Gear FIX & Molykote LUBE of Apple 1.44MB Floppy Drive [MP-F75W-02G]

[@santospoland]

Dear James, thank you for consistently delivering such fine content. I am really delighted that in this video a few people have offered to provide you with humble gestures of goodwill that encourage you to continue your craft of delivering really exceptional reference repair material. If they should read this comment, I appreciate and thank them for supporting you. There is something very special about those small contributions, they may be humble in their offerings but it makes a world of difference. Thank you!

[@JDW-]

Thank you, Alex. I'm actually editing my next video right now, which is about the FCPX workflow, MBP and camera tools I used to make that broken gear video. I am covering FCPX 10.4.9 which came out recently. Some of my YT viewers asked about my workflow, so my forthcoming video aims to satisfy that request. Much more to come, my friend!

[@cosmokramer4585]

I am a new sub. Its crazy I am in my Plus right now and just took apart the drive for the first time and found the exact same gear broken. Then a few hours later you come out the video!!! Freaking awesome. Thank you for all the help and information you provide on your channel!!

[@JDW-]

That’s wonderful to hear, Cosmo. Thank you for your subscription. Please let me know how your repair goes!

[@cosmokramer4585]

JDW I absolutely will. I recapped the board and finally got it going and running like a top. I just got done tuning it using Pina’s book. Going to repair the drive and start using it like it’s 1986 again. Any chance you are going to make a video on retrobriting in the future? Or have I just missed it on your channel?

[@JDW-]

I’ve not done a video on it yet but I do have several photos about it on Flickr, including my gel recipe which you will find in the text description I put under the photo below: flic.kr/p/6PKVYV

[@michaelmullett7327]

Really like that you get right to the point and show what you are doing so that anyone can learn to do it

[@JDW-]

Thank you, Michael!

[@joethezombie]

Hey JDW, rather than desoldering the motor from the switch board, I just popped the motor out along with the board. I noticed on the bottom side of the motor along with the metallic gear, exists two holes which had wept a fair amount of oil onto the plastic gear box frame. The motor had some resistance when turning by hand, so I dripped some electric turbine oil into the holes, which significantly eased the ability to manually turn the motor. Probably not a required step, as there hasn’t really been any reports of non-working motors, but I think the drive ejects with no where near the amount of audible labor than before adding the oil. Not definitive, because I refurbished the gearbox with EM-30L at the same time.

[@JDW-]

Thank you for sharing your experience. I've never removed the motor myself, but that's because my motors haven't been frozen up. The middle of this website shows photos of the two holes you mention, and in the case of that author, he used WD-40 (which isn't a lubricant, but which will clean out crud): bit.ly/32xtDyX Toward the middle of this 2nd website (Google translated from Japanese to English), you can see photos of a disassembled motor: bit.ly/3b3w0h1 The author of that 2nd website (Japanese) chose to use alcohol and clean the inside, rather than use oil. I am by no means an expert on motors or the proper way to lubricate them (and for the life of me, I cannot find an OMRON data sheet on the original motor), but there are windings inside the motor that need to be considered. I found this web page which suggests using lubrication that won't harm the windings: bit.ly/3hBkTOz

[@SteveRieck-Music]

I've been hitting it out of the park with vintage Mac repairs lately. Due in large part to such helpful videos by you and Branchus Creations. Thanks again!

[@JDW-]

Steve, that’s truly wonderful to hear. Thank you for your kind words and for making time to let me know your repair progress is going well. Best wishes!

[@santospoland]

Thank you for the mouser carts, they are invaluable.

[@8bitwidgets]

thanks for doing this video! great to know there are parts available when they are needed.

[@flow221]

Informative and detailed as ever, thanks. I have two 800K floppies sitting in my SE that have never been maintained, and your videos leave me little excuse to put it off any longer.

[@JDW-]

Thank you, J.B.!

[@Fred_Raimer]

Thanks for another awesome video, JDW!! This is *exactly* what I needed! BTW - I was astounded to see the number of these sold on eBay by a number of sellers!! It would seem that every surviving classic Macintosh needs this fix!!

[@kappino]

Proud to be Italian 😊🇮🇹

[@ebuy05]

Hi JDW, your videos are great! You are very picky and likes to get the things right - that seems like a rare quality nowadays lol. Coincidently, I just took 2 SuperDrives (1.44Mb) this weekend from a Mac SE/30 and a Mac SE FDHD I recently acquired and I cleaned and lubricated them in similar way you did to yours. One floppy drive came from a vary bad condition Mac SE FHDH that I wasn't sure if it works. Even after my careful lubrication work (the drives operate mechanically very smoothly), it doesn't recognizes my 800k boot disk - the head moves, spins and keeps on going in this loop. The other one, it kinda recognizes the boot disk: I get a happy Mac face for a few seconds, but then ejects the disk and the question mark disk shows. Do you know what may cause the happy face to show up only for a few seconds? PS: This 800k floppy is functioning as it works in my other Mac SE. Thanks, Ed.

[@JDW-]

Thank you for your kind words. Since you said you CLEANED your drive, I assume that means proper cleaning of the top and bottom head with 99% ISO alcohol, so we can rule that out as the cause of your problems. Have any of your "bad" drives ever been touched by someone else? If someone else tried to service those drives in the past improperly, such could have cause problems with the head. I can think of 2 things, both of which are shown in my 800K drive video (link in text description). (1) Someone could have lifted the top head up too far and bent the metal piece shown at 18 min. 55 sec. (800K drive video). If that happened, the bent metal can be bent back into shape but it's very time consuming and fiddly work. (2) Someone could have removed the head alignment screw show at 47 min. 6 sec. -- the screw I mention that should not be removed. That could have shifted the head enough to where the head either won't read known-good floppies at all, or only partially read them. A partial read would explain why a known-good disk starts to boot but then fails. Regarding the floppy drive you say partially boots, if you can boot from a FloppyEMU or hard disk, try to format a known-good floppy in that drive and see if it succeeds. Try formatting other disks too. If that works, make a duplicate of a disk onto one of your freshly formatted disks and then try to boot from that. If that works, try to boot your other Mac from that same disk. If that too works, then it is a matter of slight differences in the way data was written to the disk. I myself have seen that in my 400K drives. A floppy would work in one drive but wouldn't work well in another 400K drive. But when I formatted and duplicated that same disk in the "bad" 400K drive, then it started working in all my 400K drives. The interesting thing is though, all my disks which were original commercial software disks would work in both 400K drives. That again shows that writing data to a disk yourself on one drive could have issues when you try to read it on another drive. It could be head alignment, or it could be magnetic field strength. I'm not sure.

[@ebuy05]

JDW Wow! Thank you for the quick and very detailed reply. Much appreciated:) I really liked your idea regarding booting the machine with another device and trying to format a new floppy in this drive. Interestingly, I just ordered a FloppyEmu today as I only have 1 single SCSI hard drive working on my Classic and I don’t want to keep removing it. I’ll try your idea once I receive the FloppyEmu. Thanks again and keep it up with your professionally made videos!

[@SteveRieck-Music]

Hi JDW, Are the caps on the 1.44 the same as the 800k? I have three of them and they are cleaned and seem to be working fine. As always, I appreciate you sharing your knowledge!

[@JDW-]

It is NOT a necessity to recap floppy drives. It is only a good idea in light of the fact that no fluid fill cap has eternal life.

[@scottharris7222]

Exceptional content. Thanks so much.

[@JDW-]

Thank you for watching and for your very kind words, Scott!

[@johnsnook2358]

Thanks for all your videos. I really like them. They help me alot.

[@jeffginsburg3603]

JDW, I love your videos. My SE/30 logic board has been re-capped and the analog board is next on the list - thanks to you (mouser parts hopefully arriving this weekend). Although I now boot off of a BlueSCSI board, I am trying to image as many of my old floppies as possible. I have been able to read about 25% of my old floppies. Then, after around 20 successes, the drives will not read or format any discs. Mechanically, the disks drop in and are ejected aggressively, so I do not suspect a lubrication issue. I hear the heads moving for a few seconds. The heads are clean. Any ideas why both of my drives (internal and external 1.44M) would suddenly neither read, write and fail formatting within 5 seconds? Some investigation suggests that a chip (RP10) can go bad. Unfortunately it is no longer in production. When you built your SE Reloaded, do you remember what chip replaced this Bourns 4120R-601-250/201? Thanks again for all of your hard work. Jeff

[@JDW-]

Mouser & DigiKey stopped selling the Bourns chips because they are no longer made, but UT Source in China still sells them, and there is a way to make them too. Links and details given on page 3 of my SE Reloaded BOM here: docs.google.com/document/d/1QhHpDew4saFxvt82W2TkdpnNA2W7tLZhe53Et64gpdY/edit

[@JDW-]

Are you saying that you could only use both of your floppies for 20 minutes, and then both stopped working and even to this day have never started working again? Or are you saying that both of your drives stopped working for a time, but then after you shutoff the machines and left them for a while and came back, then the drives started working again? I have had similar issues in the past when reading a large batch of old disks, mainly because there was some crud on the disk surface I didn't notice initially, and after using 30 or so of them, my previously cleaned heads where now dirty again and required subsequent cleaning. Be sure to slide open the metal slider and use a magnifying glass on your floppies to see if there is any mold or crud on the disks themselves that might be putting that crud on your heads.

[@jeffginsburg3603]

@@JDW- Again, thanks for the info re UT Source. However, I think it IS an issue of Filthy disks re-contaminating my drives. I have been collecting drives for years and had one in my box-of goodies labeled "working 800k". I connected it to my Mac and it read a few disks before having similar issues. I actually heard something hitting the heads as the floppy was spinning. Further cleaning and inspecting every floppy surface platter before inserting back into the drive has helped. Some disks are likely just bad, but I am making progress. I will try again with my 1.44m drives after I finish the analog board recapping. In answer to your question: No, once a drive stopped reading or writing, no amount of rest made any difference. I am no longer concerned about the mother board chip since this 800K is working. Jeff

[@JDW-]

It could be that if there are any hard pieces of debris on the old floppy disks, that debris could scratch the head as it spins. You also need to consider that cleaning the heads may take multiple tries. I had one drive that wouldn’t work right until I clean the heads literally four times with 100% IPA. That’s because the first three cleanings didn’t get off all of the crud. you need to take a magnifying glass and carefully look at both heads, taking care not to bend the upper head too high.

[@jeffginsburg3603]

@@JDW- I forgot about the various drives I have been collecting over the years because I did not have a reliable way to boot or a working machine. With the recapped SE/30 (and a donor SE for parts), along with the BlueSCSI to boot, I can finally get to those floppies. It turns out that I own 4 Superdrives and 2 800K drives. 1 superdrive and 1 800k are completely usable, 2 superdrives are unreliable and 1 800K is hit or miss. 1 superdrive is so gunked up with visible gummy dust that I won't even try it until it gets the JDW super tear down and relube treatment next weekend. Thanks for your suggestions regarding cleaning the heads, that is what go my data off of those floppies.

[@smop8388]

Thanks JDW for this video! Is 100% silicone grease and oil not as suitable?

[@JDW-]

Thank you for your kind words. If you already have silicone grease that was purchased within the past two years and properly stored, then go ahead and use that. I still think you need oil to supplement the grease as shown in my video. But if you don’t have existing grease and oil, or if what you have is too old, I strongly suggest that you expand the text description beneath my video and purchase the SuperLube grease and oil that I recommend. The EM-30L grease will also work, but you would still need oil.

[@billmckim6589]

Do you offer Floppy clean up services? I have maybe 8 floppies mechanism drives needs cleaning Thank You! 🙂

[@JDW-]

I’m afraid I do not, primarily because I’m located in Japan and most of my viewers are based in North America. International shipping is more expensive than ever, so it wouldn’t make it financially worthwhile. You might want to check with Thomas Andrews of Amiga of Rochester, New York to see if he would do the job for you. He primarily does recapping work, but it could be he could service your floppy drives.

[@JeffG-uo7vx]

Bill, Do the drives all work i.e read and write disks? Are they simply needing cleaning to load and eject disks?

[@olepigeon]

22:56 My skull & crossbones icon! I'm famous! :P

[@JDW-]

And the best part is, that version ROM file now famously works with the DayStar Turbo040 40MHz PDS accelerator in the SE/30!

[@bernardguillot5195]

Hi, Thanx for this great very helpful video! Please give me the link for ordering Molykote EM-30L since jjclay@68kMLA doesn't work...

[@JDW-]

Hi, Bernard. If you click the SHOW MORE link under my video, it will expand the text description, and inside that I have an Amazon link and an EBAY link to to EM-30L grease.

[@bernardguillot5195]

@@JDW- Thank you very much for this very quick answer!

[@procerpat9223]

I replaced the 2x gear on the motor on mine and the floppy ejects correctly now, but the disks are not reading or being written to. Any ideas ?

[@JDW-]

If the drive has been properly lubricated in accordance with that I show in my video (i.e., using a good lubricant sparingly) and the head seems to be moving smoothly as it should, there could be two causes of failure to read and write: (1) your head is still dirty after you cleaned it (which I have experienced before), or (2) the head is misaligned and requires adjustment (not a fun, fast or easy task). So let's focus on (1) for now. When I cleaned my head, I used 100% ISO alcohol on a swab, taking care not to bend the thin metal piece that holds the top head in place. But even after that I had read/write issues. When I used a magnifying glass to examine my "cleaned" head, I found some gunk was caked on. It took another 5 cleanings with 100% ISO alcohol to get it all off, and after that, I was able to read/write again. So if you are using only 70% rubbing alcohol, it make take more effort, and you absolutely must use a magnifying glass or loupe to see if your cleaning job was a success. If that fails to get it working, you will then need to resort to head alignment, which is described in a downloadable document on the TinkerDifferent forum here: tinkerdifferent.com/resources/zero-track-alignment.37/