As I now have some of the drive belts I need, I went back to my favourite cheapo cassette deck, the Aiwa AD-R450 which I was looking at last Sunday. It only took a couple of minutes to take off the backplate of the tape transport - a couple of screws and the plate was free to move out enough to thread in the flat drive belt. I had obtained service info and I was right about the belt path - from the top of the motor pulley, horizontally over to the RH capstan flywheel and down and around, up between the two flywheels and back to the bottom of the motor pulley. This drives the RH flywheel anticlockwise and the LH flywheel clockwise for the forward and reverse capstan drive.
At this point I refitted the backplate and tested the drive - all was working now except the mechanical tape counter. To replace the counter belt, I had only to remove the four screws securing the whole transport mechanism - two into plastic pillars right at the top of the front panel, and one each side into the base of the bottom tray (from inside) and pull back the machinery. Another two minutes to loop the new belt around the back of the take-up hub onto its integral pulley, then put back the mechanism and secure it and stretch the counter belt over the tape counter pulley. While the assembly was out, I took advantage of the easy access to clean up the heads, capstans and pinch wheels with some methylated spirit (wood alcohol to our colonial cousins).
This restored everything to full working order, and I had my old hi-fi deck back again.
The belts I used were from CPC Farnell, AVBELT9 (flat, 81mm dia., 3.5mm wide by 0.6mm) and AVBELT98 (61mm dia., 1.2mm square section). I had intended to try AVBELT10 (88mm dia., 4mm wide by 0.3mm) but this was out of stock. The original capstan belt was about 86mm dia, 5mm wide and 0.5mm thick - it's difficult to accurately measure a length of soft liquorice.....
The only comment I'd make was that the AVBELT98 was slightly too long and although it drives OK, will probably loosen fairly quickly. A better choice would have been the AVBELT96 (55.6mm dia.) or AVBELT95 (54mm dia.).
CPC's website is one of the worst for finding items. They have an astonishing range of stuff, and usually good prices, but the organisation and search is rubbish. For example, to get a drive belt you can eventually find your way through the menus in the sidebar (> Components, Kits & Spares > Spares (Brown & White Goods) > Audio Spares > Belts > Square Section) but then you're presented with a filter matrix. If you select just one wrong box, you will get wrong answers. By selecting the minimum of filters, you can get a matching list of bits (belts, in this case), but they are in apparent random order. They show part numbers, prices and the Length - by which in this case they mean DIAMETER - and the depth - by which they mean WIDTH. If you click 'More details' the actual item page shows the price and hopefully an accurate picture (but sometimes generic) but no dimensions, If you select the obscure "Further Information" link from there, you get a list of EVERY belt with dimensions and a BUY NOW link, but no prices! When searching for a number of possible alternatives, as you do with belts, it's a matter of having a very good memory and the patience of a saint. Many times I have tried to find something in CPC stock and given up, only to find out later that the item was available but classified as something else. And the filter options rarely filter the things you want to filter.
Another point to note with CPC is that they very kindly send you sales flyers - floods of them! - listing the current special deals. The catch here is that the last two digits of the part number are specific to the offer catalogue only, and if you try to get something from that catalogue after the offer period has expired it will show a 'Not Found' error. Disregard the last two digits and search again, and you will probably find the item still in stock but at a different price. You may be happy to buy at that price as it may be better than thinking you aren't going to get it at all. Once I tried to be an arrogant smartarse and thought I would remove the last digits because I didn't like my buying habits being logged (from a given catalogue). Hoist by my own petard, I was charged the full off-sale price for everything. And serves me right.
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