Wow!! This one was an absolute nightmare Really challenging as the cassette deck was completely crippled, it wasn't till I stripped it down as shown in my post when it arrived - I was so excited to get one of the not so common Crowns & never thought it would take 2 months to get it sorted The keyblock carries the six piano keys that operate the cassette transport functions.........5 out of the six keys return springs were simply missing (The pixie's have been in here) & the remaining spring was jammed solid & ground into the fast forward plate - yeah it was unrepairable as it stood Huge thank you to Rudey who unprompted, sent me the deck from a CSC-945L which shares the same deck minus the search system - That didn't matter at all, it was the keyblock I needed, mine was fucked This took ages the next stage, I put it aside many times.............3 layers of sliding operating the locks for each key to change over & that's after a major stripdown of both deck mechanisms!! Lots of swearing but no loss of temper Just walking away from it & doing slowly stage by stage until: VIOLA!! The doner keyblock now carried the extra components that mine had to make it work at all Well the deck now operated manually in my hands, the stop eject arrangement is beautifully simple, but to put everything back was a way off yet - I could operate all functions as though the deck was connected & so far so good Next up, clean all switches out with servisol, power the motor up & clean the pinch roller back to black, polish the heads which were all really dirty We are now up to today cassette backplate back in, damped eject mechanism replaced with the better of the two, azimuth adjusted (only a tiny bit out) speakers plugged back in & front back on A really good cabinet clean, top & sides, sadly there is some 'pitting' on the top panel, it looks like deep ingrained dirt to me but I don't want to polish the writing on the top, so for now it's better but not pristine!! Picture Heavy I'm afraid & many haven't made it onto here as this repair was a real pig!! Took so many pictures as reference These are just some (reduced size) that give you some idea of what it was like I can laugh now & I am well chuffed to now have a fully working CSC-960L which sounds somewhere between the 850 & 950 & has the very beautiful Crown looks Good mechanisms once sorted - very stable playback & some nice led's of course Here is my CSC-960 people
