This one was rather interesting… although I managed to lose most of the footage and ended up with what you see in the video above. At least the darned thing works! That’s really the important part when you’ve got a CD player that refuses to eject its tray.

The machine in question is a Denon DCD-F101, and the original fault was fairly straightforward. The tray wouldn’t come out properly because the little rubber drive belt inside the mechanism had deteriorated. The belt wasn’t doing its job anymore, so I needed to find something to replace it.

My first solution was a rubber band I happened to find in a drawer. Extremely professional, I know! But it was enough to get the eject mechanism moving again, which was rather satisfying. Sometimes the simplest experiment is all you need to work out whether the rest of the machine is still capable of doing its thing.

Of course, the rubber band was completely the wrong colour for such a magnificent piece of machinery. I couldn’t possibly leave it like that, could I? So repair number two involved swapping it for a black rubber band instead. Much more appropriate for a high-end CD player!

With the new arrangement fitted, the tray was opening and closing again. Beautiful! I wouldn’t expect an ordinary household rubber band to last as well as a properly sized drive belt, but for this little experiment it certainly established what was causing the problem.

As for the video, I had to improvise a voiceover without even having the original footage in front of me. That made the timing rather entertaining, especially when I was trying to guess what the viewer was looking at. There are some magnificent slow-motion shots of the eject mechanism in there, if I do say so myself!

Not that I personally use CDs or DVDs very much these days. I don’t really see the attraction. My hearing seems to roll off somewhere around 14 to 16 kHz, so the very top end of CD audio is probably rather wasted on me. The joys of ageing!

Soon I won’t have to listen to punk kids on my lawn telling me to put some pants on. There are advantages to getting older, apparently!

Honestly though, I do enjoy making videos like this. Low on content, timing off, mistakes poorly corrected and everything else that comes with trying to wing it. It really shows the impressiveness of my ability to improvise when needed, although thankfully I don’t do it quite this badly every time.

So there we go. One Denon CD player with a working eject mechanism, even if the temporary belt arrangement is a little unconventional. Next up we’ll have a look at some Sega Saturn hints and tips when swapping power supplies between units. Back to a nice sensible console, then!