What Is This Lever On My Teac 3340S?

[jmiles1960]

There is a small lever below the capstan roller on my Teac 3340S. It is not shown in the Service Manual and I'm not sure of it's purpose or settings. The lever can adjust the capstan roller up or down (two settings). Please see attached photo.

If anyone knows what this is for or what the settings are (reel size / speed?). Please let me know.

Thanks!

[Nakdoc]

It is used for editing. You can disengage the pinch roller in play mode and rock the tape across the heads to locate a splicing point.

[vinyldavid]

Cue lever. For manually spinning through tape to find you start/edit point.

It drops the capstan right above the pinch roller and disengages the tape lifters that keep the tape away from the heads.

A word of caution!!!!!

Leave it disengaged, or else you will wear out your heads extremely quickly when fast forwarding and rewinding.

I have used it in the past when I needed to roll sound effects off of my A3340S and needed as close to instant start time as I could.

[jmiles1960]

VinylDavid / NakDoc - thanks for the responses.

So, "disengaged" is the "down" setting of the lever correct?

I won't be doing any editting with this machine, just playing tapes.

Thanks again guys!

[Bob Boyer]

Yes. Down should be disengaged. It's been thirty years, but that's what I recall.

You can watch all this in action without any tape on the machine. Just hold the tensioning lever in the "play" position while you hit the play button and then the stop button. You should see the pinch roller go up and engage the capstan like it's pulling tape, then the pinch roller will go back down to its resting position. Now engage the cue lever and repeat the process. You'll see that the pinch roller doesn't travel as far to engage the capstan, neither does it move as far away from the capstan when you hit the off button.

Then, as David sez, make sure to disengage the cue lever!