In this video we continue the floppy drive repair that we started last week. The SFD 1001 is an interesting drive. It was one of the last IEEE-488 drives made by Commodore (the 8280 dual 8″ drive may have been later – it runs DOS version 3.0, compared to 2.7 on the SFD). It’s a double-sided single disk unit, housed in a 1541 style case.
This specific drive is of particular interest to me because it once belonged to the company that gave me my first programming job.
Let’s quickly recap what we’ve done. We’ve dismantled the drive and taken the power supply out. The power supply is the US standard 115 volts, which means we don’t date plug it in here in the UK. In any case, the power and IEEE connectors on the back look very manky, so one of today’s jobs will be to replace them. In addition, we cleaned and lubricated the drive, and repaired the spindle motor PCB, which had suffered corrosion due to capacitor leakage.
Today we’re going to continue the renovation. We’ll put in a new Mean Well power supply. This is a modern switching PSU and is much lighter than the original linear transformer. Then we’ll recap the main PCB. Cleaning and retrobrighting are also on the menu. We have a heat wave going on, so the case will bask in the sun with a peroxide wrap.
Finally we’ll put it all back together, and switch it on for the very first time.
PCBWay make high quality PCBs for prototyping, projects, or even production. I’ve been using them for a while now, and their prices, delivery and quality are all excellent. I’d like to thank them for sponsoring this video.