HP 97 card reader - tantalum capacitors

[Dreato]

I refurbed an old HP 97 card reader - O rings for drive wheel, superglued the worm gear. Cards fed well, but ALWAYS with errors. I found a post here that mentioned a problem with the tantalum capacitors in the power supply section on the main board. Tantalum caps usually last a long, however, mine were bad. I replaced the 47 uF and 22 uF caps and voila! all worked well. BTW, when I removed the old caps, the leads fell off - these caps were degraded.

Although it's almost always a mechanical issue with the card readers, in this case it was electrical, too.