Hi8 eject error. Jammed shut. YIKES, Should i try to fix myself?

[Bob Hart]

I come down on the side of coincidence. The TDK tape might be a dog and the walnut which caused the camera eject to choke.

However I think that on-off-on cycling suggests a jammed mechanism and enough slack in the gear train to allow the motor off locktorque one way then the other and eventually nudge it loose. My bet comes down on a crumb of some dried lube and/or plug of fluff and general lack of lube in the sliding guides and the mechanism pulling up just that little bit short.

A microswitch at the end of the travel might be setting off too early due to wear of other parts or simply drag on some part of the mechanism which holds it back bent or sprung just that little bit and allows the load motor to drive the rest to reach their end travel and the end travel switch to happily say "job's done all is well with the world and everything is in its place" and shuts the power off to the load motor.

Another detector somewhere else tells the camera "No it aint" and the camera reports an error message and turns off.

It will likely be some small fiddly thing which would resolve with a clean and lube. If you don't want to spend $300 or so but want the camera to play nice, maybe put the cleaning tape through it and then once a month or so find a non-critical tape, cycle the tape system with a load and unload cycle so things don't freeze up.

[Tyson Persall]

Agreed with you Paul. Was about to do this very thing. Luckily it started working.

Originally Posted by Paul R Johnson

I tried to post this yesterday when the database was misbehaving, and now the problem's fixed - however, I'll still share it just to give a different viewpoint.

I've got a different view. If you don't have the skills at all to even try the repair, don't - but if you have common sense, a set of jewellers type screwdrivers to fit the tiny screws, then what is the worse thing you can do? Break it? It's already broken. Any form of paid for professional repair is going to be very expensive simply because it's fiddly, takes time, and they really don't want to work on older kit anyway! So your options at the moment with it in the current condition are pretty limited. Spend lots of money, or throw it away.

So my view is that as the actual value of the camera is virtually nothing, spending any money has to be uneconomic, so why not have a go. Some are real devils, others, once you work out which screws to remove, come to bits quite easily, and then, once you have access, you can either attempt (if you can gain enough access) to manually force the eject, by manipulating the small plastic cogs - this is often made much easier if you snip the tape, which is almost certainly what is stopping the eject completing. You could find once the tape is cut, that as the pressure is removed from the guides, it will eject, and be fine - total loss = 1 tape. Sometimes, once the case is off, you can remove the lid of the cassette holder, letting the tape slip out. As jammed tapes are pretty common, the manufacturers usually build in a way of removing them - they're tiny and crammed with parts, but the secret is there somewhere. If you break it, all you've lost is your time - you can't really make it worse.

If the camera was newish and very valuable, then obviously a proper repair by people who know makes sense, but at the moment, it's a scrap item as it stands - so you don't have much to lose?