Worked on stuff taking up room in the basement today. I have three Pioneer 6-Disc CD changers that were/are broken. One I bought new back in 1991, Mike gave me one, and the other one I picked one up at a flea market for $2.00. The lady I bought it from said she didn't have any idea what it was, that her daughter had left it home when she went off to college. It worked perfectly for a couple of years.
The first one - the one I bought, is a PD M630, the best one of the bunch. It has a remote and features the other two don't have. I had looked around on the Internet for tips on what could be wrong with it. One article mentioned that, because the laser points down (you put the CDs in upside down), sometimes the laser's lens comes unglued and falls out. When I took the cover off and checked, sure enough, the lens was missing. After some shaking, I found the lens and glued it back in with Gorilla glue. It works - so far.
Next I opened up the PD M501, my $2.00 flea market find. The first thing I noticed was that the metal ring on the bottom that pushes up on the CD had come off and was stuck to the magnetic ring on the top side. I glued that back into place and tried it out. It played a complete CD fine but then stopped working. I thought the laser assembly was getting stuck at the inner edge of the CD, where it comes to a rest after playing. I tried greasing the gears and the runner the assembly rides on but it was still intermittent. After some poking and prodding, I found out the ribbon cable running from the main circuit board to the laser assembly was bad. I bent it till it worked consistently and put one of those black clips you use to hold papers on it to keep it in place. Now that's jerry-rigged but it seems to work. Time will tell.
The last one, the one Mike gave me, is a PD M435 with intermittent problems. I'll probably just clean the lens and close it back up for now. I could just junk it and keep the cartridge assembly as spare parts for the PD M630, they look identical.
Wasn't that fascinating?
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