Thank you for using the correct types of lubricants. I see so many retro youtubers using non plastic safe petroleum greases that will just gum up again in short order on floppy drives. Drives me nuts.
@JDW-8 ай бұрын
Many KZbinrs fail to clean the drive thoroughly, and even if they do, they don’t video that part so viewers are left in the dark. I dunk the frame parts in 100% IPA for 1 to 2 hours, scrubbing with a toothbrush at various times. That is far more effective in getting out caked on old grease than a mere topical application of IPA via swab. That cleaning is key to ensuring the drive parts will move smoothly after new, plastic safe grease is applied.
@TaijanDean8 ай бұрын
It makes you really appreciate how mechanical the system is. The only major failure point in the whole drive are those gears, which is to be expected from 30 - 40 year old floppy drives. They really put a lot of effort to make these drives as mechanically simple as possible to ensure a long lifespan. Thankfully my much older Mac Plus has a perfectly fine and working floppy drive which is great as I have plenty of floppy backups of System 6 should I ever need them, as well as a Floppy copy of the game 'Dark Castle' and 'Galactic Frontier'. I'm trying to find one of those all plastic drive protector disks used for shipping, since I carry my Plus around in its carry case a lot and I don't want those heads to touch or become damaged in any way, but I can't find any online.
@JDW-8 ай бұрын
After having repair the gearboxes of several 800K and 1.44MB drives, I believe Apple must have deliberately chose a different plastic to use in that gear which always ends up broken. Seems like they designed it to be more brittle on purpose. Maybe it was designed to be a sacrificial gear just in case the grease hardened and got stuck one day. When you have one gear that is brittle, it will break apart, sparing all the other gears the same fate. And sure enough, that's what happens. You never hear about any of the other gears needing replacement. It is always that one little gear. So while it's unfortunate we need to change that gear, the good news is that it is always the same gear, and only the one. Nice design overall, I think.
@TaijanDean8 ай бұрын
@JDW- Indeed. I think quite a few record turntable of the period used the same ideology, sacrifice one small gear for the sake of the rest. Come to think of it, that also applies to DVD players (the ones with front loading drives) among other things. It's not a bad idea, just a nuisance when it happens. 😄
@mr.weatherman4032 ай бұрын
Hey James, I wanted to thank you for making this (and all of these videos regarding the SE and SE/30). I, on a whim, bought an SE about a month ago and tore through the motherboard, analog board, PSU, and floppy drive as per your instructions. Your videos are simply brilliant and very easy to follow and understand. I come from a background of vacuum tube radios, so this was definitely a new experience for me. After a swap out of the RAM modules, I powered it on, and lo and behold, it chimed and began booting from the hard disk. It has a full Microsoft Office suite, WordPerfect, and Norton file encryption all on System 7.1. It's a little sluggish, which is to be expected, and I'd like to use it for web browsing and word processing. It can do the latter decently, though I'd rather it be a little snappier. However, I am sure that it can't effectively web browse due to immense sluggishness. Ultimately, I can't (at the moment) justify buying an SE/30, especially since I have an SE that could be made into a decently quick machine with an accelerator card. However, I am curious: How common are these cards? Also, do all of them come with an additional PDS slot? I know This Does Not Compute covered the Prodigy SE by Levco, which had one, but I don't know if that's a universal feature. I'd like to use an ethernet card in conjunction with said accelerator, even if it requires some inventive ideas to fit everything inside. I'm sure this comment is more appropriate for a forum, but I've been meaning to thank you for your help for the past week or so, and figured it would be easy enough to come here and express my gratitude while also rolling my questions into the comment.
@JDW-2 ай бұрын
Thank you for your kind words. In short, you are asking about accelerators and Ethernet for the Macintosh SE, preferably which have a pass-through PDS connector. Finding accelerator cards for the SE can be difficult, and a lot of people who end up with an accelerator find it as a hidden bonus when they purchase an old SE. Typically, if you look for accelerators only on eBay, in those rare cases when they do appear for sale, the sellers are trying to milk you for as much cash as they possibly can get. Probably your best bet in finding an accelerator for a more reasonable price is to join a Facebook “marketplace group dedicated to vintage Macs and join the Tinker Different forum to post a “want to buy” message. While you search for a good accelerator, I need to mention that the majority of accelerators for compact Macs are for the SE/30, and sadly, those are not compatible with the SE. You also asked about an ethernet card, but honestly, it’s probably best to get a BlueSCSI V2 with a Pico W because it offers wireless connectivity to the Internet that is going to be about as fast as any 10BaseT ethernet card would be. The problem with connecting a Mac like an SE to the Internet is that it cannot display modern CSS. A workaround is something called Frog Find, which is basically an intelligent filter that grabs a webpage and then converts it into a format that older Macs can understand. Also, older Macs cannot understand HTTPS websites, which are the vast majority of websites these days. But frog find helps you deal with that too. And because frog find acts as a filter, even slow Macs like an SE can take advantage of it, although it would be mostly text based and not display graphics. One last thing I should mention pertains to accelerators for the SE. It’s very unfortunate but a fact that most accelerators for that machine don’t handle sound very well at all. The sound is distorted because the designers did not take audio into consideration. They simply accelerated everything and that messes up the sound. Back in the day, a lot of people with productivity apps wanted a faster machine and they didn’t tend to play games so it never was an issue. But most of us these days use older Macs for gaming quite a lot where audio matters. Some accelerators allow you to temporally disable the acceleration so that the audio sounds fine again, but that will run your SE at the stock 8MHz megahertz speed. I don’t even know if there is an accelerator for the SE that doesn’t have audio problems. DayStar an accelerators for the SE/30 don’t have those issues, but again they’re not compatible with the SE. I hope this information helps!
@mr.weatherman4032 ай бұрын
@JDW- Indeed, this is exactly the information I was looking for. I already have an Asante MacCon SE in my possession, which I managed to get for a decent price as far as EPay is concerned😂. Ultimately, I do actually desire to use this machine for office work such as writing and basic research, which only needs to be text-based. In using my SE for writing, I have found its lack of distractions to be most enjoyable. The only blemish is a lack of snappiness, which can easily be remedied by said card. Thus, given my priorities, sound isn't the highest on the list. I do appreciate the heads up however, and will keep in mind this information.
@johnsnook23588 ай бұрын
I always enjoy your videos. Thanks! 🙂
@computerhobbyshop8 ай бұрын
Really great, I especially loved how you used the cool Garage Band Demo Song as intro music. ;)
@JDW-8 ай бұрын
Thank you for your kind feedback. I tend to prefer No Attribution free music because I sometimes hit the 5000 character limit when I write text descriptions, which eliminations any possibility on my part to comply with Creative Commons text based attribution. In this video, I used a combination of free music from the KZbin music library, and music I found in FCPX on my Mac, none of which flagged any copyright notices after upload, so I went with that. But I must say, picking music really isn't my thing. Making videos takes a HUGE amount of time, and then I need to pick music in the final stage of my editing. And yet, if I leave music mostly out of my long videos, some people would consider it boring. Then again, there are others who dislike the musical selections I choose, so I guess it boils down to a guessing game on my part as to what might please the majority of people.
@robotroom8 ай бұрын
Another great video. I will refer to it when I recap and lube my drives. Thank you.
@JDW-8 ай бұрын
Even if the stock gear in your drives work, since you will spend timing tearing it apart anyway to recap and lube, it makes sense to swap out the gear too. It's basically a ticking time bomb. I think the drive shown in my video was serviced in the past few years by the previous owner, but it's clear he didn't swap out the gear, and when I got the machine the gear broke and eject never worked. Well, not until my fix with Tune-O-Gear! 🙂
@michaelmullett73278 ай бұрын
Fantastic I will need to do this to mine and it’s always nice to watch you work on these Mac mechanisms and show us all what we need to do!
@JDW-8 ай бұрын
Thank you for your kind words, Michael!
@WelcomeToMarkintosh8 ай бұрын
What's the difference between a piano and a sprocket? You can't Tune-O-Gear! Sorry!-- Wow, Kay's gear looks fantastic! Thanks for another great video James-I feel confidant I can service a floppy drive now!
@retrohaxblog7 ай бұрын
Awesome video! Thank you for all those hints. Regarding Universal ROM SIMM, does it work with a stock Mac CC motherboard?
@JDW-7 ай бұрын
Thank you for your kind words. The answer to your question is No. That is because there is no "ROM" SIMM slot, nor are there any pads into which you can solder your own ROM SIMM socket. On the LC575 motherboard, there are pads, and it is into those pads that I soldered a socket, which allows the Universal ROM SIMM to work. Now you need to consider that the stock CC motherboard is no fun at all to use. You have a 10MB RAM limit, and a very slow CPU. Using a stock CC feels slower than using a stock SE/30, even though both have a 16MHz 030 CPU, and that's because the CC has color, whereas the SE/30 is B&W. This is why so many people try to find an LC575 motherboard to do the Mystic upgrade. It really makes the CC usable. And the side benefit is that you can now have a custom ROM SIMM installed on your Mystic too. It's a very worthwhile upgrade to consider. I explain more about that in my video here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/gqirameOdquei5o
@retrohaxblog7 ай бұрын
@@JDW- First of all, again, thank you for such detailed info. I am a bit layman if it is Mac CCs and I am learning a ton from your videos! :D I am currently refurbishing six Mac CCs (one of them is Mystic) and was a bit confused with that 64-pin socket spot on the stock mobo near the white edge connector. This is why I asked about Universal ROM SIMM compatibility with a stock machine.
@JDW-7 ай бұрын
@@retrohaxblog You may find the following PDF an excellent reference, and please note the motherboard parts begin to be described starting at page 82 (coving RAM, VRAM, PDS, etc.) www.applerepairmanuals.com/the_manuals_are_in_here/Color_Classic.pdf
@retrohaxblog7 ай бұрын
@@JDW- Awesome! Thank you! :)
@enrico44987 ай бұрын
Thank you Sir for this great video! How do you know that the Tune-O-Gear is molded and not printed? The official shop isn't clear about that.
@JDW-7 ай бұрын
You can see me use a microscope to examine the smallest details of the gear and there are no print lines that show it to be 3-D printed. It looks and feels as perfectly smooth as the original gear. 3-D printed gears are not made as perfectly as the Tune-O-Gear. With that said, it really would be best if Kay Koba could make specific mention on his product page to avoid questions like this and maintain clarity that his gears are indeed made in a mold. But if you have any doubts, you need only ask him and I’m sure he will provide you with an official reply.
@user-ze7mi7ox7n7 ай бұрын
Very helpful video! I'm attempting to do a repair on a Mac Plus internal drive. I have a question for you (or anyone else that can help). In the process of removing the ejection motor, the square piece of metal that covers the read head fell off. I hope to glue it back, but I'm unsure about what kind of cement I should use. Any suggestions?
@JDW-7 ай бұрын
You seem to be talking about the reflective square piece of metal shown in my video which has blue colored letters and numbers stamped on it. Any glue that can secure metal to plastic will suffice. You just want to make sure that if you have a very liquidy glue that it doesn’t drip down onto the head and ruin the head. Since gravity will largely hold that metal piece down, I suppose you could even use Elmers glue if you don’t want to buy any new glue you don’t already have. Even so, the head moves around a lot so using a glue that’s a bit more robust than that might be in order. Pretty much any superglue would probably do the job. If you want to try a glue that’s thicker than superglue, I have little doubt that the original JB Weld, which takes 24 hours to cure, would do the job. You would just need to note which parts come in contact and use a toothpick to apply it sparingly. Here’s an Amazon affiliate link to the exact version of JB Weld that I use, which sticks well to pretty much everything I’ve ever tried it on: amzn.to/3TGufyk
@user-ze7mi7ox7n7 ай бұрын
Thanks for the quick reply! Ordered using your link... @@JDW-
@JDW-7 ай бұрын
I think you made a good purchasing decision. JB Weld isn’t just a one trick pony. You can use it on a variety of things and it’s extremely strong too. The only one caveat is that it has a dark gray color which might be seen if you’re trying to glue something back together which is white or a lighter color. But other than that you might find it quite useful. I would suggest putting it inside a Ziploc bag to make it last longer. I’ve had a pair of tubes for a few years now stored in that condition and the contant is just as soft as it was when new. You might even consider putting each tube into their own separate bags, because sometimes after use, a little bit might leak out around the cap area and make one of the tubes a bit sticky. If you have time, please be sure to report back about how well it worked to secure that metal piece back to the top drive head. Good luck!