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As you would expect there are a lot of similarities between the early Sony and the Sanyo Betas. As a licensed manufacturer of the Beta format, Sanyo was free to make design changes in many areas but the tape path had to be consistent with the format, the same holds true with the other licensees. Click on the picture and you can look at the graph of the early Sony so you can better compare it to the Sanyo. Click on the picture again and the top view will come back but this time with the various components identified. Click it again to see the picture once more with no arrows. During refurbishing the Sanyo machines are examined and treated almost identically to what we have seen with the Sonys. Click on the picture again and you'll find a mechanism that is different and is notably Sanyo. A small motor assembly was used with a belt and pulley to drive the reels. Here we have two pendulum arms, one for directly driving the reels and another for functions that require less torque or allow slip. Click on the photo to see a close-up of these two components. The bottom pulley is the driver and is mounted on the motor shaft. The top or driven pulley has a top and bottom area. The bottom surface drives a pendulum mounted rubber tire that swings from one reel to the other depending on rotation and delivers full torque to the reels for fast forward and rewind. The top gear (sometimes this is also a rubber tire) drives a different section or layer of the reels that is designed to slip. This slipping is for the modes when the tape winds at its own rate, such as scan and play. Which pendulum is active is decided by a mechanism that enables them when the various functions are called upon. Early units had capstans driven by a rubber belt, later models were the pancake type. Rubber belts were also used in the threading and loading systems in most models. Rubber items are always replaced during refurbishing. Click on the photo and you'll see the supply reel disassembled. Click on the photo one more time and examine the video drum. Notice it has a highly polished surface, something that no other Beta manufacturer had. Sanyo's motive here was to reduce dirt build up and in that they succeeded but the trade off was the added the friction of a flat, smooth surface. This is why almost every Sanyo winds its tape back into the cassette shell for fast forward and rewind. Because of this deviation from the norm Sanyo was regarded as the "renegade Beta" maker. This makes their machines great rewinders if you want to avoid winding tapes in other machines that don't do this. Sanyo did offer some machines that left the tape threaded when winding but they used the machined drum design (and they appear to be Sony hybrids). To go to the other subjects covered in this section: ©Misterßetamax go to homepage |
