Dulwich Hill Bicycle Club

Got 5 tapes that I need to transfer to another media. Has anyone got a working VCR that I can borrow for a day or two

Yeah, you can come around and collect it tonight if you like.

Thank's Othy. Make that next week sometime

No problem, give me a call / text when you need it.

Ah crap, my camcorder isn't working, it won't accept the tapes. The mechanism works when no tape is inserted but won't load one when a tape is put in.

I have 2 options;
1. get it fixed, but where?
2. buy a minidv camcorder

More info would be needed to give you a quick diagnosis on the camcorder. When you say it won't load when there is a tape in there do you mean it won't close the door assuming its one of the ones with a closes the tape door itself. Depending on how old it is and how much it was worth new it may not be worth fixing.

the tape goes in correctly, there is no external problem such as a door that won't close. The mechanism is rather complicated, after closing the door, the motor moves the tape further in, then there is a secondary door that you manually close.

If there is no tape inserted all the mechanism works correctly. If you put a tape in, the camera tries to engage it and then quits, opening the door for tape removal.

Have you tried cleaning the tape path? Rollers, pins and heads.

Something could be slipping. The camera will pull the tape out and wrap it around the head, if this fails then it will give up. Its not usually done with a belt drive in cameras as far as I know. Do you know if the guides are moving at all with a tape in? Have you tried a different tape that is known to be good? Is there any dust in the mech?

The tape is brand new, it went in the first time, but then the camera failed due to the dew meter and I had to leave it 24 hours. From that point it wouldn't accept the tape, so I've tried a brand new cleaning tape and it rejects that too.

Looking inside with the torch, I can't see anything wrong.

There is a small window, so I shined the torch in there and I can see that the first stage of pulling the tape out works, but then it doesn't do the second stage of pulling the tape around the heads. Without a tape in, I can see the pins go around the the head, so the mechanism that pulls the tape around the heads is working but is not been activated.

Mike, I have an almost unused Sony VCR. Do you want it?

Thanks Toff, but I don't need it. I only need to playback about 8 VHS tapes and I have Tim's VCR for the job.

The problem I've encountered is that my camcorder is stuffed. Yes I could dump the 8 VHS tapes into the pc with a cheap piece of hardware, but I also have 60 miniDV tapes that I want to dump to a hard drive, so I still need miniDV playback even if I simply bypass the problem for the 8 VHS tapes