One of the best Videos on cleaning/fixing A500 Floppy Drives! The Zoom in and clearly showing in more detail the various parts of the Drive was stellar...I've Subscribed! Thanks...-Mark.
14:50 - That switch for detecting a disk was what usually gave me trouble. After a few months to a year of use, the drive would suddenly start acting as if I'd ejected the disk, even though it was still in the drive. Spraying contact cleaner into it had about a 50% chance of working. One day I got the bright idea to take that unit apart so I could really clean the contacts . Big mistake! It took me close to an hour to put it back together! The base of each pin is a fatter round section with a notch in it. In this notch is a U-shaped brass contact that's about 1/4 the size of a grain of rice. When the pin is pushed down, this microscopic contact connects two contacts in the base and completes a circuit. The fact that it's so frigging tiny is why it causes so many problems. The area that makes contact is so small that even a speck of dust can cause problems. And once you've taken it apart, getting both contacts to stay in the little notches while you put them back in place and snap the top on is epically frustrating. At one point, I seriously considered just chucking the parts in the trash and wiring a couple toggle switches to the board just so that I wouldn't have to deal with it ever again.
I just did some work on a A500 floppy dtive today. The eject wasnt working. Compared to an Atari ST I found the drive hard to work on. The hardest part was actually screwing the drive back in. The three base screws did not want to line up.
The head stepping is because it needs to read a track in order to distinguish between the same disk ejected and re-inserted, and a different disk inserted. I don't think it would've been necessary for it to do it with no disk inserted, of course, but apparently that's how they designed it back then. Anyway, that should be the reason for the head ticking. c",)
is this drive the same as the A2000? I have two bad A2000 drives.. one tries to work but fails while the other seems less responsive overall when accessed.. were the drives of this era interchangeable or unique to each model?
What kind of cleaning 'alcohol' based stuff do you use to actually clean the head? I could not really figure out what you were saying, what stuff you were using on that cotton swab. And the grease you use, is that of any particular type?
I think he used isopropanol alcohol, very commonly used when working with electronics. And he used something called "Graphite bearing grease" for the shaft.
I used to have one of those cleaning floppy disks, I always thought it would rip the heads off with the noise it made! I don't think much to them though, they can only at best clean the surface and not always well enough, there's often a lot of crap that collects around the head. You do have to be careful like you say, but no springs were harmed in the cleaning of this drive :-) There's a piece of flat spring steel as well as the actual spring and it's that bit that is the most delicate if it gets bent too far, but you can feel the limits of that if you are careful.
@@Error42_ I use compressed air and a Qtip AROUND the drive head area if it's needed and most of the noise is generated by the jacket of the floppy against the material so that doesn't matter. The MAc 800k drives are more delicate, IMHO, so this may be ok for some models but again IMHO not for others. I have seen varying amounts of spring robustness too, so I wonder if the strong springs wear the floppy faster. :)
