Rubber or elastic bands as drive belts?
It is 3 AM, you have finally removed the last of the 38 screws to access the tape transport in your Suprex Never-Forget model X4123 answering machine and what do you fine? A broken belt, of course! What to do? As a test at least, a common elastic band may work. The recordings will likely have terrible wow and flutter but this will at least confirm that there is nothing else broken. In a pinch, this free solution can be left in place until a proper replacement arrives. This should work for many types of devices – CD players, VCRs, tape decks, etc. – where grooved pulleys are used and the belt is not called on to provide a great deal of power. Identifying and replacing SMT devices See the document: Surface Mount (SMD) Transistor/Diode Cross-reference. If this does not list your device or it is so fried that no markings survive, you can usually use some educated guesswork to select a suitable replacement. SMD types can usually be replaced with normal devices since there is usually suffici
