Hi,

Nightmare situation here. My best deck, the NV-HS860 ate a tape earlier. Or rather, it was struggling to eject. After taking off the VCRs shell, pushing the eject button and very gently lifting the tape itself, the machine ejected the tape. It was crinkled but I manually rewound the tape back into the shell. It plays OK on another deck, which is good because the tape isn't mine and is irreplaceable.

However, my deck now doesn't want to know at all when I insert a tape. It takes it in just fine, but ejects it a couple of seconds later. I'm going to see if the hi-fi repair shop down the road can do anything about it, and I'll post a video of the machine here, but if anyone knows of anything I might be overlooking that would help, that would be really helpful. And yes I've been searching / Googling / watching YouTube things related to this matter for hours now.

This really is horrible as I don't have anything else with TBC and I have work to do. Thanks in advance for any pointers at all.

Here's a video. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Om9lY8cHCPM

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Upon further learning / inspection, the roller guides are way back when they should be at the bottom. Probably a specialist fix, either that or I now have a fairly expensive paperweight.

If something is broken you should be able to replace most of the mechanism bits with bits from a less fancy Panasonic with the same mechanism which are pretty common at least in Europe.

Might this be simple bands on the transport coming loose, or breaking?

It's possible, yeah. Here's the answer from a repair shop if that helps any - I'll likely be sending it to them for repair.

"It seems the arms that take the tape from the cassette and around the drum are stuck in the playback / forward position. This could be down to timing or damaged gears, I wouldn't know without properly seeing the machine, but I would be happy to offer you a free estimate if you can get it into the shop. To give you some idea of costs, a VCR repair usually costs between £30 and £60 depending on what I find and there is also the possibility of not being able to repair it if it requires parts I don't have, as they are no longer available."

Doesn't seem to be any loose material (e.g. teeth from broken cogs) rattling inside the unit upon a gentle shake.