Zip Drive Repair?

[macuserman]

Has anyone taken apart a Zip drive to repair it? I have an internal scsi one that was missing the front plate. I swapped one over from an ide one I have thinking it would be the same and it was. The drive works great except it can’t eject? Instead it just unmounts then remounts the disk. Any idea if I can use further parts from a donor ide drive to fix it? Has anyone ever opened one of these and have some tips? Am I asking for a world of trouble and 1000 tiny parts to fly everywhere?

Picture is of the ide drive after I swapped its front plate to the scsi one.

 

[Franklinstein]

Sounds like either something's getting stuck/misaligned or your eject solenoid is defective/disconnected. Most of the internal Zip 100 (and probably 250) drives were mechanically the same so it shouldn't be too big of a deal to fix the eject problem if you have a donor or demonstration drive.

A bigger problem on Zip drives is that some (mostly the externals) built between about 1997 and 1999 were assembled without a head stop bumper to save half a cent in component costs per drive. Unfortunately the bumper was essential to the design and with it missing the head assembly can become misaligned and/or damaged, which is what typically causes the "click of death" on these things and primarily responsible for tanking Zip's popularity. Good job, bean counters!
Anyway I have a few of these and it doesn't seem like it would be hard to fix, it's basically just installing a little rubber o-ring at the back of the head support rod, but I haven't actually got around to doing anything with any of them yet.

 

[bibilit]

At some point i had several units, tried to repair some, only to discover that heads were bad most of the time.
As the only difference on the inside is the board, i was able to swap heads between IDE and SCSI units.
Was never able to fix heads on their own.