Early in 2020, when Coronavirus was just becoming a thing, a friend gave me an 8 track player and a pile of 8 track cartridges. The player is, according to the front panel at least, a Wien 8TD3. Nothing particularly special about that, it's quite a common unit, often found with different branding but based on the Model T145 made by Birmingham Sound Reproducers (BSR).
The mystery with my player is what's inside. The guts of the BSR T145 are shown in the service manual and I expected to find the same thing inside my player as this tear down of an 8TD3.
But mine has a completely different mechanism inside. All my searching online for "T145" or "8TD3" didn't come up with anything looking like this, they all have the mechanism with the fan on the motor shown above.
I remembered that Techmoan featured a Wien player in his 2013 video about 8 track, so I took another look at that video. His player has the same internal mechanism as mine, but the front panel shows "8TD4"... Mystery solved!
My unit must have had the front panel for a different unit fitted at some point. I'm not complaining, the mechanism for the 8TD4 looks more sophisticated than the 8TD3 and I believe it's a more modern player. A sticker inside for the Matsushita branded motor (although weirdly not stuck on the motor itself) has a date of 1976 and earlier dates than that seem to be quoted for the 8TD3.
Initially this player just needed a new belt and a clean, but recently the motor started screeching and wow & flutter was bad. A drop of oil on the motor bearings took care of that.
I also took the opportunity to fix another intermittent problem where the Track 4 indicator bulb would not light. Testing proved the bulb itself to be alright. It was the rotary switch on the underside of the chassis, formed by a shaft from above rotating a wiper over contacts on a circuit board beneath. The wiper of the switch was not making a good connection to the relevant contact on the circuit board.
Pushing in the board a bit solved the problem so I wrapped a thin piece of wire around the shaft of the switch to push the board upwards and make a reliable connection. Not a hi-tech solution but it works fine now.
These players come with a Din plug for the audio out, which in my case had been cut off and some phono plugs spliced on with tape. As the insulation of the original wiring had gone brittle I replaced the whole thing with a new phono cable.
Not a bad player, and there's some half decent albums in that stack of 8-tracks too.
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