General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

Did a bit more Apricot Xi tinkering these last couple of nights.

After the exhibition the Xi's hard drive was having trouble spinning up again so I decided I just had to go for broke and soak the area around the spindle and spindle motor with oil. I put around ten pipette fulls of oil in the area (which it soaked up under the drive PCB) and left it over night. I then soaked up as much as I could using tissues. The drive now spins up more quickly and takes longer to spin down, which suggests I've managed to re-oil the bearings.

I also serviced the floppy drive which I'd got from one of the scrap machines. I hadn't bothered previously. This drive wasn't as gunked up as the other "scrap" drive but definitely was a bit dry.

I also saw if I could get the other drive I'd made from parts of the other two working properly, but this will need a lot more work.

I also installed the 8087 I got off eBay and rigged up a Gotek so I could boot the MSDOS 3.1 floppy which had MimicPC on it as well as I needed to be able to test the chip and to do that needed CheckIt to work.

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A bit of a Heath Robinson set-up but it worked.

Turns out the Xi is actually a bit faster than an IBM PC/XT.

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And, more importantly, the 8087 checks out as correctly functional.

I'm not sure how fast 1.#J megahertz is thought...

[PhilC]

@stephen_usher well done with the HDD. Just out of interest, what grade oil do you use?

Yes I know, geek question of the day goes to me

[stephen_usher]

It's described as "clock oil" or "watch oil", so very light but designed to not dry out.

I just got it off Amazon.

[stephen_usher]

Started looking again at the frankenfloppy I built using parts from the original F1 and one of the "scrap" Xi machines.

'scoping the head connector showed no data at all really so down the rabbit hole I went, dismantling the drive and delving into the head connections.

The upshot is thatI've had to remove the upper head and then found that the head itself had become unstuck from the mounting itself. Probably not really recoverable but I'm going to try gluing it back where it should be and hope the alignment is good enough.

Anyway, after some prodding and cleaning I seem to have connectivity between the heads and the connector so after I've got the top head reglued I can put it back together and see if it can read any data at all.

[agranlund]

I'm not sure how fast 1.#J megahertz is thought...

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Never heard of the Apricot Xi before, that's a very stylish looking computer!

[stephen_usher]

Never heard of the Apricot Xi before, that's a very stylish looking computer!

Yeah, all the early Apricot machines were very much influenced by the UK's Design Council esthetic, like the "Durabeam" torch.

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The later machines from 1984, the F series were also stylish, such as the Portable (with wireless keyboard and "mouse" and voice recognition) and the F1/F2 and F10 had a very different styling to any other machines of their time.

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All of those are 8086 machines.

[rubber_jonnie]

I had one of those torches

[BennehBoy]

Me too, I'd forgotten about them - I loved that torch

[stephen_usher]

I've re-glued the upper head and it's straight and remounted it into the drive, lining it up precisely with the lower head.

Checked the continuity, diodes and resistances on the heads and they all check out but I'm getting no data on either of the heads of the frankenfloppy.

I guess it could be that the head carriage is so out of alignment that it's missing track zero or any tracks.

I may desolder the upper head and move it, the motor board and the motherboard into the original drive from the Xi. That's basically the last thing I can try.

[stephen_usher]

So, I tried desoldering the wires from the "good" upper head and... The wires desoldered but they are glued to the top of the plastic!!! Disaster.

I cut the wires close to the edge of the plastic and pulled as much of the insulation off as I could. I'm now going to cut the wires from where they attach to the flexible PCB, strip them and solder those to the pads on the head and glue the wires down so they don't move. Then on the other drive I can cut the wires close to the plastic, strip those and join the wires together. The only issue being that I don't have heatshrink which is that fine so I'm going to have to find some other way to insulate them.