Uploaded 2025-03-16
The start of an interesting journey about my Walkman...
Nice to be back into blogging finally, even if the methods presently are a bit...tricky, due to going from the very convenient Spacehey format of just writing everything in Obsidian, and chucking it there, to actually hosting my own website for this kind of thing with next to no assistance. I'm sure I won't regret this ! But let's actually focus, and elaborate on the subject at hand; Walkmans, and how I went about the repair process step by step, from very little knowledge, to wherever it, and I, end up.
Around...oh wow, only January 2024, I thought it was way earlier than that, alright. Well, around that time, I had been experimenting with psychedelics a fair bit, and it gave me an intense appreciation for the set, setting, aesthetics, and general "feel" you can get during a trip, and just for certain things in life you might experience. Something about the idea of a physical cassette player, with all the imperfections that come with audio on tape, spoke to me as a fantastic idea to get into. The clicks, the hiss, physically seeing music playing, the tactile sensations of it all, I cannot understate how much I loved this idea. Yet for whatever reason, I didn't go for it.
...that is, until the room block for Megaplex 2025 opened, and I had to think quickly on if I was seriously going to drop $500 on being the person others knew that would have an actual room for the convention. I didn't feel financially secure with being that at the time, and made what felt like a very mature call, and passed on the room block. I could've, it would've been one click, but...nah. To reward myself, I actually spent the time looking more seriously into cassettes, getting myself one that was listed as "For Parts", and having it be a fun little repair project.
The Sony WM-F18 had lots of mentions online for being both solid, and having one critical flaw that seemed easy to fix; A faulty headphone jack that would come loose. Sure enough, I found one listed as kinda sorta working off eBay, but with a faulty headphone jack, $65. *Bingo*. Maybe I overpaid, but something about it seemed promising, and the seller was quite friendly with communication about it after realizing something in their listing wasn't worded correctly, even offering to refund me. After very explicitly saying "Yeah no I'm aware it's likely in rough shape, I'm still interested because I'm gonna service it, please feel free to ship it ASAP", I waited 5 days, and it arrived *just* as I was coming down from an extremely intense LSD trip after a several month hiatus.
I eagerly started unscrewing screws, before realizing "Oh wow, this looks complicated...maybe get some rest first and start researching how to fix the headphone jack, and generally service these things."
After 13 hours of sleep, I woke up, and started ripping into as much info as I could find, and assembling a list of tools I'd need. Soldering iron ? Alright, grab a cheap one, a coyote told me that it'll get the job done for basic repairs. What's the precise issue ? Three pins are loose that should be connected to the main board with solder, or liquid metal that conducts, and hardens. Any other culprits ? Yeah, headphone jack could be dirty, swab it out with 99% isopropyl alcohol. Any other guides online to follow ? Not particularly, but walkman.land has a complete schematic and service manual, that should come in handy...
Oop. That doesn't look good, I don't even know what that part is called, but there's clearly a tiny crack in it. I didn't do it, I assume that's just a result of 40 years of age on this poor thing. I make a note of this, and continue on.
So, not knowing what the hell I'm doing, and accidentally burning myself with the soldering iron upon realizing it is basically just a hot piece of metal you melt things with, I vaguely mushed around the existing solder that was on the board until it looked like the pins were more accurately secured and bridged to the board, then cleaned it all up with more isopropyl alcohol, scraped off a little corrosion, and to my surprise ?
It's ALIVE ! The headphone jack is incredibly picky with the angles it enjoys, and there's a low hum in the right channel sometimes, as if someone was blowing into a jug, and there's a fucking horrific crackling and popping noise when the volume is adjusted, but...it works, I actually resurrected it.
I popped the back off again, and scraped at a bit more corrosion near one of the capacitors, and that seemed to solve the volume issue. I quite excitedly spent the next couple days just...enjoying having a working if janky cassette player, as I learned how the auto-rewind feature works, got to hear all the insane sounds of electronic interference in my room, and very excitedly started scouring my favorite bands and albums for cassette releases (I love that there's modern albums that still do cassette releases~). It was around this point that I felt like I had kind of given it personality in a way, felt like it likely stayed dormant for decades after someone mangled the headphone jack, only for the slightest bit of care to cause it to jump back to life all eager, if still limping in ways.
It was nice to feel like I got a win on the board with this, as not everything I try to fix is a success, but this one was undeniable, I could hear it for myself that it lived.
Feeling exceptionally pleased with myself, but also knowing that to tackle this further, I would need outside perspectives, I took to Reddit to happily share my little project. I don't quite know why I was expecting to get zero responses or information, but someone quite quickly showed up in the comments section to answer a massive amount of my questions I had, in a tone that was rather comically blunt, but did vibe with me. It's nice to be given the straight answers to things in a blunt way, while still being respected as someone that can likely achieve what they set out to do, while clearly not being bullshitted with incorrect info.
They pointed out the solder job looked very close to their first attempt at soldering something, and that the hollow noise in the right channel was likely caused by either that, or the capacitors, and mentioned how copper soldering wick would help to suck up the old solder, so fresh stuff could be applied for a cleaner, more flush fit. I didn't even realize it at first, but I absolutely did not solder the headphone jack on at the correct angle either, it was slightly skewed. The mention of capacitors also made me realize...
"Wait, how the hell do I find replacement parts ? How do I read and understand what a capacitor is ?"
"Well, the corroded capacitors on the board look like they're labelled C212 and C311. The service manual *does* reference these as being identical, and listed as part number 1-123-617-00, but...it isn't 1985, and what the hell do any of these numbers mean ?"
A sense of being faintly overwhelmed started to grab hold of me, but I was still interested in figuring all this out. After a fair bit of research on what the hell a capacitor is, and how to read these numbers, I was able to figure out how to decode what the manual lists.
C212 and C311 were simply the identifiers for the individual capacitors on the board
1-123-617-00 is the part number, what you would order from a catalog, back in 1985
ELECT is shorthand for Electrolytic Capacitor
10MF *probably* stands for 10 microfarads, or the base unit of capacitance a resistor has
20% is likely the tolerance, or range a capacitor has to deal with, so ±20% tolerance...
16V is the rated voltage, simple
After checking the diameter much earlier to be exactly 4mm, and using the site that the helpful Reddit user mentioned...
...wow, I just figured out how to read, decode, and source capacitors. That's...a little nuts, and something that my mind still as I write this, can't fully comprehend, but I have no reason to believe I'm wrong...
Upon having all this sink in, I proceeded to spend the rest of the night brute forcing my website to get blog stuff finally up and running, so I could document this entire process. I still have no idea what that cracked wheel is called, or how I would even find a replacement for it, but cracked plastics like that I feel can likely be salvaged by an epoxy of some kind in case I can't actually source the right part.
I get a bad feeling that I'm going to inevitably fuck something up in this entire process, but if you stop yourself from trying to fix things you love because you're afraid of ruining them...well actually I think that's insanely reasonable, but I'm not going to be held back by fear on this one, I want to see how far I can get with restoring this. I get a feeling that taking care of this is going to be an ongoing process that'll end up teaching me a lot, and it might end up being something I could help teach others about too, or at least de-mystify the process in some way.
...I'm so excited for those cassettes to come in