Cassette Tape Santa
I attended a street festival outside of Guttenburg Arts and came upon a Santa Figurine from the 90s that someone put on the curb to throw away. I was intrigued because the figurine had a cassette player attached to it. There was a tape inside but it was easy enough to pop out and put another tape in. I didn’t own any cassette tapes but fortunately the Tunes music store did so I bought a couple. Unfortunately, no sound came out of the figurine even though the tape was spinning. I took the figurine to the local Repair Cafe to see if they could help. The Repair Cafe volunteers were very enthusiastic to help me with my project. However, they did not have the right type of screwdriver to open the plastic casing to get to the circuitry of the figurine. The figurine was obviously designed to be very difficult to take apart.
The last option I had to make the repair was to somehow crack open the plastic to get to the circuitry. To accomplish this, I used a rotary tool to cut an opening large enough in the plastic casing to fit a screwdriver in. Then, I used leverage on the screwdriver to open the plastic casing further until I could get a few fingers inside. I was able to pry open the plastic casing by snapping the small screws sealing it shut. The circuitry did not look damaged so I thought there must be something wrong with the speaker. To test this theory, I needed another speaker to solder in to see if it works. I took a speaker from headphones I found in an e-waste bin and soldered it to the connections of the original speaker. I was able to get sound out of the headphone speaker!
Then a few days later the original speaker, which I reconnected, started working as well. I’m not sure what happened, maybe adding more solder fixed the issue with the original speaker. I decided to keep both speakers connected and seal up the plastic casing with duct tape. Here is the end result with the original tape:
And here it is with a Van Morrison tape:
I was disappointed when I found out that it was playing at a slower speed so the other tapes I bought didn’t sound right in it. I think this was by design so you would not use the figurine to play your own tapes. Also, this video of someone else’s figurine sounds the same as mine. I’m not sure if there is a way to fix this.
One interesting thing about the cassette player is it has a fast forward button but not a rewind button. At first I thought this was bad design. But after more consideration, this makes sense because when you get to the end of side A on the tape, you flip it over and it is at the beginning of side B. So using fast forward on side A will rewind side B as well.
