I'm going to be honest, as technical as I am, the title was the best way I could describe this problem.

I noticed this problem in my player the day I brought it home, as this was the *very* first thing it did when I powered it on and stuck a disc in. I believe something in the tray mechanism has a problem. I *think* it might be something as simple as a drive belt needing replacement; I say this based on my expierence with a Kenwood CD player that wouldn't load properly. Tore it apart thinking the limit switch was bad, but turned out the belt was stretched, so it wasn't able to apply enough torque to move the laser/spindle assembly up in to position. I hate working on CD player mechanisms......so I've not been too excited to blindly tear the LaserDisc player apart if I don't have to. I figure it works, if I start taking it apart, it won't anymore (despite the fact I take stuff apart and do board repair all day long). First, let me tell you what it's doing.

You stick the disc in the try, hit the eject button to load the disc, it pulls the tray in and as soon as it does, you can hear a motor trying to turn. It makes a whirring noise for about 8 seconds or so, then comes up with a "U1" error, and spits the tray back out. You press eject again, tray goes in, everything cycles as normal.

It seems to do this when the player's been sitting idle for a while, which is usually after I go to bed at around 2am till I decide to use the player again the next night. If I'm doing a contious cycle of throwing discs in, like I was when I got the thing, it doesn't care. I can stick 20, 30 discs in the thing and it won't hiccup at all. But, leave it for more than say 12 hours...and there's about a 50/50 chance it will do this. If anything, it went 2 days without doing this jamming thing once.

I'm slightly worried at at some point, whatever is causing this is going to break, but since it hasn't gotten progressively worse over the last 12 days, I haven't freaked out too much.

Pictures are worth a thousand words; video is likely worth a million, so I finally remembered to grab my tablet and film what this thing is doing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgJaD5vtDEA

Any ideas/advice? Thanks in advance.

-Jay

Take off the top. Open the tray then unplug the player. Then either pull out on the tray until it catches or bend the tabs and remove the tray. The belt is at the left front just underneath the tray. Either clean or replace the belt (SCQ4.0) and clean the small white pulley on the motor. It will then work fine.

That is exactly what I thought it might be; and I believe I have some SCQ4.0 belts somewhere.

Thanks.