Fun with a IIsi Floppy Drive

[LC_575]

Remember my explosive IIsi? Well it's moved on to Mac Heaven, but I salvaged some of it's parts, including its broken floppy drive. So I fiddled with it some, learned out the auto-eject system works, and made an attempt to fix it's upper drive head. The metal hinge plate that fastens it to the lower head was somewhat bent, preventing the upper head from actually contacting disks. So I tried to remove it. It is screwed in place by some unusual hex screws (curse you Sony!), so I tried to remove them by needle-nose plier. And broke them! Now there are screw stems stuck in the screw holes. However, I still managed to get to the hinge plate, bent it back properly, and set out to find a way to reinstall it without screws.



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It's a combination of hot glue and electrical tape. After a few trials I managed to get it to work in some permanent sense by drilling in glue wells into part of the head arm. The real challenge was securing it well enough that the heads would be aligned

Afterward I did a test run. The drive kept trying to eject, even though it was "ejected" and no disk was present. I took it out and inspected the eject motor. Hmm, seems to be jammed. I gave the servo a revolution, putting it into the right place. Let's try it again!

Huh, now it won't eject disks at all. And what is that smell?

...

Needless to say, the drive didn't survive.

 

[Dennis Nedry]

 

[Byrd]

I think once you attempt to remove screws with pliers, things don't work after that. It's not really a Hack/Development, is it?

JB