Looking Inside

Today I got the time to look into the 700ZXL to see what caused the problem. I was met with a deck packed with circuitry, all neatly organized and labelled. A quality machine indeed! Some screws were noted to be missing and some connectors were not correctly positioned.

Opening the back panel was easy. Releasing some screws allows the back panel to fan out. Bad corrosion was observed around the battery compartment.

Removing the auto-computing section brought more bad news. The corrosion had affected the bottom board and pieces of metal had falled on the components. The board has been badly damaged by leaking battery chemicals! This board controls all basic deck functions like play, record, rewind, forward and controls the cassette mechanisms.

The auto-computing board had not been spared as well. Leaked battery chemicals had spilled on the board and oxidized the board! Copper tracked had been eaten away and the board had been partially destroyed!

The opposite side of the board, the component side, seems to have been spared damage.

Upon closer inspection, the components seem to be in good condition. Only the printed board tracks seem to be damaged. The other board has not been damaged at all and looks to be in good condition. Over the week, I plan to explore different ways to repair the damaged sections. Looks like this lady is not going to be singing as soon as I expected.