NGY

That one is the sled motor. If the laser needs to do a lot of repositioning, you can observe its cog "oscillating" heavily. This can cause a noise. A short video could help us better assessing, what actually happens there.

Do you have this part in place? (see in the post above)

This is item "155" on page 59 of the SM: Probably it has been removed when opening the drive up for the belt replacement, and was not put back for any reason.

This applies to any grease (gel, spray, etc.) that has silicon content.

Because there are very sensitive optics in very close distances from the lubricated mechanical parts. And if silicon grease gets on those parts (or, "in", actually, like the OP cavities where the mirrors, prisms, sensors, etc. are located), it is very hard, if ever possible at all to remove from there. Just imagine when your glasses (sunglasses) have some fingerprints, how badly it affects your vision (and how far is human retina from the resolution of the CD/DVD/MD players). Same for certain electrical contacts, as pointed out in the quote in Kevin's post above. Silicon grease is a great stuff for many applications, but is the meanest thing when it comes to how to properly remove it. BTW, very good article you linked. Explains lots of "why"-s and "why-not"-s, I liked it.

You probably missed Kevin's point above. If you did not, then my apologies for the redundant post here. It may be worth to check the PDS/TDS of this TF2 first though. An MD drive is nor a bicycle, neither a roller bearing. "A grease is just a grease" approach might not work here. To the extreeme: there are "white lithium grease" products for heavy duty tractors and other agricultural machinery, for example. Would you just use those in your precious hifi gear :-) ? As a rule of thumb, better avoid anything labelled "All purpose".

For those who cannot sleep at night (or, like me, messing around with MD gear instead): today I got a 480 with the exact same symptoms that Petter had with his 980. I replaced the belt about six months ago, and the deck have been working fine since then. A few days ago it did not accept any discs, then finally today it just stayed in standby after powering up, so my friend brougth it again. I went through my usual check list, mechanically all looked OK (incl. all BD board switches). If I "trick" a disc in manually, after powering on the deck spits the disc out and goes back to standby. In Service mode, the drive does not want to load the disc either (thus I could not check the laser so left it for later). But here is the interesting part: after powering on, staying in Standby, the drive DOES do something! If I lean close and listen carefully I hear a very soft noise, like the laser was trying to focus. No light from the lens though. Also, I can see a faint movement of the sled motor, it tries to move the OP inwards (= towards the centre of the disc). Being already in parking position, it certainly cannot move further in. It keeps trying several times, I actually shut the device down after a few, because obviously something was wrong there and I did not want to make the trouble bigger. This much was for today, tbc. Now, I wonder, if Petter can observe too the same on his drive. If he does, we are probably getting somewhere.

If I remember correctly, M-Crew is looking for the CAV-MN10 interface - that is an USB box, and as such, it needs the appropriate dll-s installed.

I read this quite a while ago - might be worth a few minutes to quickly read through, if it can help.

I don't want to seem like a stickler, or doing any hairsplitting here, so please don't take my words below anything like that. And I know you had "laser power settings" on your mind when writing the above. I just felt it was important to mention, that - at least on the Sony MD decks I met so far - there is no such thing in the service menu, as IOP settings for the laser. IOP value is more of a measure (i.e., a "consequence" ), and not really a parameter or variable one can modify or pre-set in a menu. Here is a short explanation on this (with some addition here), should anyone be interested in details.

I thought others might find this little hint useful too. There is a nice feature of this forum engine: after you attached a picture and inserted into the text, double-click into the photo (the inserted "copy" of it), that brings up a configuration window. There you can set the size of the thumbnail, how the picture will appear in the post. Say 120...200 pixels wide (heigth follows it proportionally), and it still gives an idea of what the photo is about, yet the post remains compact, easier to view, scroll, etc.. Then readers just click on the thumbnail, and can see the picture in its original size.

I guess this is the same one that is also on Elektrotanya. Sadly it does not have any circuit diagrams, only (rather poor quality) PCB layouts. Probably -30V. But the VFD should work with -17V as well, only somewhat dimmer. I am not sure that this SM is 100% consistent, because parts numbering seems different on the PCB layouts and in the parts list. Nevertheless, if the VFD driver IC is what we see in the SM, then its datasheet talks about -35V (actually anything down to -40V).

I guess you replaced the whole drive mechanism, didn't you? Error dp information is stored on the BD board. I would love to see whether or not marrying the "bad" drive and the good OWH makes now the 520 recording. It would confirm that only the broken OWH was the cause, or something else. Just to give a heads up for later visitors, what to look for in similar cases (besides swapping a complete drive :-) ). Congratulations anyhow, the 920 is a nice QS machine.

Ha-ha, that's my younger brother's favourite :-) . I can't count how many TV-sets, tape recorders etc. I also fixed when I was in the army and later at the university, by similar hocus-pocus ... I have quite a few funny experiences, but this is not the right topic for them. Maybe one day I open a separate topic for these obscure stories ;-) .

Hi Petter, I am glad to hear about you again, although it is a bit worrying that you cannot enter Service mode now. You may want to disconnect all cables inside the deck, so all individual panels stand on their own and not connected to each other by any way. Then, after removing the reset jumper, leave your deck with all cables and jumper removed for at least two-three days, before you will again have time to continue the repair. There is another trick that I have been using back in the ancient times of first IBM XT/AT PC-s, but I just do not dare to recommend it for such a delicate machine. When we faced a computer being dead or irresponsive, had tried everything but nothing helped, we finally stripped it down to its individal cards, and put the cards into buckets full of clean water for 24 hours. In many cases, this "barbarian-like" treatment helped, the water discharged any hidden potentials in caps, IC-s, or between other components. Now, I am not saying this is what you should do with your precious 980. But one of the main chips seems playing a game with you, that can also reasonably be some stubborn static charge (hopefully not yet an irreversible ESD damage) somewhere inside the silicon. A "lighter" version of the above trick we used on fine electronic measuring instruments for the same purpose was shorting the leads (talking about old through-hole components) of the ICs with thin copper wires, or, we simply covered the leads with aluminium foil, using a small brush (this also worked on SMD components later). If you decide go this way, it is important to re-emphasize the necessary, appropriate ESD protection measures.

Just simple visual inspection. Take the deck's lid off (*), load a disc and watch it spinning in the drive. Normally you should see a disc as if it was standing still, not spinning. If you see a disc "rocking", that's not so good. Will most probably play/record though, don't get me wrong, the question here is how much extra load this puts on the laser, to compensate for it. (*) note: on the 20ES it takes a lot more screws, plus another shielding plate to be removed, to have a view into the drive. It is not that convenient, and not really practical either.

I would love to hear back from Petter, whether or not he had time to move forward with his repair. We all learn from these cases, and I am personally very interested, because I had a couple of very similar problems in the past, that I could never properly solve. And I also wish he was finally able to get his 980 back to life, as it is a valuable machine.

22uF is 10V I think. But no big deal: 1) filter caps are certainly designed to have a calculated value, but that value often can be higher without any negative effect on the circuit, 2) these caps are frequently produced with a 20% tolerance (E6 series) for mass products anyway, 3) higher voltage is not an issue either, in a 5V circuit both 10V or 16V just do it well, and it is more the form factor/size that limits what to use, as long as it is higher than 5V.

No doubt. We began working on your 980 drive :-) , and we did it for a reason :-) . I still put my two cents on the sled problem, that I began with. That rattling noise on both of your videos is definitely telling that to me. The second video is more "verbose", because it shows the OP tries to play a track, then reverses back to the TOC as it did not find it, so seeks for the information again, but it could not properly read the TOC either, so keeps trying. That noise is very similar to when the sled moves back to the beginning of the dics and the gear jumps over one tooth of the rack. I have seen several similar cases. Until you don't pull the sled off the drive and take a look, we cannot really exclude this possible cause.

Both are electrolityc capacitors. In mass production it is not unknown that different batches use sometimes different components, as there are always several part suppliers that serve the OEM. Also, if there is a slight design change, for any reason engineers felt they needed, some parts can have a somewhat different specification, but essentially the part is the same. You can compare the P/N of the BD board, and see if one is a later version. As long as only the last two digits are different, they normally interchangeable.

I think the EM-30L is a fairly popular product and meets all requirements we would ever need in our applications. When I was after an appropriate grease, I run exactly into the "1 kg tin only" problem, and had hard times to find smaller quantities. Then I found a Canadian company MG Chemicals, and their "No.8461", a white lithium grease. An electronics grade product, compatible with metals/plastics/rubber, does not contain silicon, has long lasting consistency and also prevents corrosion, etc., much like the Molykote. The manufacturer had a standard 3 oz. tube (~85 g) commercially available. Actually shipping cost more than the product itself. And as Kevin said, even this 3 oz. tube is a HUGE quantity! I put about 5 ml of it into a small glass pot, and years after and dozens of machines maintaned, I still have a bit of that small portion. I am more than happy to offer anybody such a tiny amount for free, though I feel the postage from mainland Europe might be a lot less reasonable than a UK or US based seller's.

Vodka? :-) No, I am serious. Certainly not "equivalent', but it is a fairly "clean" spirit, with relatively high content of alcohol. Anyway, isopropyl alcohol is there in several other liquids around the household, like rubbing alcohol, eyeglasses cleaner, window cleaner, stain remover, etc. All these materials may do a good cleaning on those contacts. Mineral spirit (white spirit) would also do it, though the odor is not that good, and probably not the best for such delicate parts. And a trick: sometime I use ordinary eraser to remove the oxides from those galvanised contacts. Carefully though, not to wrinkle the ribbon itself.

Well, ribbon cables can trick you in several ways. It must became a routin to always check them first. Here is one example - I reseated this one a quite few times, but the fault did not want to change. It took me a while to actually look at it, not just reseat it. Visual observation can also help a lot. And I would like to add another one on the "broken records" list: do not move over to the next thing to check, before you are done with the previous one. You must conclude that it was not the cause, and prove it for yourself, then you can move on. Otherwise, jumping back and forth between different potential causes might lead to a total chaos in your head, and would definitely not help to find the way out. You just stand there and can't see the wood for the trees.

So true ... I remember when I made my first LPM and had the first successful repair with the help of it. It was such a liberating feeling, that I immediately fell under the "law of the instrument" (aka: "if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it was a nail" - although we used to say this proverb slightly differently: "give a moron a hammer, and ... etc.") :-)

Sounds like the sled cannot find the right positon for reading the TOC. Might be a dental problem :-) . (direct link) (another one here)