[andypilgrim]

Hi There,
Yes it is a TR-600A. I bought it from a company that once had a post house in Soho, it had been wrapped up and put in to storage for the last 3 decades and is in really excellent condition. The hours meter shows 1760. I was lucky to find it, I went to purchase four Ampex machines, two VPR3's and two VPR6's and the RCA was there in the same storage container, we did a deal and I ended up leaving with that as well. It came with three heads which all look good and 3 service extender cards. I was lucky that I found an advert from a company in Germany for some service manuals and a box of new old stock spare parts for the machine which I bought, and then another bit of luck was finding a company in America called ZIN Vtr who had just refurbished a TR-70 for the Washington Library Of Congress and in that process had a number of pinch rollers manufactured for it. The 70 and 600 have the same pinch roller so I bought one of those from them to replace the only mechanical component that seemed to have aged. The air system needed overhauling, all the air fittings in the machine needed replacing, they used plastic fittings with brass inserts, almost all the plastic fittings had cracked, all easily obtainable and replaceable. The spool brakes needed re-lining as they had glued themselves to the hubs. Apart from that its been a pretty normal restore of old electronics, capacitors, quite a lot of semiconductors (RCA made their own and apparently at that time weren't the best at it, their chips now suffering from ionic migration) and most difficult was optical sensors on the deck but what I lack now is information on setup and alignment. I have all the schematics and board layouts etc. Its been an interesting, if expensive project so far. Hopefully I can find that elusive volume III of the manual set.
Cheers
Andy