and not driving the idler. I will strip the tape deck down tomorrow and hopefully sort it out - the belts are a bit slack, but will hopefully have some suitable o-rings to replace them with. I have some rc fuel hose kicking about somewhere, so hopefully I'll be able to get the deck running again. What was the 'upgrade' you did to the head?
After my initial disappointment, I slept on it, and decided that I didn't mind doing the work to bring it back to former glory - I was just annoyed that it was a lot worse than listed. Decided to get the internals sorted, and if it runs well, then I'll worry about the cosmetics.
So yesterday I had some work to do in the garden, so cranked the radio up!! I gave the sliders a quick clean which sorted the scratchiness out, and after it had been running for a while it seemed to improve, the right vu meter came to life eventually!
One thing I have noticed is that it goes loud enough, but seems a bit bass shy. There is a definite channel imbalance as well, you can see it on the VU's and also hear it, one channels has much more bass & mid, whereas the other has more treble!
So hopefully I can bring the electronics back to former glory first, then the cosmetics - I need to get hold of a service manual (does anyone have one?) and get some pics up - I'll start a thread when I get back from work
