That time I bought a broken TV/VCR combo, had the faith of Job and fixed it.
This Emerson VT1322 (Orion built) took a few weeks to get to the bottom of. Back in ‘94 it retailed for $650 which would be about $1400 bucks today. Local repair guy said it wasn‘t worth fixing. From where he sits he’s probably right. But for me, I really wanted it to work. When I got it, it was covered in soot and wouldn’t take a tape in at all, but the price was good considering the current market. Cleaned it up, opened it up, and troubleshooted one problem after another. It was Carrie who saved it. Wedging the book in, I isolated the last problem. But the main fix was probably retiming cams 1 and 2 and cleaning the mode switch. There was a pin out of place in the loading mechanism near the clutch, too, causing the tape not to fully seat, which affected the rotation of the capstan/idler system. Let’s just say I learned a lot about VCRs in the last few weeks. Life lesson about perseverance learned from a CRT. Side note: Macrovision can make it tough to hook an extra VCR to an early 90s TV/VCR combo.