Philips N1500

The best stuff I've found - from experience with contemporary Philips reel-to-reel machines - is Cif cream and plenty of kitchen towels. Does a superb job; it might be an idea to get some disposable nitrile gloves as well just to keep the resultant mess off your hands.

Hi All,

Work goes on to remove the disintegrated belts. Thank for the suggestion of using Cif which works but I have found that foam cleaner works too (white spirit doesn't) but in both cases you have to remove as much of the goo as possible (Screwdriver, tissue paper) and as said this stuff sticks like nothing else, avoid as much as possible getting it on anything else! be warned, it takes a lot of time and patience. And yes it also sticks to your skin too and just gets everywhere. I have now , shown in accompanying pictures, cleaned all the goo off and lubricated all the drum, capstan and motor bearings, and fitted the new belts. For information the motors on these machines are mains synchronous and are governed by a magnetic eddy current brakes. One of the first faults I had on one of these was the capstan servo would not lock and after working through how the servo worked could find nothing wrong so disconnected the eddy brake and it still wouldn't run fast enough! It was then I diverted my attention to the motors and dismantled them, removed the old dried up grease, re-lubricated and then when tried ran to fast, re-connected eddy current brake and all locked up immediately, that was in 1978 (I was 19 then) on the first video machine I had in for repair. That machine had to have a new video head drum and audio/sync head, one very pleased owner when finished. I have had to repair the loading motor pulley assembly which is always split on these and machine now loads and sort of plays, lackluster video and no colour, I'll leave that for the next instalment.

Hurty

In the 1500 I have, the lockfit transistors in the Chroma and Luma stages suffered. machine would work--For a while, then video would disappear or colour, and tracing would find yet another dead lockfit.

Got bored and replaced 'em on masse!

I have never seen inside a N1500 before!

Is the fan on the right just to keep what I assume is the capstan motor cool or does blow air around the rest of the machine too?

Hope to see it up and running soon.

I would like to own one of these machines one day if funds will allow.

The first and last N1500 I ever saw was around 1974, certainly not that long after they were introduced. Just a case of dirty heads.

The people who had it in their possession didn't own it but were paid by a company to record the adverts on ITV, the tapes of any recordings that had interruptions or were cut short were posted to back them. I presume that the firms who were affected by the interruption of their commercial could make a claim against ITV region or ITA?

John.

Jayceebee said
The first and last N1500 I ever saw was around 1974, certainly not that long after they were introduced. Just a case of dirty heads.

The people who had it in their possession didn't own it but were paid by a company to record the adverts on ITV, the tapes of any recordings that had interruptions or were cut short were posted to back them. I presume that the firms who were affected by the interruption of their commercial could make a claim against ITV region or ITA?

John.  

They certainly could: if you've paid for twenty seconds of advertising during a high audience programme and only got ten, you'd be pretty angry. Even now that's the case: except in the modern world with greater automation, that too can be automated by logging the ancillary data embedded in the video and comparing it against what was transmitted - so if a sponsor's name only appears for five seconds when they paid for ten, the ancillary data can be checked to see if/where the automation was at fault or if it was human error for example.

TVJON74 said
I have never seen inside a N1500 before!

Is the fan on the right just to keep what I assume is the capstan motor cool or does blow air around the rest of the machine too?

Hi Jon

The fan is on the shaft of the drum motor which revolves much more quickly than the capstan so giving better cooling.

The Capstan and drum motor run at approx 3000 RPM, and have Eddy-Current Brakes. There's an approx 2:1 ratio on the head-motor/drum pulley pair Both have fans. The Head/drum motor's fan which is a small four-blade metal thing on the lower side of motor cools just the motor itself.

The Capstan motor's shrouded plastic fan positioned on top of the motor draws air down through the motor into the lower deck where the electronics are.

Faults in the Eddy-Current servos can often be caused by Incorrect Belt sizes changing the designed ratios, and by dead Lockfits...

I made a service-cassette by removing the top from a normal one, and epoxying the steel guide-pin into the lower half and making lightly springed brackets to hold the two Nylon rollers in place at the front, so as to keep light pressure on them during use,--or they can ride upwards....

--Care is needed when fitting to machine or storage, but otherwise a great easy (and dirt cheap) bit of kit to service the 1500, and filled with VHS E240 tape works well.

Goreseinon 3M's/Scotch is (was) just down the road from me, Wish I had known there were N1500's there years ago!

 before you get started i recomended you to check out the video heads, they have around 600 hours from new, the VCR LP was a really improvment, espicially the hours on the drum, new heads for a machine like this i very hard to find today, and very expensive.

The VCR SP machines has a really good picture, i remember the later 1502 series have the special video crisp circuit for improved picture quality.

I hope you get this big beast back to life again 😉

Alex 😉

Too comment on Jayceebee posts.

Before video recorders came along we had a rental TV customer who had a 16mm film camera rigged up in front of the set and they had to also had to record the adverts for an advertising agency. He was the type of customer who would happily watch TV all day.

In much more recent times in my retirement I took a part time job which entailed going to cinemas and watching and writing down details (time, product etc)  of each advertisement shown. Later at home I would send the results to the company by internet. I got paid and free entry to cinemas, plus I could stay and watch the films if I wanted to but I seldom bothered.  The job folded, maybe with digital presentation they have another way of tracking the cinemas advertising slots.

I remember going on a course about servicing the N1500 when they first came out. I wonder if there are still tape cassettes about to use in them as I seem to recall they used an unusual double decker reel system.

John