12:23 When I went back to the service manual, I noticed this 3-pin connector is to attach a massive 6xAA battery unit to the bottom of the player!!

I bought one new when it came out. It was robustly built and worked beautifully. I later bought the IR remote control and was my only CD player for many years. One repair that I did make, was that there was a ribbon cable at the back of the player that was rubbing against the hinge mechanism and gradually exposing the copper traces, causing shorts. A piece of electrical tape fixed that. I sold the player many, many years ago, and have regretted doing that ever since.

James, that was a fantastic repair job! I really love your style of comments and explanations. Damn, I was only 6 years old (born 19. January 1983) when this thing came out in 1989, and yet it's design is so timelessly clean, well thought through and it's very well made with a super build quality. I really love it. I remember having a non sony portable CD player without skip protection in the early 90s, then upgrading to one with skip protection aka audio buffer memory in the later 90s and even later (probably around 2003) having one that could actually cope with mp3 CDs before then switching to my first ipod mini when it came out...

@jamesbennettmusic

3 ай бұрын

I had a £20 Alba one that could play MP3 discs, when I went to university, to get me through the short gap between starting term and buying a laptop... It just about scraped through, with some firmware quirks!

i got one of these for my 14th birthday and kept it until it was ruined in a car accident 10 years later while playing nine inch nails head like a hole through a tape adapter delivering dominoes pizza in my first car ever. it had bad shock protection and i had built a little spring and frame suspension box for it to play cds in the car as i could not afford a cd player in the car and sadly the frame itself crushed around the player essentially denting the entire metal case and lid irreparably. i actually found that aa battery adapter at my parents when going through my old boxes of crud a few years ago full of leaking kodak gold batteries lol. ah memories

@jamesbennettmusic

3 ай бұрын

One of my favourite things about rescuing the old stuff is the stories people tell when they see it

Excellent job of fixing that Discman!

I had a Sony D-10 & D-55 with FM radio & it sucked. Back then they did not have the anti-skip buffering feature & they did skip a lot with vibration.

Great video! Do you mind sharing where you got the replacement gears? I have two of these I am trying to fix and both have crumbled cheese gears. I had one of these in 1997, trying to chase nostalgia now.

@jamesbennettmusic

3 ай бұрын

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/226043691720 good luck!

Love it as always tho the cheese gears are stuff of nightmares along with monkeys on skateboards and alien spider invasion! Funny tho. The later end of run Sony discman I gave you was a nice looking unit but an unwanted gift I was bought and probably only played 2 or 3 discs.

I have one sort of like this, but he disc lid is fully black and says "Discman" in big text in the middle. Still works perfectly

What would happen to the gears if you used petroleum based grease?

30:08 Old oil or grease can be removed with oil. You don't have to use any aggressive solutions for that. Let it soak overnight if it is really hard to remove and it cleans up very well. Please, never use acetone!

@jamesbennettmusic

3 ай бұрын

Yep I never use acetone near plastics. It wasn't really hardened but more of a gluey paste. I did all the sled cleaning with isopropanol.

I have one of these and I was hoping mine had an issue with the gears too as now inhoudloze have had a fix. Mine however has a laser unit that’s not moving when loading a disc. So it never reads it. Gears are fine by the looks and feel of them (easy to move). Anyone a suggestion as to the cause of a laser unit not moving?

@jamesbennettmusic

2 ай бұрын

Check if the laser lens bobs up and down when the door interlock is closed - if it isn't doing the focus movement then I would guess you either have a bad door switch, bad laser assembly or a bad focus circuit

I really can't understand why they choose to make some gears in Teflon and other gears using this plastic cr4p. :(

@jamesbennettmusic

3 ай бұрын

Someone suggested on the Philips video that it was done in different plastics to reduce vibration. I expected this one just to have a split in it like the Walkman clutches do, but didn't expect it to have utterly decomposed!

@asbestomolesto

3 ай бұрын

@@jamesbennettmusic Very interesting, thank you! :)