Macintosh LC Floppy Drive Realignment?

[CamiTheWitch]

So, to make a long and slightly expensive story short, I had two drives, one with a shot mechanism, and one with a shot controller (and worn mechanism). I took the good heads and moved them to the good controller. The disks do not read right, format right, or in some cases, the heads don't want to move on the drive rail (though I've mostly fixed this), and I've heard I need to align the drive. Is there any practical way to do this, or do I need to just deal with the ridiculous cost and buy yet another stupid F75W floppy drive, and this time make sure it works?

Thanks!!

 

[cheesestraws]

There's a proper way and a slow way, as I understand it .

The "proper" way to do alignment requires a special disc and an oscilloscope. The special disc has analogue signals on it to make it easier to detect when you're aligned properly. This means that this disc can't be duplicated or made in a normal floppy drive. So you'd be somewhat at the mercy of eBay, and this is probably overkill for doing a single drive.

With patience, I know that other people have successfully realigned drives just by iterative tweaking and trying it out repeatedly: I believe @mg.man has and might be able to give more concrete advice (sorry if I misremembered who it was I talked to about this). I've never managed it personally, but I have very low patience and am very bad at fine adjustments (you can write your own jokes about software people here). If you have time and working fine motor control, it's likely more doable for you than me.

Floppy drives are awful .

 

[LaPorta]

It is true: if you have patience, you can tweak it like any mechanical or analog instrument. I really wish somewhere in some sort of archive there were the exact manuals of how to do this properly with original Sony equipment, etc.

 

[olePigeon]

@cheesestraws Presumably someone can duplicate that special floppy via Flux imaging, correct?

 

[mg.man]

I believe @mg.man has and might be able to give more concrete advice

Oo.. sorry for the late reply - I missed the mention!

I have had reasonable success swapping parts and re-aligning the F75W Sony drives, but, unfortunately, I don’t have a "proper" alignment diskette, so it's a matter of trial & error and lots of patience.

It does help to start with known "aligned" diskettes. I usually create these in a more modern mechanism - like the Mitsubishi or Panasonic units found in Power Macs. I tend to start with 800k disks, then dial the rest of the way in using a 1.4M disk.

I believe there was a thread about adjusting alignment by rotating the stepper motor - there are two torx-head screws that hold down a semi-circular sprung steel that 'clamps' the motor down. Loosening those will allow the motor to rotate.

I'll do some digging to see if I can find that thread I've based my process on...

 

[mg.man]

I believe this was the post...

Hi everybody! Today I am going to tell you a most extraordinarily entertaining tale of a floppy drive, a boot disk, and a screw driver...