Already finding a use for this blog! Thought that I didn't do enough interesting things for me to warrant posting anything anywhere but the reality is that half the stuff I find interesting online is people posting about random niche stuff that they might feel is similarly uninteresting... enough chatter!
Picture attached is a Realistic Micro-27 14-1044 that I bought on eBay. It's a birthday present for a friend who loves Twin peaks and old stuff. Coincidentally this is both old and is the recorder used in certain scenes in the show (At least according to the source below). The other one that Cooper uses more frequently is a Panasonic, but the big scene that uses automatic voice activation (with the parrot... Darcey or something?) uses this model as it actually has voice activation and the Panasonic doesn't. Anyways there were no Panasonics about, so I thought this would be the next best thing, as they aren't easy to find... especially if you aren't in the US.
I bought it for about £4 broken, with the shipping from the US being triple the price of the thing... crazy! Anyways there wasn't a chance of getting one anywhere else so worth it in my eyes. Apparently anything Realistic made was sold through Radioshack in the US... and not really anywhere else, so not really shocking that they all are over there. As described by the seller, it was broken when it arrived, so the first thing to do was check how broken it was... I was guessing that it was unlikely to be anything major, the nice thing about electronics like these is that they tend to be fairly simple, and made of strong materials, so there isn't too much to go crazy wrong. Thankfully that was the case with this one.
After putting in some batteries and pressing play, there was no response from the central spinners, but there was some noise from the speaker. Signs of life. So I started the process of taking the thing apart. Very small screws! It came apart pretty methodically which was nice, however getting the board out and seperated from the mechanics was pretty difficult. The recorder comes in 3 distinct sections, the case, the board and the mechanics. These are pretty solid, however the first time I took it apart the wiring was all glued together and I was nervous so it took a while to seperate them. The repair I needed to do involved changing the belts (as one was super worn out) and a bit of soldering as the wires are very thin and old and a bit crumbly so they kept snapping and coming apart from the board. I have got it all working and am now waiting for a microcassette tape (or 6 of them! thanks ebay) to arrive. I will then do a bit of testing and probably take the whole thing apart again as I've noticed that in my re-assembly the play button doesnt have the correct clicking mechanism. Small things like that make you realise how much design and thought goes into making these things, it's pretty insane. In this reassembly, I will take a lot of photos and do a bit more formal documentation to help anybody else who my try this same repair, as there's not much out there on the modern web for it.
Anyways that will wrap up this post, I'm hopefully going to get that next post up in the next week or so. Writing this has made me realise I want a bunch of features for this site that I will have to work out. Individual project pages with posts from each project would be cool, and hopefully be of some use for anybody searching the web for info. I'm kinda sick of how poor a job search engines seem to do when trying to look up anything specific... Seems like it will send me to random semi-related things or top 10 lists that read like they are AI generated. Forum posts aren't particularly easy to come by and are normally pretty old so things like photos are often missing (fucking photobucket)... and following with "reddit" at the end of each search is good but only does so much. I would like to get make a comment section as well, I will try to give as much info as I can (for other non-interactor types like me) but repairs can often end up with specifics that I may forget to to put in there/photos might be shit. Also might be nice to have some interaction about this stuff... nobody in my real life does any of this, and I'm not super inclined to bother people in any online spaces like discords with this stuff, guess thats an advantage of my own website kinda can do what I want without bothering anyone or feeling insufferable. Anyhows, Formact out.
Sources
https://twinpeaksblog.com/2020/09/30/twin-peaks-prop-dale-coopers-tape-recorders/
