Is my flyback transformer dead?

[Dog Cow]

Oh interesting, didn’t realize you could tell visually like that.

The give away is this little shiny metal guy that the red arrow is pointing to:



When it's out in the center, then it's a Sony 800K drive. When it's at the right side, near the emergency eject paperclip hole, then it's a 400K drive.

 

[Gsbtom]

Neato.. thanks! Learned something new today!

 

[Alexlfm]

That is a good catch with the drive, I didn't notice that. That is a giveaway. I don't know a situation where I'd have a good enough picture with a disk in to see that, but interesting to know all the same.

I know the keyboard was available in 86 since that was the 512k e/mac plus, but was it available before that with just the plain 512? I haven't seen an A model from before then. When I say 512, I mean original 512, 84/85 not the 512e.

The 800k drives are a lot more of a pain to fully clean. I disconnect the springs and then pull the top part of the carriage assembly off and spray that heavy with WD-40 and then use my pen to apply it to the bottom mechanism attached to drive body while sliding it back and forth. Doing that usually improves it enough to consistently eject.

 

[Dog Cow]

I know the keyboard was available in 86 since that was the 512k e/mac plus, but was it available before that with just the plain 512? I haven't seen an A model from before then.

No, that keyboard was introduced with the Macintosh Plus in January 1986.

 

[Gsbtom]

Finally got some free time yesterday to continue working on this. Replaced the battery, cleaned out the little bit of corrosion on the positive terminal. Installed the 4 MB of RAM. Sweet, now I can run Civilization! Squirted some WD-40 into the troublesome left shift key and let it sit overnight, as of this morning, seems to be working flawlessly. For now anyway, looks like the keyboard issue is solved.

Next, the troublesome floppy drive.

I was surprised at how relatively clean and dust free it was. Guess leaving it in the Apple bag for 30+ years was a good idea. Pulled it apart, cleaned both of the heads. Figuring the eject gears might be a problem, I pulled it apart to inspect.

Gears are all intact, so I pulled the top plate off,

Again, remarkably clean. Cleaned and greased up everything here.

That's much better, everything's sliding nicely now. I opted against pulling the heads out. The head rails looked clean, so I carefully just q-tipped in some more grease on the rails. If I muck up the track zero sensor, I'm basically SOL as I literally only have one working DD floppy.

However, still no luck with the eject. In fact, it didn't even appear that the eject motor was even engaging on eject. I could see the heads move to the right spot, but the motor never appeared to engage. For grins, I figured I'd check the connector solder joints.

These look ok, except for maybe the bottom one, but I couldn't tell if that was the light or if the solder joint was bad, but I figured it couldn't hurt to touch them up. Quickly realized after this that I need some smaller solder tips. Way smaller. And much better vision than I have. I cleaned up the mess I made out of this.

I was kind of out of options here. As a last ditch, I pulled the eject motor again, and pulled all the gears off to see if at least the motor was turning.

Surprise, surprise, once the gears are off the motor actually engaged. So, cleaned and greased up the gear posts, and voila, I've got a working eject mechanism!

One question: I did watch a couple of YouTube videos on this (super helpful on seeing what pieces did what), and all I watched suggest that I should be aligning the eject pin to 12 o'clock (that's left on the above pic), mine's aligned to 11:30 it looks like. I was adjusting this when I was trying to get the motor going, but ended up putting it back to where it was during my diagnosis. Any reason I can't just leave it? Or is it better to truly line that up? I'm not sure here, as the 800k disk I have does seemingly reliably eject (it's been so long that I don't remember how a brand new drive ejects).