Both shielded and sealed bearings exist and they are being used depending on the application. Judging by the serial (R-1650-HH) posted by AkBKukU these are shielded.
Shielded bearings, you can use wd40 to dissolve old grease and oils by soaking (I used to use a bearing tube/sleeve with screw cap and shake it). Sealed, you can't.
Sealed bearings usually have a black rubber seal to keep lubricants inside, shielded bearings usually have a metal covering to keep junk out. Both kinds can be re-lubricated.
8:00 You can buy whole packs of those bearings for cheap. Also, yeah sealed bearings are just... contained. Not actually sealed. There's quite a bit of play around the shaft for many of them. I'm glad you figured it out! Yeah you can sometimes recover them for a while with 3in1, but you may need to just order a pack of those for a few bucks online.
I have an Atari 810 with a Tandon drive and this video has been immensely helpful in diagnosing and treating the issue with the stepper motor that it’s having. Thank you so much for helping me out.
The metal cover indicates these are shielded not sealed so lube can make it in no problem. You can pry the shields out carefully clean and relubricate. I doubt given their usage that the bearings themselves are physically damaged. Probably just petrified grease. If you dont want to pull the shields just soak them in alcohol for a day let them dry or a day then soak in oil. But the shields shouldnt be too hard to remove.
Back in the day we were mainly having to replace the spindle bearing and sometimes the stepper motor with new parts but it you and others are having to replace the bearings in the stepper motor from donor drives. Kudos.
I thought it was a bit amusing AkBKukU has the WD-40, needed a penetrating oil... went for the 3-in-1 silicone instead? (If the 3-in-1 is also a penetrating oil, then, well... my bad) Okay, yes, I get it, it's not a long-term solution... so you free it up and clean it out with the WD-40, and then maybe clean that out with isopropanol, and finally lubricate as desired?
@Joe Casson its in a stepper motor, so not like it be spinning thousands times a minute or in use all the time and moving a small read head. Stop being so over dramatic.
The bearings are size R-1650-HH, not 608. So I can't just go and easily get new ones. The non-garbage quality ones I saw online with a cursory search were about $20 shipped. So they aren't easy or inexpensive to replace. Just because it's a circular bearing with a hole in it doesn't mean it's the same size as a skate. Like I said in the video, it would probably be easiest/cheapest to get another NEMA 17 stepper and yank the bearings out of it. I can do that any time I want. But oiling the bearings and putting them back it lets me use the drive right now without needing to wait for parts.
Where do you get that size from? I can find very little info when searching for info on either the model number printed on it or "NEMA 17 motor bearing"
Er, not really, but if he had the schematics and felt really nuts he could recreate a PCB and send it out to be fabbed, even in qty. 1, then try to source all the chips and passives and assemble it himself. Would be vastly easier to get another 'parts' drive that _does_ have the missing PCB.
I'm learning so much from you!! It's incredible that you essentially keep all of us from possibly throwing away non-functional or otherwise faulty electronics that might only have small faults, that we may be able to fix with your help. (I'm not trying to take credit away from others, like Big Clive for example, just saying) ✌
Thanks man! Your videos are really close to the day to day life of those who work with maintenance. I am always pleased and happy to see your repairs. :)
This is my favorite video, ever. Maintaining those old full height/Shugart drives baffled me. The only part I didn't like is that another IBM computer is now in service, but oh well, can't have everything.
22:18: While the lubricated drive is a lot quieter overall, it does make a weird clack sound though. Not sure if that's a problem. Anyway, thanks for the really helpful info; that's fantastic. :)
I think that it is either the other drive makes so much noise that you can't hear it hitting the stop screw or that I may need to move the whole transport back just a tiny bit more.
@@TechTangents I was thinking that or the gain was higher on the recording to try to accentuate any kind of sound. Growing, my cousin and I both had Tandy Cocos, his had the older FD501 SSDD and mine had the FD502 DSDD drive. Both were new drives when purchased, and around the same time but the 501 was a lot louder, and I thought sounded cooler. My 502 drive had more of a buzz as the heads moved rather than the braaap, braaaap sound his did. Also it seemed like your silent drive loaded faster, maybe because the seeks were quicker?
Bearings are quite cheap so NEVER bother with soaking in oil - it is really temporary fix (not solution) and it will be worse and worse until it fails catastrophically in matter of weeks. Been there, done that. Bearing R-1650-HH translates to 625ZZ, the second most widely used bearing and I found it as cheap as 2 GBP for 10 pieces, so price is really not a point here. Also, when disassembling a stepper motor - never let the rotor lay on table open in wild. If you plan to have it dissasembled more then for few hours, you HAVE to cover the rotor with something magnetic, like nails. Why? If the rotor doesn't have magnetic stator around it, the magnetic field degrades quite rapidly resulting in motor which have almost no torque.
"If the rotor doesn't have magnetic stator around it, the magnetic field degrades quite rapidly" Very unintuitive, like many things in this world! I would like some additional reading on this if you could point me in the right direction. I would have expected the magnetic field to be lost at a rate similar to... well, regular magnets, frankly. Which is negligible over a human lifetime.
never is a long time; NEVER is even longer. But knowing what you do, understanding the bearings and their failures, de-shielding, cleaning and lubricating them may be shorter, cheaper and better overall. Not for everyone though...
what I don't get is why he doesn't just order new bearings bearings are the same as they were 30 years ago all you gotta do is match the size and type (IDxODxH, sealed) and likely based on the size are cheap as chips 608 roller skate bearings
christ all floppy drives must be like this they are often so loud perhaps they all need new bearings (I might need to sell a kit to fix these old things for a 10% markup...) wait did I just type that....
I genuinely admire your commitment to these primitive (relatively speaking) floppy drives. As one who was bought my first floppy in 1979 (for a TRS-80 Mod 1), and owned a wide variety of floppies including single-sided double-sided, single-density, double-density, quad-density, etc, I can say that I don't miss them one bit. Backing up a 20 gig hard drive to floppies was absolute torture.
That's some dedication. Good thing I haven't run into that problem. My 5150 was purchased as an intelligent terminal which had no drives in it. The floppy disk drive came out of an industrial chassis which I don't believe was ever used.
Those bearings aren't totally sealed. Back in the day, IBM and Shugart used to rebuild those stepper motors and replace the bearings because they get gummed up kinda easilly if you use the computers in a dirty or dusty environment. If you soak them in solvent, and then in a good oil (light machine oil) they may work OK for a little bit, but it won't last. The only way to totally save the drive is to replace them. It is an NMB bearing, they are still available. Glad you got it working though, hopefully it stays that way. The best way to keep it going is to use the computer, work those drives on a regular basis.
I really enjoy your videos. I am amazed that this drive still works after complete disassembly. Once you disassemble and remove the heads on a floppy drive you have to re-align the drive. You can hear in your video that the second drive is not quite aligned because you can hear the sound of it hitting the end stop. It shouldn't be making that sound. The first one doesn't. If this was a High-Density 1.2MB drive it would not work. To properly re-align the drive you need an oscilloscope and a factory alignment disk. They did sell do it yourself alignment kits but they only get close, which you obviously did because it is working. Once they aligned the drive at the factory, they used thread locker on the 3 bolts. Those are all crucial for proper alignment. You can still purchase the analog alignment disks but they are very expensive. Anyway, not trying to sound too critical just trying to save people from cleaning too deeply and ending up with a non-functional drive.
Sorry for the late reply... but yeah, something is very unpleasant sounding with that second drive. It does sound like some sort of plastic on plastic. The first drive sounded perfect to my nostalgic ears. That second one sounds like a hard drive head crashing... it was disturbing to my nostalgic ears!
Thanks for the video, I had recently gotten a XT with a Tandon drive that didnt work. I had lubed the rails but didnt even think about the stepper motor bearings. Not wanting to dump $$ into it I was able to turn the drive on its side and put a couple drops of lube in each side bearing of the stepper without having to take the drive apart. I was able to at least verify that the drive and heads work although the heads are out of alignment, so now I have ordered bearings for the stepper and I feel better about investing some time in rehabbing the drive.
Those bearings have a particle seal, not a fluid seal. That brown stuff is seized deteriorated grease. Lubing it up is not a good idea on the long term, as you wash away the grease.
There's a RU-vidr out there that took a couple of seized MFM HDDs that use steppers and dropped a bunch of oil into the bearings and got them working good as new again. One of them I believe he mentioned needed pliers to get it to even move slightly, and he got that working too. Pretty impressive stuff!
The loud, grating sounds the non-refurbished drive is making whenever it seeks is absolutely not what those things sounded like brand new. We progressed through several machines with 5 1/4" drives back in school and I remember them sounding a lot more like the one you've oiled up. Except maybe the thumping sounds; I don't remember our drives back then hitting the stop that hard unless it was done on purpose like the Apple drives on startup. Also I'm not sure how long oil is going to last before it manages to seep back out. Those bearings are normally packed with grease during manufacture, not oil.
Triflow lubricant. I don't know how common it is anymore, but I picked some up at a bike shop years ago. Dripped some on a 1/10 hp fan motor shaft that wouldn't self start and would squeal and squelch when it was turning. The environment that fan is in is absolutely filthy, grinding dust, saw dust. Been running for 2 years without issue I forgot about it until now. HOWEVER, the bearings in that fan are sintered bronze oil impregnated plain type and not ball bearings so... YMMV.
I don't think those bearings are worn out (at the RPM they operate at, the head itself wore out sooner), only the old grease is hardened up. Soaking them with oil will soften the old grease. For how long, who knows... You're right that WD40 will make a short term solution only, because it's quite volatile, and the grease will harden up again. That 3-in-1 silicone oil you used might be better, I have no experience with it. But theoretically you can remove the shield from the bearings, only from the side which will be inside the motor, so will not be subject to contamination. Then dissolve the old grease with WD40, wash it with brake cleaner, and apply some good quality bearing grease.
About those bearings, it shouldn't be too hard to find replacement bearings, that way you could potentially restore the donor drive to operational status as well. The main thing you'd need to do is take a set of digital calipers and measure the dimensions of the bearing, and then look online to see if you can find something that fits. You'll probably be wanting to select bearings that don't have much play in them, you don't need to be picky about what speed they operate at, and you don't need to be picky about what kind of load the bearings are under since this stepper motor isn't really moving around anything with significant mass or drag.
I hate when I oil something and it starts to work better than I thought it was possible. So I go around the house and oil every moving part and be amazed how well things work now.
Other posters are right - sealed doesn't mean hermetically sealed or air-tight. It just means they have a cover over them. Some are completely open. You can give them an oil change from time to time to extend their life. Use isopropyl first, then re-oil.
From personal experience, I've found that WD-40 actually strips away liquid and any kind of lubrication. This is good for cleaning it away, but as he said in the video, it's not good long term, but for what I think? It's not even good short-term
WD-40 primary ingredient is aliphatic naptha I think. A solvent. Then slightly less of mineral oil. So the solvent will evaporate and leave some really thin oil that oxidizes within a few years. It works great for cleaning greasy dirty things, but lubrication and corrosion prevention are lacking from my experience.
I had a drive that looked the same as the one you repaired, i had it on a zx spectrum via a Plus D disk interface. Very good old drive, just keep the heads clean and it worked a treat :-D i think it was a Tandom tm100 or similar, that was 30 years ago so my memory is not so clear lol.
The grease in the bearings in the stepper drive motor dries out and freezes up the motor. They're easily removed and can be soaked in a solvent, wd40, whatever. One must be careful with the fine metal strapping that converts the circular movement of the stepper motor to a linear movement. Taking that apart is a lot easier than getting it all back together. Ask me how I know this. Regarding the drive speed there is a potentiometer on the rear circuit board that is a speed adjustment. You can change the belt, that might help. Use the pot to adjust the speed to get it right.
That's the funny thing about old technology, most of us weren't alive or don't remember far enough back to really know if the tech is supposed to sound the way it does today, or if that's a aging symptom that needs to be fixed.
I have several 3.5″ floppy drives that either sometimes work very slowly and make horrible high noises, or even dont work at all and only makes the sounds. I wonder if i could do a simillar thing to fix them.
@@eduardoavila646 On most 3.5" drives the top part is removable with a flat head screw driver. There are little dimples on the metal that hold that part on. You just pry it off and you have access to the heads etc. I would just lubricate it and clean the heads. If you don't know about floppy drive alignment on more modern floppy drives...don't mess with the rest of it.
Well, maybe in this case it worked, but be aware, that taking apart a stepper motor messes up rotor's magnetisation. Steppers are magnetised after final assembly at factory. When you open it, rotor sticks to stator shorting some of magnetic circuits. After that steppers usually only have 30-50% of their original torque. In this case motors must have been oversized, but it may trip you up with some other devices...
Just a heads up, disassembling stepper motors messes up their magnets. You usually lose a portion of the power (you normally lose about 25% if I remember correctly). You normally don't even notice, but if the motor is struggling, it will likely not turn at all if you take it apart and put it back together without adequately fixing the reason it was struggling.
Dunno if you still look at comments for older videos, but a R1650HH bearing is just obsolete nomenclature (NMB numbers) for a 625ZZ bearing (ISO numbers), and those are cheap as chips. They're the exact same. You don't need to get new old stock parts, bearings are just jellybean parts.
those are shielded bearings not sealed. As far as the brown goop, the grease can go hard and that usually what happened to those bearings. it was common to take the drives out and use a spray lube to just working into them to keep them moist in a heavy use system
NEVER USE HEAD CLEANING DISKS!!! they are abrasive, and will destroy the head(s) over time. always use a q-tip with alcohol or similar. even if there are some that aren't abrasive, you have more control when doing it by hand. another thing is that it is better to use grease, or even better would be lithium grease, or a different synthetic grease. also, there is a speed adjustment on most drives, although it would also be a good idea to change the belt.
Do you think replacing a motor could fix a problem with a DVD drive that doesn't feel like opening? The bugger reads discs just fine but it doesn't want to open properly. I have used silicone/teflon grease, I have replaced the belt but nothing helped. It DOES open if I give it a little push but not on its own UNLESS there's a disc inside. I think the motor is not strong enough to separate the magnets which keep DVDs in place.
(16:34) When I have a knob or screw that I may want to adjust later without great effort, but I generally don't want it to move on its own (thermal, vibration, etc), I apply just a single dab of fabric paint overlapping the edge of the knob / screw and the frame. My bicycle was a different matter, as fabric paint would neither withstand nor weather; for that, I used a dab of J-B Weld at three points, being careful not to get any inside.
WD-40 IS a lubricant, but just a thin one for things like squeaky hinges, etc. Where did you get that old-looking can? Was that stored at your grandparents house for 52 years?
WD-40 makes a lithium grease that works well. But you are right, WD-40 is not a lubricant, It's a water displacer. I've used the same copper infused lithium grease used for brake pads, for CD drive rails and it works beautifully. I only did it because I was in a pinch.
A drop of 3 in 1 into those stepper bearing and forcing it to turn a little while wick the oil into the bearing, also you can order replacement bearings if you can find a number on them
I hope you can put full run (non time lapsed) footage of disassembly and reassembly on a 2nd channel. 👍 Taking apart a drive looks really complicated. So a full length run (even minus comments). Would be very helpful.👍❤️ Not that me, personally ever to expect need. But for those that do. For general viewing purposes your layout is nearly perfect. Entertainment.👏👏❤️ But those who need to do it would appreciate a full breakdown video. Think that any commentary would be way too much work for you with those bonus length extra videos.👌 Just hope your render rig and data plan could cope.☹️
Your relubricated drive sounds closer to what they used to sound like when I was a kid. I had to do this same procedure for an old hard drive that had a separate stepper when it wouldn't seek properly after sitting for 8 years. PTFE grease may last longer in that bearing but you would likely have to remove the shield to repack it.
some old fashion greases tend to get rock hard over the years and seize parts so the bearings are probably fine you were just fighting solidified grease. this happens a lot in potentiometers were you cannot turn them even with pliers. this happens also on the brightness and contrast knobs on ibm monitors. those bearings are not supposed to seal anyting, those are just shields to keep the grease mostly inside and keep the dust outside.sealed bearings have rubber seals. most oils penetrate well through those shields thats why you had sucess lubricating them. those bearings dont rotate very much during the usage of the drive so i dont believe there is damage to the balls or the sleeves
Think I would have removed the shields and cleaned the old lubricant out of them. It could be completely pointless if the races are screwed, but getting the old gunk out will help. It's quite tedious removing bearing shields though, not impossible though.
It appears that the bearings are actually shielded but not sealed. In that case its pretty normal to have the ingress of moisture that produces the red color liquid that comes out that you showed. its just some surface rust breaking free. Either way they should be fine.
This has given me a few ideas about the two Qume DT/8 drives I have that appear (well at least the main drive) to be faulty. Try try to load data but then give up every single time. I obviously have cleaned them up and lubed up the head carriage and it seems to move fine, but you never know. Maybe the head stepper needs that extra little touch. Either that or the controller boards are shot. Ugh!
I wonder what it would look like if you put a current sensor on the 12 volt lines on those floppies to see how much current they draw... Might be nice to know just as a diagnostics tool for future use if your floppy drive pulls more than x number of amps it's probably time to lubricate the stepper motor.
Put the Bearings on Paint Thinner or solvent for contact cement. That should disolve any dry grease. DW-40 also works but its not as strong nor quick. Bearings are supposed to use grease, not just spin freely. It may look like having then spin effortlessly is better but its not, id say wash them clean like i said, and try getting motor oil in them. Motor oil is thikker and doesnt evaporate that easily and stick really well to steel, that should make them last longer. Ideally you should remove the seals and clean them and then put grease in them, silicone or thin lithium grease as those are not in a high speed device., but those are not removable seals, or in that case HH stands for dual shield, so they arent seals, only shields for dust and particles. Worst case, try removing one without breaking it, though i doubt you could, clean it, put some grease, spin it a while to remove any excess grease from the track and put it back with the shield looking to the outside. Though i think motor oil should be enough for this case.
I find it likely that it's just old dried up grease inside the bearings, which as stated below are not shielded. My fix would be to first soak them in IPA to loosen up and get all that old grease out, then lube them with like silicone lube or something like that.
Hm, is the spindle motor als responsible for the heads movement assembly? Normally those two are separate steppers. About the bearings though. Take away one of the shields, clean and lubricate them. They have lived in a clean environment. So how much can there be wrong, given that it has not lived like a hard disk...??? (it even might work on them a swell) BTW sealed only means that there is grease inside. Not that they are completely air tight. P.s. U might as well oil the bronze bushings of the other parts. Which is certainly good 4 3.5 inch drives. Namasté.
Arne Schmitz It would be in a awmost dust state, but its kinda sticky, it wouldnt be a good conductor, and probably wouldnt get into the rest of the system. But most of the grease i've tested is also conductive so no big difference here. And as i said, go 'full' crazy.
"...and hope for the best" :D lol, I have seen quite a few of your videos: it was never the best :D (but go on, it is more fun to watch than to suffer :))
It might have been just me, but it seemed like the freshly cleaned one (the b floppy in this case) is faster than the not cleaned one (the a floppy in this case).
I didn't want to mention this in the video but I did notice that as well. My best guess is that the drive I worked on may have been aligned better than the other drive. The other drive may need to rehome more often to keep positioning in the correct spot. But that is a total guess which is why I didn't mention it.
Assuming no edits: Untouched floppy drive: 21:37 to 22:10 (33 seconds) Lubricated floppy drive: 22:17 to 22:46 (30 seconds) So yes, it was three seconds faster.
I followed along with my 5.25 drives from a compaq portable 1 and as soon as the belt starts moving on boot up, it instantly says "diskette error, replace and strike any key when ready". Would you have a solution to the problem?
Try adjusting the flat head screw at the back of the drive. It will move the transport back and forth. It may be out of alignment. You might need the adjust it a little bit and press a key, the move it some more and repeat until you can get a read. It can be finicky.
Anyone know who actually made these drives? Back in the day, I saw loads of these (with exactly the same construction, just not IBM branded) in various 8-bit CP/M systems. .... Aaaaah! "Tandon"... of course!
