Bringing a ZX Spectrum +2's Datacorder back from the dead
My grey ZX Spectrum +2 had a really annoying fault. I'd press play, the cassette would turn for a second, and then it would just stop. Nothing dramatic, no grinding, no smoke, just a sad little twitch and then silence. Here's how I tracked it down, the wrong turns along the way, and what finally fixed it.
My first thought was to skip the repair altogether: if the deck won't play, just feed the loading audio in from something else, like a phone or a laptop. That's what the EAR socket is for on a lot of 8-bit machines, and it's the usual way around a dead tape deck.