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Using Magneto Optical drives on vintage 68k Macs
- Thread starter MrFahrenheit
- Start date
One of the cool things I found ages ago at a local thrift were Avery compatible floppy drive labels.
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There are two circular things on that part... if you're talking about the actual hole, that's also circular on the real part... just in the photo it looks elongated. That hole fits onto a shaft on the MO drive so it's certainly circular. If you're talking about the peg that comes out of the part, that is not a perfect circle, it's elongated. The 3D model part also has it elongated.
I printed a test part in PLA and fitted it onto both a 640MB and 2.3GB drive. It fit well and the latching worked properly. I did not test it with the drive powered up as both drives I tested fit on were my two broken drives (I didn't want to pull out my MO drives from my computers and the external housings I recently made). But the eject mechanism did latch properly and also unlatch as well.
The PLA seemed strong enough for this particular use, but nylon probably would be preferred.
Printables fixed their bug. The part is also there now using this link: https://www.printables.com/model/1228676-fujitsu-magneto-optical-drive-ejection-catch
So I did just buy a Creality K1 SE, because I've had the desire to have a 3D printer for a while now.
This is the first print I did after the obligatory Benchy, I'd say it works quite well
It's just (Hyper) PLA for now, but it seems quite strong (went for full infill to ensure strength).
Ejects nicely when powered on, too
Wanted to get involved in this thread since I’ve had an interest in getting an MO drive swapped in place of the floppy drive on an SE/30. I’ve been toying with the idea off and on for several years now.
I finally had a replacement bracket made up that has slots for the mounting screws so I could reposition the drive height to line up with the floppy slot, which lines it up well but as folks have pointed out, without the manual inject-style slot it’s exceedingly difficult to insert a disk. The bracket needs some adjustment to shift the drive as flush with the case as it can be but even then it’s still a bit tricky. Need a thin finger to get it to drop into place.
Judging by faceplates I can see online it seems like all 3.5” MO drives are “manual inject”. Has anyone had experience that differs? Is there a specific model that offers some level of auto-inject?
I finally had a replacement bracket made up that has slots for the mounting screws so I could reposition the drive height to line up with the floppy slot, which lines it up well but as folks have pointed out, without the manual inject-style slot it’s exceedingly difficult to insert a disk. The bracket needs some adjustment to shift the drive as flush with the case as it can be but even then it’s still a bit tricky. Need a thin finger to get it to drop into place.
Judging by faceplates I can see online it seems like all 3.5” MO drives are “manual inject”. Has anyone had experience that differs? Is there a specific model that offers some level of auto-inject?
Cool!
I had an MO in my SE/30 for a bit. Documented it here:
68kmla.org
I ended up removing it to use as the external MO drive as mentioned a few posts above. But it was quite cool having it as the floppy replacement. Only gotcha is that it’s hard to push the disk all the way in due to the size of the opening. I could have modified the slot to help but decided against it.
I have yet to come across an auto inject MO. That would be cool if you find one.
I had an MO in my SE/30 for a bit. Documented it here:
Macintosh SE/30 Upgrades (Early Christmas)
Last time I had posted about my Macintosh SE/30, I had just fixed some boot and sound issues which were the result of capacitor leakage. In addition, I had an issue with the floppy drive which was caused by a faulty UH7 chip. I had worked around this by bypassing part of UH7 and introducing my...
68kmla.org
I ended up removing it to use as the external MO drive as mentioned a few posts above. But it was quite cool having it as the floppy replacement. Only gotcha is that it’s hard to push the disk all the way in due to the size of the opening. I could have modified the slot to help but decided against it.
I have yet to come across an auto inject MO. That would be cool if you find one.
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