In this lab, we got the chance to dismantle a seemingly ancient Sony cassette player. While it was past it’s prime ( as indicated by some mold), it was really cool to see the inside of it and reminisce about the cassette and cd players that have been in my life.
The first thing that we took out was the battery. (In reality, it just fell out.) It was a Sony Nickel Cadium Battery Pack, and it took up about 1/4 of the space in the cassette player. We then tackled the many screws that held the outer aluminum casing with a small phillips head screw driver. The outer aluminum casing was likely made from a sheet that was stamped and bent into the desired shape.
Interior of Cassette player when laid “face down”
After removing the plastic backing that was attached to the aluminum cover, you had a clear view of a jumble of wires, an old circuit board, the back of what we later discovered was a speaker, small motor that had a rubber belt, and other mechanical components that were connected to the buttons on the cassette player.
Some of the design features of this cassette were the plastic buttons that were attached to the mechanical components that allowed you to play tapes, a metal mic input that allowed you to record on a tape, and the aforementioned speaker that was made of a thin plastic that was likely cut from sheets .
We then continued to fully utilize the small phillips head screwdriver to access more of the interior components since much of the cassette player was held together by small screws. After taking off the circuit board and removing some screws, we had mostly unobstructed access to the mechanical components that were connected to the buttons. These components were mostly metal (perhaps aluminum or steel?) and the source of most of the weight of the device. (Unfortunately, we didn’t get the chance to weigh the individual components of the device precisely.)
Inside of cassette (post wire cutters) laid out roughly the way it was before disassembled
We ultimately had to use wire cutters to
separate the innermost components of the cassette player to get a better look at them.
Inside of cassette (post wire cutters)
This made it a lot easier to see the mechanical components inside the cassette, as demonstrated in the video below.
The construction of the cassette player ultimately led me to believe that it was not meant to be taken apart. The main evidence for this would be that some of the screws also seem to have some sort of adhesive on them. (The two screws closest to my hand in the video look like they have some sort of blue glue on them.) While I don’t know how expensive this device would’ve been to purchase back when it was more in demand, the construction also indicates that it wasn’t meant to be fixed. We could only access certain components by using wire cutters, and the way it was wired still made this a somewhat difficult task. If you had to remove an inner component without damaging the wiring to replace it, I imagine that would be pretty difficult and time consuming.
