Thanks to the fellow members for their suggestions. This turned out to be a two-part fix. First, I checked the light-dark reflective disc under the take-up reel and found there was some dirt on it. Cleaning that solved the erratic speed during the FF process but the tape would still slow down and stop with about 1/16 inch thick winding left to go before the end of the tape. Looked under the chassis and saw that the drive belt from the flywheel to the idler clutch was slipping when the tape was having problems winding. New belt solved that. I did clean the belt originally and thought that it was tight enough but it wasn't. My original message: this Akai VCR VS-515U came in needing a good cleanup and idler tire change. I did it and now plays fine but I notice that rewind and FF have an issue. As a tape is rewound near to the beginning or FF near to the end, the action is very slow, it takes forever for the process to get the tape to the end. Some tapes are worse than others and during the process, I hear slight pitch variations in motor speed. If I load in a dummy cassette and grab a hold of the reels, I can't make it stop, so it appears to have tons of torque. I stopped the rewind and let the unit sit for 20 min. and then started it again, thinking bearings were tighting up from heat, but right from cold it had same problem. Checked the tips bases that I have with no reference to this problem. If it is a bad motor, why does it have plenty of torque when I manually grasp the reels? I wouldn't bother with it, except that I already called the customer to come get it before I realized the problem. THanks for any help. -- Gary McCartney McCartney Electronics Guelph Ontario Canada Est. 1984 email: gary (at) number63.ca ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lost Password: http://www.tech-assist.org and select "Login Problems?". Email Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/techassist/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lost Password: http://www.tech-assist.org and select "Login Problems?". Email Archives: //www.freelists.org/archives/techassist/