[DMcMahon]

Thank you to everybody for their useful inputs.

Tried 2 tapes and could not fault it, so hopefully the tape label was the culprit. I found out that the plastic shaft the label was on goes up into a hole in the underside of the tape cassette to remove the brakes off the tape spools. So as John suggests a label must have come off the top of a tape and got pushed down onto the shaft during a load of a tape.

I gave the whole area a good clean, quite a lot of dirty dust/fluff and a little lubrication where required. I removed a tiny bit of sticky material off the auto head drum cleaner but apart from that the auto cleaner looked in good condition. Nothing seemed stiff and everything appeared to move/operate easily.

Tomorrow will hand it back for my friend to test it out.

David