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PR & E Tomcat question

H

HadYourPhil

I was recently given several of these decks to repair/check out. Also, fortunately, was given the manual. One deck has a strange problem. It'll play a cart for a couple of seconds, then the "abort" light starts flashing and the pinch roller disengages. I've tried adjusting the pinch roller pressure and pinch roller engage pots, even swapped that card with another deck. Also, I tried adjusting the Pinch roller flag adjustment. No dice. Anyone ever see this back in the day?
I had forgotten what solid pieces of equipment these were!
 
Might be a bad cart. Tape wind might be too tight.
Another possibility is bad electrolytic caps on the "control" card.
 
It has been a while, but if memory serves, the abort function is set off by the motor going overcurrent. Either from too much side load on the capstan or worn bearings. Take a look in the book, it 'splains in there someplace what triggers the abort mode. Maybe Jack William's boy, who posts here occasionally, knows where some of the factory guys have landed. They could set you straight quickly.
 
a bit off-topic--yet on the subject of Tomcat cart decks--there is a site where you can "Bid" to buy them. Any ideas of what one would "Bid" for (what looks to be great condition in photos) triple deck with (supposedly) LESS than 300 hour usage?

"Leibo"
 
Thanks for the tips. I'll have some time to fiddle with 'em again later this week.
 
Bob Moore at Moortronix in Michagan is a great source for service and help on older PR&E gear. He used to be the service manager many years ago before going back to station engineering in LA and NY. You can find his business on the web at mooretronix.com. Great guy. He may be able to help with these as he was arround there in the days that product came out.
 
I have dispatched an email to Mr. Moore, describing my plight.

Another oddity about the bad pb deck is that the capstan motor is always on...
It's definitely a problem with the microcomputer board.
 
It was U9 on the microcomputer board. A CD4529BCN. Hard to find, but I found one.
Mr. Moore was very helpful.

Used those machines as a talent at WAXY in Ft. Lauderdale and WNKS in Columbus, GA. In Columbus, we ran 'em at 15ips. They sounded teriffic!!
 
You couldn't use Scotchcarts at 15i.p.s., but with AA-5s, they did Good Things. We had a bunch of them in Birmingham from the initial production run... 2 digit serial numbers. The audio card was redesigned at one point, I think we replaced the old ones. We ran them in matrix mode, so that scatter errors between tracks would show as a loss of seperation instead of a loss of highs.. how much stereo can you do with Willie and an accoustic anyway. PR&E had a comparison in their booth at NAB one year, to show they were the equal of the reel machines of the day. Someone - I believe our mutual friend The Bushman - picked the cart player every time. He could hear the increased flutter, though it was very small. You can't pull tape as smoothly out of a continuous pack as you can off a reel. When you consider the constraints of the NAB cart though, they were and are truly awesome machines. When we bought our last recorders, I think we gave $6 Large and change each for them. They weren't inexpensive.
 
The ones we used in Columbus at 15ips were all but impossible to tell from the source material. We cleaned the decks between every shift. The downside was that the longest songs you could cart up were just north of 5 minutes... maybe 5:30. And, cart failures were both funny and spectacular! I enjoyed 'em on the air. You could make a bit out of the failure. And you are right. Not many carts could take 15ips.
 
On one of his 'fact finding' trips around the country, Jack stopped off and we had a long conversation about equipment. He pointed out, the high output carts >never< met the NAB spec for breakaway torque because the tape was too rough. They required roughly twice the pull to get things moving. Thus the ceramic capstans on the Tomcats, and the screamiing high durometer pinch rollers.
 
Hi gang - Sorry I was late to this discussion about the Tomcat Kitty Cats, I've been swamped with my own 4 radio station children, beginning a ratings period and a format flip.

Believe it or not, I've never worked at a station that ran Tomcats (exception was at an RKO facility where I worked on the AM with ITC Premiums and the FM did have Tomcats). Sadly I've had my fair share of experience with ITC 99s and Scotch Carts.

Sorry I don't have any input of tech support of Tomcats, only my enjoyment of the stations that used carts, wanted great sound going as far as running 15ips (and 7.5ips with an optical sensor) and even adding Dolby SP. I would personally say Bob Moore at Mooretronix is the best source.

Jeff Williams
 
I had pretty good luck with the 99s, but they weren't as robust as the Tomcat, nor did they have the audio performance. We bought one of the cart prep recorders for the production room at one station, so the carts would be lined up nicely for stereo playback. All of a sudden, our commercial product got real poor. Out of phse problems abounded. I finally figured out one jock had as part of the job dubbing agency stuff, and this was where the problem arose. So, I took myself to the studios one evening to observe and be instructed. It was enlightening. Jock took tonight's production tapes, and a stack of carts. Cart stack set to the left of the recorder. Each cart in turn was put in the machine and run through the record prep cycle, then stacked on the right of the machine. After they were all processed, the top one was recorded, then the next, and so on.

For the Unanointed, the 99 recorder prepped by erasing the cart, then recording a 10KHz tone on it and adjusting the azimuth of the record head to match the fixed playback head, thus ensuring you were recording with the tape azimuth correct for the guides in that particular cart - which guides varied considerably, and then erased the cart again and found the splice. The cart on top of the stack always sounded great.
 
littlejohn said:
For the Unanointed, the 99 recorder prepped by erasing the cart, then recording a 10KHz tone on it and adjusting the azimuth of the record head to match the fixed playback head, thus ensuring you were recording with the tape azimuth correct for the guides in that particular cart - which guides varied considerably, and then erased the cart again and found the splice. The cart on top of the stack always sounded great.
Click to expand...

Another issue if one ESLs a bunch of carts was overhearing the eraser coil - and IIRC those babies weren't cheap.
 
SRP said:
littlejohn said:
For the Unanointed, the 99 recorder prepped by erasing the cart, then recording a 10KHz tone on it and adjusting the azimuth of the record head to match the fixed playback head, thus ensuring you were recording with the tape azimuth correct for the guides in that particular cart - which guides varied considerably, and then erased the cart again and found the splice. The cart on top of the stack always sounded great.
Click to expand...

Another issue if one ESLs a bunch of carts was overhearing the eraser coil - and IIRC those babies weren't cheap.
Click to expand...

I've seen them make smoke when being used as Littlejohn describes above.
 
I remember doing a factory modification on the ELSA coil to add a temp. sensor to keep the coil from burning out.

RFB

RadeoEngineer said:
SRP said:
littlejohn said:
For the Unanointed, the 99 recorder prepped by erasing the cart, then recording a 10KHz tone on it and adjusting the azimuth of the record head to match the fixed playback head, thus ensuring you were recording with the tape azimuth correct for the guides in that particular cart - which guides varied considerably, and then erased the cart again and found the splice. The cart on top of the stack always sounded great.
Click to expand...

Another issue if one ESLs a bunch of carts was overhearing the eraser coil - and IIRC those babies weren't cheap.
Click to expand...

I've seen them make smoke when being used as Littlejohn describes above.
Click to expand...
 
I have two stories about 99s:

1. Months before consolidation was about to begin in our industry, I was working for a newspaper company who I'll call "G" which eventually sold its stations to a company named "J". One day I came to work to our two station cluster with a news-talk station in it which had Deltas and 99s with mono heads. The Chief Engineer arrived one day with a giant box and a big grin on his face because his cap ex request that took 5 years was finally approved by "G's" committee. This engineer was so excited to have a brand new 99B recorder with Mono heads that cost a cool $7k. A year later we were installing Prophet Systems with company "J".

2. One three day weekend I was working production and dubbing a ton of spots Friday night. The Production Director came in and took over and continued with the dubs and one of the recorders a 99A (that we constantly bitched about) smoked off with the erase coil sticking on and creating some hum.
 
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