• Member Since 10th Jun, 2015
  • offline last seen 6 hours ago

TheMajorTechie


Oh, look at me... you've got me tearing up again. ◈ Forget about coffee buy me a cup noodle.

More Blog Posts2545

Apr
30th
2021

In which ya boi Tonkus can't find a tiny enough spring to fix his ebay junk. · 7:56am Apr 30th, 2021

Gotta love it when the retention spring on 40+ year old hardware has been sitting for so long that it's lost its springiness. I tried bending the thing into a shape that'd let it work again, but the wire itself that the spring's made from is so degraded that the whole spring looks like it's a gust of wind away from disintegrating. I can't find any replacement torsion spring small enough to replace it, so I might just go with mutilating a paper clip until it's the right shape. :P

In other news, I got a floppy drive that's around four decades old to come roaring back to life on a 1.1GHz computer. It's just that one pesky spring that's causing the top read head to not be able to reliably contact the disk surface for reading and writing anymore, and based on the fact that the second drive I have with identical mechanics has the same problem, I think their springs are just long-past their expiration dates.

Surprisingly though the motor belts are in perfect working order and are even still kinda elastic. I was worried that I'd have to go even further down the jank rabbithole and use rubber bands from grocery store asparagus bundles to replace 'em.

Yay.

Comments ( 3 )

Huh... I wonder if floppies of DOOM still exist?

5509656
probably. Older floppy disks tend to be more reliable than newer ones due to the lack of extreme cost-cutting.

How old are we talking here? I remember the days when the "Park" command was relevent!

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