Fixing a 40 Year old Record Player

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Chapter one: A lucky find on Ebay

After watching a

video by Techmoan about the Sony PS-FL99

I wanted to have something similar. I didn't really care about the track order programming but having a tray-loading record player that operates by the press of a button and can automatically move the arm back and play the record again after it has ended sounded intriguing.

So I did some googling and searching on Ebay and found a Sony PS-FL77 for 120? + Shipping. (Except one outlier for 100?) those normally go for between 200? and 350?, depending on their state.

Obviously that deal had a catch: It's pretty scuffed up on the outside and there seemed to be something wrong with the electronics on the inside. The power plug also looked like it's not original to this machine and the tonearm motor was missing a belt. (These pictures are from the

Seller on Ebay

)

A zoomed-in section of the inside of the record player in question. There's a bundle of wires coming in from under a plastic piece. Some of the wires from that bundle hang loose around inside of the case.

A side photo of the record player where a piece of the outer shell towards the back is missing.

The backside of the record player. The hard-mounted power cable on the back is black with a white plug. It's likely not original.

Another photo of the inside of the record player showing a motor and some gears clearly missing a belt between them.

All in all I figured fixing this thing would be a fun puzzle to solve, especially since the

Service Manual

is archived online.

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