Thank you so much!
It's a high-quality product; I'm very familiar with JVC.
However, some boomboxes are difficult to navigate.
Beautiful!
You are most welcome! The JVCs are quite nice. I went on quite a nostalgia tour this year, restoring a whole bunch of JVC boxes. It all started by wanting to do a belt replacement on a PC-X100 I've had since the early 2000s. Nostalgia took over, and I found myself seeking out the PC-XC11 I had in high school, and before I knew it I had a PC-V55, RC-X510, PC-Y555, PC-V77, PC-X300, and PC-X130 on my bench. So, I've seen the inside of a lot of these this year. I always loved the Hyper-Bass, 3D woofer configuration that JVC used, so I wasn't pleased in the 90s, when they went away from it.
While working on all of these machines, though, I gained an appreciation for how these improved over time (e.g. how streamlined yet not cheaped-out the PC-Y555 is compared to the V77; or how much more elegant the woofer situation is in the 100 vs the 300). Although the 130 and the C11 don't have that head-turning (and honestly imbalanced) low end of the Hyper-Bass boxes, the fidelity is still quite impressive for what they are; and the fact that you can push them harder without having to futz with the eq to stop the woofer from rattling actually makes them more practical than their more interesting older brothers. The 130 is downright elegant in design from a repair/maintenance perspective, which was kind of shocking to me (I almost destroyed ribbon cables MANY times, trying to get the 100 reassembled).
All in all, there wasn't much repair work that had to be done on any of these. All of them needed new RW/FW belts, but all but two capstan belts were still working perfectly. Only one mechanism needed to be re-lubricated (they all got re-lubed, but all functions were working). All electronics were still working fine, except for one component: one still needs a new supercapacitor for the tuner section, so it can remember what station it was tuned to after shutoff (the PC-X300). Three record/play switches needed a healthy amount of DeOxit (as they were producing a terrible thumping during playback on the rec decks). . One common failure, though, is the pause button on the rec decks. Two of those failed, and although I was able to find the spring and plastic caps rattling around inside the units, I didn't seek out replacement parts for them (I never use the relay function nor the pause feature anyway).
I appreciate how resilient the plastics are, as well. Some of these looked terrible, upon arrival. The greatest length I took to restore the looks was using black leather dye on the speakers for the 130; those had faded to a light tan color, when the box arrived.
The RC-X510 and the PC-V55 went up on eBay- they're nice, but don't scratch the itch the way the other boxes do. Here's the curated collection I'm keeping...for now:
