Paper arrives

The manuals page has carried wanted slots since the day it went up — factory paper this site had only ever seen as other people's scans. Two eBay listings looked right, and both came good: a paper maintenance manual for the 2S/4S/2SD/4SD, and a separate Parts List and Schematics volume. This entry is their unboxing.

The maintenance manual's cover page — binder holes, rust rings and all

Through the scanner

The scanning was the easy part. An Epson FastFoto FF-680W — an A4 photo scanner with a duplex document feeder — turns out to be happy running loose manual pages at a full 1200 dpi, fast. Both books went through it, 117 pages in all, and the result is on the manuals page beside the downloads that came before them: my own copy, scanned at archive resolution.

The honest part

Now the apology. At 1200 dpi you preserve exactly what is on the paper — and what is on this paper is a photocopy. The tell is the punch holes: alongside the holes actually punched through these pages, there is a second set printed on them — the shadow of some earlier original's binder holes, faithfully reproduced by whatever copier made this copy, faithfully preserved again by mine. So the scan is sharper than the 34 MB mirror this site already hosted, but it cannot be sharper than the copy it was made from. It is the best copy this site can offer until a true original surfaces — and the wanted slots stay open for exactly that reason.

One book inside the other

The Parts List and Schematics volume gave up its secret quickly: behind its own new cover page, the rest of it is this manual's own parts and schematics section, rebound as a book of its own. Nothing new inside those pages — but nothing wrong with them either. If all you want on the bench is the exploded views and the board schematics, that volume is the lighter thing to print, and it is downloadable on its own for exactly that use.

The fold-out that wouldn't fit

Both books carry the TD-5050 tape-transport fold-out tucked into the back — the very sheet whose separately-sourced scan on this site unlocked the dummy plug. It stays unscanned here: unfolded, it is far wider than anything on this bench will swallow, and being part of the same photocopy it is a generation below the scan already on the manuals page. That sheet remains the better copy.

Same book, two pages apart

The mirror this site has hosted from the start — 85 pages, someone else's scan of someone else's copy — turns out to be nearly this same book. Eighty-five of this new scan's 87 pages line up with it one-for-one, same order, and everything outside the parts section reads word for word the same on both. The two pages left over aren't a discrepancy, just blank ring-binder leaves the old scan skipped — and one of them wears the same rust rings as the cover page above.

Nearly the same book, not quite. Open the parts section and the extra two pages stop being the whole story: Parts Lists 1 through 9 each carry a New No. column filled in against the old part number — a column the mirror's copy of these same tables leaves blank — plus a couple of added notes and a run of old-number/new-number headers stamped across several of the schematic sheets, none of which the mirror has. So the photocopy this entry spent a whole section apologizing for turns out to be carrying something the cleaner scan does not: a later Otari factory revision, renumbering parts clean across the section.

Those new numbers are already sitting in the digital edition's own parts tables — worth knowing, when you read them, that they're the later-revision numbers, not the originals this machine shipped with.

Still hunting

The operator's manual — Otari catalog number OIM-1005E, the book this maintenance manual keeps deferring to — is still the open slot. Or not for much longer: eBay has already coughed up another order, somewhere in the post as this entry goes up. If what arrives is what was listed, the scanner stays warm.