Gear in VCR eject mechanism not gripping?
 

Hi, I have a VCR with a broken eject mechanism. This is not a particularly good VCR, and it has other issues, so repairing it isn't all too important, but I would like to understand how it ever could have worked in the first place because it's been puzzling me for a while now.

It's probably easiest to see what I mean by looking at the attached images. The first one shows the cage that holds and lowers the tape. There are some gear teeth that are supposed to be moved by a bar that is shown in the bottom right of the second image. The problem is that when the cage is lowered all the way (as in the first image), the last gear tooth is already too far up to be gripped by the bar in the bottom. I would have thought that some tooth maybe broke off, but I've looked at everything very closely, and it really does not look as if anything is actually broken. The third and fourth image show the bar from the bottom side of the assembly. Again, nothing seems to actually be broken there. Does anyone have any idea what could be wrong here?

Thanks in advance for any help!

My guess is probably a bad timing on the cam gear (assuming the tape was once stuck and someone forced it out by hand)
Or it could be as simple as a dirty mode switch.
Wait for other answers

Every mechanism has timing marks, align the marks and everything will work as it should, You will need a service manual if you can't figure it out.

Thanks for the replies, but I don't see how this could just be a problem with the gears not being aligned properly. As can sort of be seen in the images I sent (specifically the first one), the gear teeth on the mechanism to raise or lower the cage holding the cassette only go around a small part of the way, so when the cage is lowered all the way, there is no tooth pointing downwards anymore. This means that the bar on the bottom that is supposed to turn that gear is simply too far down to even touch it at all, no matter how far it is pushed in either direction. The reason I'm so puzzled is that I have not found anything that looks broken or bent, so I really don't see how this could ever have worked (I mean, it obviously did, I just don't see how).

Side note: I am planning to clean the mode switch at some point as well, and I need to replace a capacitor that died recently, but that doesn't seem to be related to this particular problem.

Lookup how the mode switch works and the modes graph in the service manual.

So, I played around with it a bit more and finally found the problem. It was completely different than what I expected - the part of the cassette basket where it is attached at the bottom was actually bent slightly, which caused the gears to be too far apart (see attachment). A lot of force must have been used on that thing...

After bending that back, replacing a bad capacitor (see attachment), cleaning the mode switch, and spending hours figuring out how to get the gears aligned properly, it actually works now! The last part could have been avoided if I had been smarter while disassembling everything, but I guess that's how you learn. It's still pretty useless because the video head is really bad, but at least I got some experience fixing VCRs, so that's not too bad.