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Please help - DCR-TRV103 soaked in sea-water

About 1 week ago my TRV103 took a salt-water bath (in NewFoundland at Shallow Bay, very nice place indeed). I have managed to dry and clean it up immediately, in order to avoid corrosion (disassembled lens block, opened tape deck and drenched lens, head & mechanics first in distilled water then in isopropylic alcohol 99%, then let it dry in blowing air current - sorry, these were camping conditions). It partly came back to life however with problems :
- the tape eject mechanism seems to have friction problems - sometimes the deck does not open or close properly and I am getting C:31:xx errors
- quite often it does not want to record, asking for cleaning tape (reinserting the cassette helps)
- when playing-back new recordings sometimes it inadvertently detects "D->HI-8" tape, usually at the transition points when I had to reinsert the cassette (the recording itself might be corrupt)

I wonder if all these things aren't related to a single cause - the tape deck mechanics. I am not sure if the isopropylic alcohol dissolved some kind of lube that made the mechanics work smoothly - ejecting and/or properly tensioning the tape. I looked in the service manual (on http://www.eserviceinfo.com) and didn't find any mention of lube for the tape deck mechanism.

Beside these, the camera also now has focus problems - the manual focus does not seem to work and the auto one is flaky.

Thanks for any advice on how to revive my Handycam

Romar

Romar
Sun, 03 Aug 2008 02:31:49 +0000

I am surprised to hear you soaked it in rubbing alcohol as the last step. In large quantities, the rubbing alcohol leaves a thick residue. You might have to soak it in distilled water again just to be sure. The lens focusing problem could be due to the residue coating on the lens elements within the lens assembly. This problem occurred to me recently when I used too much rubbing alcohol to clean my P&S lens. (See my cleaning point and shoot lens article and my thread on Sony EOS Cyber-shot.)

Chieh Cheng
Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:15:19 +0000

Thanks for the reply. In fact it was not rubbing alcohol (the one with camphor and other non-volatile ingredients) but 99% pure isopropylic, having as only ingredient 1% water. However it seems it attacked either the plastic gears (unlikely, as they are made out of an inert, sturdy polymer like teflon) or the lube that used to make the tape deck load/eject smoothly. Today, as the tape deck mechanics seemed stuck, I've tried "in extremis" to re-lubricate (few drops of molybdenum grease of the kind used for Tamya models) the plastic gear and moving metal shafts that are involved with loading/ejecting the tape. As a result the tape deck mechanics seems to work better however I am now getting a steady C:31:10 error (tape load timeout)followed by auto-eject, no matter the tape I am loading (even the cleaning one). I am afraid I've affected a sensor or switch or whatever mechanism is used to detect that the tape is properly loaded. I don't know however how the unit detects a properly loaded tape - is it a pressure sensor, optical one or what? Cannot find any reference in the service manual. Any idea how the tape-load detection works on the TRV103?

Thanks again

Romar
Mon, 04 Aug 2008 03:02:01 +0000

I didn't realize that there is a difference between rubbing alcohol and isopropylic alcohol. If there is a difference, then I'll have to change my statement. I used too much 91% isopropylic alcohol on my lens and it left a coating on the inside.

Chieh Cheng
Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:17:47 +0000

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