Manual inject floppy drive woes

[Yodd]

So I picked up a Performa 475 recently and the floppy drive is having issues. Any disk I put in it it reports as need initialized. Even known, good working disks. And of course attempting to format these disks failed.

I have removed the cover from the drive and cleaned the heads. No change in behavior.

I have seen instructions on line for cleaning older Mac floppy drives, but not the manual inject style.

Suggestions?

 

[PB145B]

One of the manual inject floppy drives I have had a couple of smd caps that were leaking. (It was a Mitsubishi I think) You should be able to see them if you look at the back of the drive. Perhaps this is worth checking?

 

[Yodd]

Yeah, I noticed there were a few on the backside of the drive. They don't appear to be looking, but I'll measure them and see if they are the problem.

 

[mitchW]

These Mitsubishi drives are very reliable, even with old capacitors in place, however do replace the capacitors, even if you do not see any leakage. Most of the drives had no signs of leakage around the capacitors, but when removed, there was almost always a small pool of electrolyte underneath it.

In past, I repaired several dozens of Mac and PC floppy drives and most of the times there are problems with dust and dirty heads, but more commonly in last few years, there are problems with mechanical parts seizing up, even on "later" drives. I even managed to repair an 400K drive with a missing felt pad where the top head is on 800K drives.

Last month had a PC floppy drive from 1993 386 machine. It was Mitsumi or Sony one, problem was that its heads only stepped for 1/3 of the distance then stopped. I put some lithium grease and half a drop of light oil on the rails where head assembly rides on and moved the assembly few times around with hand and it worked. I also put a bit of grease on the worm stepper drive while I was there. Cleaned the heads with a Q-tip and isopropyl alcohol and it worked as new.