Tracking problem on Philips VR685/02

[Jorn99]

Hi all,

I bought a Philips VR685/02 VCR this week and played some of our old tapes to see what's all on it.

In the beginning the tapes all played fine and I didn't need to use manual tracking. But now I'm having problems with the tracking on some tapes which played without trouble yesterday. I get no picture on these tapes, only sound, and when I use manual tracking I still get either no picture or a very snowy picture.

The manual tracking on this VCR is done by holding the P+ button and then adjusting with P+ and P- but I get no result with both.

It happens very randomly, because I just finished digitalising a tape which had these problems yesterday. I just put another tape in and it played perfectly, then rewound it and now I have the tracking problems on this one.

Probably I'm just doing something wrong with the manual tracking but it seems not good that the issue happens randomly.

Hopefully you can help me!

Jorn

[davexnet]

There have been some other threads like this recently, the cause is damage (creases or contamination ) to tape,
and/or dirty playback or control track head