Hi, the title says it all really. Cleaned the internals with IPA and swapped the belt as usual, except now it plays the tapes in reverse! I cleaned the tape head and pinch rollers shortly before testing a tape, could a lack of friction be the culprit? The mechanisms seem to be working as normal. This is an auto-reverse model of Walkman too, so changing direction is done with the flick of a switch and not manually. Hope to hear from you all soon, stereomecha99
Hi all, this has been fixed. Turns out whoever had tried to replace the belt in this before me had messed with the switch present on the mechanism side of the PCB (component side), there's a small plastic post between two bits of conductive tape (it even says DIR/S301 here)... Somehow they had gotten it stuck between the two tapes so they just couldn't make proper contact, so I lifted it out to behind the two ends of tape, rebent the tape ends to be straight again and now it's 100% functional! This came in a lot of 3 Walkmans which have ALL been fixed now, so I'm very pleased. The previous owner really liked bending tape as they also did this in the WM-36, which created another electrical problem.
I had to make an account to comment because this post saved me. Thank you for following up with your solution! I took apart my EX302 in an effort to fix a loose/soft Stop mechanism, and when I put it back together it was playing in reverse. Spent over an hour trying to figure it out and googling and finally found this post. Couldn't fix the Stop mechanism, but I'm glad I didn't ruin the playback direction.
