Retro Floppy Disk Drive Repair

In this video I repair the Tandy/TRS-80 5.25" floppy disk drive that I blew up during my Coco Storage Showdown video. When recording the Coco Storage Showdown, I accidentally touched my HxC drive emulator to the circuit board of the floppy drive, causing smoke to pour out. Using an LCR meter, multimeter and an Octopus tester, I manage to find the issue and repair it.
The drive is a Texas Peripherals unit, from the Tandon/Tandy joint venture in the 1980's.
Video where I blew it up is here: • Retro Floppy Disk Driv...
Music by Bensound: www.bensound.com
Would you like to see more content like this? If so, please consider supporting me on Patreon. / retrologiclab

[@marcseclecticstuff9497]

The plastic bits that hold the PCB to the chassis are known as drive rivets. A version of them are used extensively in the semi-trailer industry to secure plyliners (the plywood panels that protect the side posts & panels on the inside of the trailer) to the walls of the trailer. You also find tons of them holding various bits of car bodies together with removal typically equally frustrating.

[@Tuxon86]

Really like the homemade inductor! :-) Nice.

[@ultrametric9317]

So I suspect you shorted the leads of the capacitor C35 taking it out of the circuit so all the applied power was going through that inductor.

[@infinitecanadian]

I have used desoldering braid without using flux. Worked fine.

[@aplmak1]

Hey would love to connect.. got a similar drive and could use some help.. it’s running and formatting just won’t read.. any way we can get connected?

[@barjammar]

Hi, I have a Seimens FDD 100-5 drive from an Osborne 1 which looks the same. Can you show me where the Tandon manual is that you mentioned?

[@Luis45ccs]

Fan of COCO and Radio shak , form Venezuela and Spain

[@RetroLogicLaboratory]

Hey thanks for the kind words! Spain is wonderful, and although I haven't been to Venezuela, I've travelled quite a bit in South America and really want to go back!

[@jjohnson71958]

look for the dark brown burn mark

[@davidwedell6167]

Very interesting. Thank you for sharing!

[@jeffm2787]

You should have easily been able to figure that out without the schematic. Guess that wouldn't make a video.

[@infinitecanadian]

The link that you intended to lead to the video of the drive breaking leads to this video. I don't think you show the drive breaking here.

[@MrHBSoftware]

that inductor acts like a fuse, its common even on washing machine boards....those 5.6uh will do nothing..its just a fuse...the one you fabricated has a much thicker wire so i guess it will not work as good as it should for a fuse...i would just reuse any small inductor with the same physical size from any random old circuit board or even a low wattage 1ohm resistor etc

[@mogouk]

Great Fix, learned a bit, Subbed!

[@jeffnay6502]

I was hoping to learn how to do an alignment of one of these old drives.

[@robbyxp1]

Nice video

[@MilliVee1966]

Fascinating thanks!

[@Tuxon86]

Use a solder pump...