This one should have been somewhat easy but after grabbing the old belts, there's two fat ones running it, I quickly found out they were pure goo and I had to do extensive cleaning. Luckily I had a new bottle of 91% IPA to help scrub all the surfaces. One of the belts was kind of an odd-ball size so I had to try to find the replacement in my shoe box full of belts. With zero luck I tried to find the MCM Electronics site which used to have a ton of cool stuff on it including some belt charts but they've been recently acquired by Newark and all the information was gone. Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine I was able to get into the 2006 MCM Website and cross-reference my belts with the proper size and did find one in the box. I reassembled the unit but was dismayed when the play wouldn't engage, the motor was running but the gears weren't turning the hubs. After pulling it apart again and pushing levers with a very small screwdriver I was finally able to get the gears to match up. It looks like everything is good, I tested it on my NOS Rolling Stones tape and it sounds pretty good. I think I need to do a little bit of tuning on it to get the full sound but overall it seems to be a pretty decent deck.
With a good screwdriver I can get it to play most of the time but the heads don't want to move consistently into place, I think I'll have to really pull it apart and degrease it and make sure there's no goo balls in there. Overall it's a pretty nice deck and my 1981 Van Halen Tape sound great on it.
My belts are NOS MCM Belts that are about 10 years old. There's a thread on tapeheads.net with the size but it only goes out to tenths of an inch. The belts I used are spec'd to thousands of an inch so I'm a little off the actual number but I do feel like it's running a hair slow. I'm A-B'ing the tape compared to MP3 and it confirms it might be a little bit slow but there's no motor adjustment on this model. I'm not sure if I want to spend a lot of time taking apart everything and checking the lubricants and if pieces of goo are lodged in the works.
AD-F810 Service Manual here: https://elektrotanya.com/aiwa_ad-f810_sm.pdf/download.html Tape speed adjustment, p.12, hole in the rear of the motor itself. HTH GB
Thanks greg! It feels like there's a rubber plug just a little bit inside of the hole and I can't see a groove for a slotted or Phillips. I was reading on tapeheads that they had to modify the electrical wiring to the motor to control the speed. I think I need to pull it all apart and give it a deep cleaning, unfortunately some other "projects" have arrived.
