Repairs and upgrades of my Pioneer RT-909

I have recently acquired an impressive Pioneer RT-909 reel to reel. As it’s a 30 year-old machine, it needed a complete check and servicing as you may guess.

Here’s how it arrived. Not full of dust, but definitely dirty:

The rollers were also disintegrated:

And this is how the heads looked like. Full of dust but happily in excellent condition underneath the dust layer:

But after being in Sergi’s expert hands at his tech repair lab, now they look like this:

Awesome, huh? Now let’s get into it…

The motors worked perfectly, but the entire deck was full of dust:

so I asked Sergi to clean it thoroughly, both inside and outside:

Of course, he had to replace the old belt, which was almost melt down:

for a brand new one from Marrs communication:

The main board was also very dirty and had a lot of old caps that probably had loose part of their quality in all these years:

So a good cleaning and a new set of high-grade caps (including audiophile-grade Nichicon caps) would return the sound quality of its full glory… even better than when new:

See the right board with the new caps:

Here’s the full set of replaced caps:

And here’s my Pioneer working again:

Sergi (and I later) cleaned it externally, so it looked like new:

Want to see more photos? Take a look at this another post.

Want to see it in action? Don’t miss this!