How to Clean Your Cassette Player, Courtesy of the Internet
The car cassette player starts skipping a few months back. I try to fix it by banging and violence. That works with most technology, but it doesn’t work in my car. I try different cassettes and nothing is working. I try jamming my fingers into the tape compartment but that doesn’t do anything.
I am frustrated. I can’t listen to nothing but the radio for the rest of my life.
I ask some gear-headed friends for advice. They tell me to take it to a car “decoration” store. I refuse to go to a car decoration store. They suggest I invest 80JDs into replacing it with an auxiliary. I refuse, because I like my cassette player. They recommend I buy a USB MP3 player that I can use in my car’s lighter. I tried those, I tell them. They’re shit.
Then BAM. One morning I’m driving to the office and I get a sudden memory of cassette-player cleaning cassettes. The memory is distant and reeks of nostalgia. The tapes were white and they smelled like ethanol. I remember that it magically fixed broken cassette players, and that I was always so amazed at how something so simple was actually successful.
Aha. So it must be a cleaning issue.
I try to remove my car’s cassette player from the “tableau”, but I can’t figure out how to remove it without breaking anything. There are no screws. There are no buttons to push. How the hell do they remove it? They must use a knife or something sharp, but I have no sharp objects on me.
Maybe I can Google how to clean it? But I must be the only human left in the Universe who uses a cassette player. They don’t even sell cassettes anymore. Could Google possibly have a solution?
Of course. Google is the sum of all the world’s knowledge, regardless of whether it’s extinct or not.
How to remove your car’s stereo:
Calcutta Global Chat has a forum post on how to clean it: http://www.calcuttaglobalchat.net/invboard/index.php?showtopic=13462
Then it occurs to me that Radioshack might still stock cassette tape cleaning cassettes. Radioshack is sometimes awesome too, in that weird-stuff-findability Internet way. Fortunately, it is also conveniently located near the office. I walk to it.
Lo and behold.
Damn though. It doesn’t work. It isn’t about dirt afterall.
Next step: removing autoreverse part from cassette. If that doesn’t work, it will be the microprocessor that controls the process, which would suck, as I would then be stuck with the radio for the rest of my life.
Fadi
October 4, 2012 @ 2:01 pm
Did you ask them why it’s the best ?
Roba Al-Assi
October 4, 2012 @ 2:40 pm
I should have, but I really doubt they would have known :)