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Panasonic’s response to the Sony Walkman (Patreon)
Content
You may remember me mentioning that I’d suffered from a few failed/aborted projects in a row and how I planned to try and salvage one of these and make it into a video. This is that video.
The most interesting period in the life of any new tech category for me is when things haven’t been fully ironed out and standardised down to mundanity. This is what drew me towards the National Panasonic RX-2700. It’s a Walkman from an alternate timeline.
You might spot that I’m speaking more clearly in this video, I think my latest medical trial might possibly be working. Either that or it’s a very convincing placebo. I’ll speak more about this in the next update just as soon as I’ve collected enough other things to talk about to make it worthwhile.
Take care and have a great weekend.
UPDATE: I’ve managed to trim a minute off the running time by removing some redundant sections - hopefully this makes the video flow a tad quicker. This new version is now the one embedded above.
UPDATE 2:
FAQ
Q) You should send it to….they’d/I’d fix it.
A) It really is not worth anyone’s time.
This cost me £44 - I bought it to use in a video and that video is done.
The disassembly was recorded across two days. The section at the end where I throw in the towel was shot after I’d spent the afternoon of day two stripping down the tape mechanism to get the belts in place. This involved removing multiple split washers and e-clips the size of a pinhead. Once those parts were reassembled a couple of the vital ones were no longer securely held in place. It’s likely some microscopic, important and irreplaceable components pinged off during disassembly, never to be seen again. Whatever the reason though - the mechanism is a write-off.
Whenever something broken appears in a video I understand the desire to see the thing fixed. This is a heavy, compromised personal stereo cassette player that even if functional would be destined to sit unused. Given that the mechanism relied on dried up rubber friction wheels it’s unlikely it would be trustworthy. I'd rather play my cassettes using something else.
It was bought as 'junk', to enable me to tell the story of Panasonic's responses to the Walkman as well as to demonstrate the potential complexity/futility of performing some belt swaps. It's performed a useful function - that job is now done.
If anyone wants to take on the challenge of swapping the belts on one of these - the RX-2700 appears on eBay quite frequently. I believe other early Panasonic models are equally complex internally. If you bought one of these at least you’ll be starting off with a complete unit, with all the parts intact. You don’t want to go into something like this following on from someone else’s half-finished repair - you don’t know what damage has been done or irreplaceable parts lost. Rather than start with a bag of assorted bits, probably not all the bits, you'd be better to start from scratch with an unmolested example. Good luck if you do, but there are way way better personal stereo cassette players out there far more worthy of your time.
