JVC SR-VS10 MiniDV side eating tapes?
 

A few months ago, I got my hands on a JVC SR-VS10 that wasn't working. After consulting some people here and doing some repairs, I was able to get the VCR side working flawlessly. However, I never really bothered with the miniDV side until just recently. I've attached two videos I took of what's happening/points of interest. I have a feeling the belt might just be worn, but I wanted to see if anyone has any other suggestions before I replace anything.

The belt is certainly looks like it has some slack but that could be due to binding gears from dried up grease, Before worrying about the belt I would give it a good clean and relube the entire mechanism and go from there.

I would start from pinch roller shaft cleaning and lubrication. Remove pinch roller assembly, clean shaft add a drop of oil (not grease) on shaft and bushing. If grease on shaft is hardened pinch roller assembly can move with delay.

Never had a VS10, but if it's anything like the VS30, there's a hub gear that likes to crack and may result in eaten tapes. The general recommendation is to avoid using them for DV because they are known to be tape eaters. I haven't heard of specific common problems with them outside of cracked gears. I will say it's unlikely that the belt there is slipping since it is "toothed", but it doesn't seem that movement is getting translated into any movement of the tape hubs, which I'm not totally clear if it is supposed to move the hubs in this particular mode not having a working one side by side to look at - but, if it is supposed to, then it's either a cracked gear, or a problem at the pendulum gear that isn't allowing it to fully swing from one hub to the other.

Maybe. But after countless problems with semi-stuck pinch rollers in Panasonic G and K mechanisms what (at least K) cause similar problem, I would advise to start with shaft cleaning.

Sorta kinda.
- VS10 is a heavy beast of a deck, more like a Panasonic than a JVC.
- VS20 is even larger/heavier -- but also very fragile, and easily breaks in shipping

The DV deck in all of them is comparable, but not 100% identical.

Yep, engineering flaws in the DV mechs. :2cents:

DV is a fragile format, and these DV mechs didn't have the best tolerances. So bad going into bad.

That's complete opposite of the VHS deck half, which was outstanding when it was new. But in the 2020s, the entire decks tend to be junked out, both DV and VHS. This is especially true of eBay decks, even more so when those were sourced from abusive school/edu/gov offline auctions. Never buy VS10 or VS20 from eBay, it will not end well.