[QuadList] Rebuilding RCA TR-600s - Success

Thu Sep 10 14:21:47 CDT 2009

Congratulations, great news.

Re #2, make sure the linkages behind the headwheel panel are clean and lubed.  Otherwise the auto track will be sluggish.  Be careful with that 120VAC if they are working on electrical around you.

Steve

Steve Greene
Audiovisual Archivist
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
(301) 837-1772

>>> jwalko at scenesavers.com 9/10/2009 3:06:25 PM >>>

Well*excitement abounds* We now have the machine back into good working order.  It is producing really nice looking pictures*very stable*no noticeable banding on output*boy, it feels good (I hope I am not speaking too soon. Ok*funny story with this.  We have the quads in a different building from our main office.  It isn't the best location, but it is secure.  It is actually a museum, mainly consisting of broadcast hardware (old studio cameras, tower lights, audio equipment, etc.) from Cincinnati's broadcast past*featuring some quite famous people (Ruth Lyons, Marty Breneman, Nick Clooney*).  Anyway, they are rebuilding this building*almost literally from the ground up.  We showed up on Tuesday  and hit the power for our air compressor*nothing.  It was acting like there is either a blown fuse or the circuit was tripped. Now, this particular circuit breaker is in a breaker box in the ceiling, next to the air handlers for the building.  It is dark up there*so here I go, climbing up this ladder to check the circuit.  Did I mention it is dark up there*so the only way you can check the circuit is by feel.  Well that isn't doing me any good, so I climb back down and get a flash light (yeah*should have thought of that first). The circuit is not tripped*what the heck*so I start looking at the wires coming into the box*they are disconnected.  So I follow them to the box they come from*wires aren't only disconnected*they are cut off.  No more air compressor* As part of the building rehab, they are re-doing the electric.  The electricians didn't know that box was feeding our circuit.  Heck, it wasn't part of what they needed, so they decided to just take it out altogether.  So, to make a long story short, our large compressor won't be working again any time soon.  Fortunately, we have a back up compressor that runs on 120 v, and while it does work hard to try and keep up, it does a fine job operating one machine at a time. So, since we didn't have a compressor on Tuesday, all we could do was an alignment with bars being fed into the machine*no way to put the machine in play mode because no air.  Today we got air and were able to fine tune the adjustments and got the picture looking really good. Some interesting observations*1.      Blanking on house playback is really wide*  Apparently, this is necessary for something to do with recording (according to the manual), but if set strictly to the manual settings it is almost too wide.  We aren't going to record anyway.  For playback, our plan is to use House mode instead of Regen (any thoughts on this??)2.      System runs better in manual track mode as compared to auto track mode.3.      Originally we thought we would have to run the system in tone wheel mode, but it seems to do fine in Pix lock*at least with the tapes we've tested so far.4.      Video signal is surprisingly stable.  We will be recording to Digital Betacam from these machines, so only testing will tell if it is stable enough.  I am concerned about low-band B&W video, since there appears to be no burst in the video (as you would expect)*not sure if D-beta will like this or not.5.      We were running a 1-hour tape.  The reel brakes need some adjustment, as the mass of this reel was just too much for the brake to stop it by itself.  This also caused tension issues.  But, switching to spot reels caused less problems (we originally thoughts the brakes weren't working at all*but it just appears as if they need some adjustment).6.      I take back what I said about the manuals not being well-written*they actually are pretty good.  One of the challenges is that sometimes they reference a board by number (3A20 for example) and other times by name*and the names in the manual are not always the same as on the board because of abbreviation. I do not know exactly why we had the set back we did the other day*all I can guess is that we did all of our adjustments without the bars generator genlocked to the machine*which caused our adjustments to be "off".   We are going to get into transferring this week*I'll keep you posted as to how it is going.  And then onto the second machine*I want to get it up and running as a spare. Anyway, a BIG 'OL THANKS to the people on the Quad List group for your support, help and insight*  You know the genlock thing the other day was just one of those things*We checked the signal coming from the generator*and we checked bars*but we never checked to make sure they were actually genlocked (as I mentioned, apparently the gunlock input on the bars generator doesn't work).  Again*sometimes it is the simple things that we take for granted that cause the biggest problems.  The video drifting should have been a major clue*but we were having trouble seeing video output.  Once we got that hooked up and with the insight of some of the people from this list, we figured out the problem and were able to get back on track. Thanks again!!! John WalkoMedia Archive ManagerScene Savers800-978-3445

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