My weekend

  So what was I doing over the weekend?

  Riding my bike?

  Playing Minecraft?

  Well yes I did both of those. Pesky creepers. But I also decided to finally sort out all the recordings on my DVD recorder.  For those of you who like model numbers, it is a Phillips DVDR3440h.  An old 80GB recorder with no Freeview and a nasty cheap looking on-screen interface.  Dont get me started on it's remote control.

  So why do I keep it? Well for several reasons:

• It is my first recorder and I'm quite sentimental.
• Even though it has no digital tuner the analogue tuner is needed for viewing and recording the analogue signal from the SKY box downstairs.
• Out of my two recorders (the second one has Freeview) it is the only one that will blank a DVD+RW disc properly.
• I have converted it to a multi-region DVD player thus I can play my two US DVD's :-)

  So it's drive was full and I wanted to record it onto rewritable dvd's and dump them onto the pc. However, there was one problem.
   For a while now the dvd tray had been sticking. I was using the blade of my pen knife to convince it to come out. This stopped working over the last weekend, leaving me unable to eject the tray.  So I decided to open the thing up and clean it, assuming that the problem was a load of dust making the drive belt slip.  Below is a pic of the insides.

   It did look pretty clean. The drive with the sticking tray is the black thing at the bottom right corner.  I removed a load of screws and opened the drive up.  Below is a pic of the drive, opened with the tray pulled out (I had removed some of the dust).

 

  Just below the plastic tray you can see a black rubber belt.  This is the belt that loads and ejects the tray.  If the belt is slipping due to dust then I just need to dust it and "yay it works"...  but take a closer look...

  See all those lovely cracks in the black rubber belt?  There's the problem!  Those cracks are due to the age of the belt.  It's now too weak to drive the disk tray.  All is not lost though.  These bands have been used since I was a kid in cassette players and are still used in othe drives like this one.

  Off to Maplin to get a replacement! Came back from Maplin without one!  Did not even have them in the catalogue.

  Luckily I had several old drives laying about, so decided to see if they would be a donor for a new band.  I spent most of saturday night probing around with tweezers down the throats of old drives pulling out bands that were either too big or just a little loose.  One drive had no band at all, used gears instead, bugger.

  So I got grumpy and decided just to order one of the net.  I knew Maplin would have them to order so went there and low and behold there they were.  

  But wait, whats that? 

  A button to check the stock at the store? 

  Enter a postcode and... 

  Bedford store has 5 of of the blighters!  Goes to show that nowadays you cant even trust a paper catalogue.  I dont really like the catalogue since they changed it anyway.

  So I went down on sunday, bought one, ripped open the drive againa and now it works perfectly.

Ahh the smell of electronics.  What a wonderful weekend.  Now to build a fence round my house in minecraft to keep out the creepers :-)