Restoring an old 80's boombox

We picked up this gorgeous Philips D8569 boombox from 1982 at a second-hand place recently.

Black boombox with silver trim, two tape decks, two speakers and a radio antenna

When we got it home and put a tape in it, the sound was really muddy. And worse, every time you moved one of the volume sliders even a tiny bit, it produced an ear-splitting crackle at maximum volume from both speakers. We were almost going to try to return it when I thought "I bet it'd be fun to try to fix it instead".

So I ordered a can of DeoxtIT D5 spray to deoxidise the volume sliders, some tape head cleaner and demagnetiser, and some plastic polish to try to knock a few years of aging off its appearance.

'Vinyl Styl' branded cassette head cleaner & demagnetiser, DeoxitD5 spray can, and three bottles of plastic polish — This stuff cost more than the boombox itself.

Deoxidising the sliders meant partially disassembling the thing. It was quite exciting to see inside an early 80's music player.

Disassembled boombox with the front removed. Circuit boards and tape decks and other internals are visible. — You can see a jammed pause button on the left hand side of this photo.

The adjustable potentiometers were on this brown circuit board underneath.

Brown circuit board with some sliding adjustable potentiometers. In the background the DeoxitD5 spray is visible.

I sprayed them a little tiny bit, moved the sliders back and forth a whole bunch, then dried it off as best as I could. After reassembly I ran the cleaner tape and then gave the whole thing a quick polish.

The result is a working boombox, give or take a few remaining issues. I'm not 100% convinced the tape decks are finished yet. One has a pause button that's stuck, so that one is out of action until I'm feeling brave enough to disassemble that whole button mechanism. The other one sounds a ton better but maybe not perfect yet. The volume slider crackle is gone though.