Yeah, unloading by hand takes a bit of time, you have to turn the little worm gear many many times.
There's a full manual for the mechanism
here. It's possible to make the deck turn the motor manually with a service mode. On the NV-HS1000 at least you do it by pressing eject, ffwd and rwd at the same time (on the panel) until the first numer on the display is 7, then you can make the motor turn in the loading direction with the play button and unload with the stop button. I think it's the same on the 1980P as indicated in it's
service manual. If you use this to unload a tape, not that this won't turn the tape spools, so that has to be done manually by turning the capstan flywheel (big round metal thing on the bottom of the mechanism) to reel the tape in. Otherwise the tape will hang out of the cassette.
The service mode can also give you some pointers to what may be wrong, maybe it's the split plastic bit talked about in the other thread, or it could be some electronics issue.
