Building a hand crankable Casette Tape Player... but how ?

[RoadrunnerOZ]

I don't know how portable you want the device to be, but wouldn't it be cool if you used a clock crank with flyweights that acted both for the tape transport and power generator, dynamo style ?

Like the flywheel used in the wheeled push-toys for kids that keep the wheels going when you spin them up and let ‘em go. The old 78rpm record players had a clock-style spring which you wound up with a handle on the side of the box and this would play an entire side of a record - my grandad had one of these and a huge stack of old ‘78s we kids used to play on it - it had no electronics but an acoustic diaphragm and small horn “speaker” inside the case - all this connected to steel needles which were lowered on a swivel arm tube to the surface of the record. This had a mechanical speed governor.
He brought it back with him when he came back from WWI.

 

[thomasdf]

I had an Victor one, and some records sounded pretty darn good considered they are pure mechanical recording (cutting) and playback.
That could be another lead, as some of the players are in poor shape and can be bought quite cheap.

 

[Gold]

Someone used to sell a ‘cutting lathe’ that was a contraption that had a sewing needle cutting into a disposable waxpaper cup. It mounted on a spindle that was attached to a rubber band. You wound it tight and then yelled into a hose attached to the needle while the rubber band rotated the cup.

 

[arthurdb]

Hey there !

I dont know how many of you are familiar with this thing here : Landscape - HC-TT (V2)

but it sparked my thoughts about how one would go down the design lane when wanting to build a hand crankable Casette Player like this thing is. What type of circuitry would be involved and how easy it could be to pull off.

If its a "recycling old walkmans" kind of project or can be done with dedicated new parts.

It would be absolutely fascinating to handcrank beforehand recorded loops super super slow or in alternating speeds per hand...

What do you think ?

I did this once for as a prop for a theater play. As proof of concept I made a generator with some (recycled) inductor wire wound over toilet paper tube, some hard drive magnets glued (or taped?) to a wooden crank. The signal was ridiculously low but with a high gain amplifier and rectifier I did manage to get it to control the tape speed of the ultra-cheap off-brand walkman we were using.

It wasn't at all reliable enough for stage use, I had to constantly calibrate it (calibrate the gain and the offset) but with a better generator or maybe an amplifier built on a pcb rather than perfboard...

The effect was amazing though. Sadly, we ended up faking it with a remote controlled raspberry pi because we figured it would be safer and cheaper than trying to build a actually reliable model.

So anyways, totally doable and reasonably easy. Probably took me half a day to get that prototype working. With an off-the-shelf hand held generator you should be able to get decent results without too much work.