exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

cmorley wrote: 23 Aug 2022 11:30 Which mechanism is in the drive enclosure? One of them with the thin latch (TEC maybe) is notorious for bad caps on the control board leaking. TEAC and Mitsubishi mechanisms are better.

I didn't see any branding on the drive mechanism, but it looks like this:

Normally there is a sticker on the die cast frame of the drives... can't say I recognise those from the photos. They don't look like the rotting TEC ones I've fixed in the past.

Hopefully you can get the motor going else you could fit a Gotek in the hole. The black plastic 3.5"/5.25" adapters work well, I have a couple. You can fit switches to swap drive 0/1 but I don't bother.. just Gotek as 0 and floppy as 1.

cmorley wrote: 23 Aug 2022 14:19 Normally there is a sticker on the die cast frame of the drives... can't say I recognise those from the photos. They don't look like the rotting TEC ones I've fixed in the past.

Hopefully you can get the motor going else you could fit a Gotek in the hole. The black plastic 3.5"/5.25" adapters work well, I have a couple. You can fit switches to swap drive 0/1 but I don't bother.. just Gotek as 0 and floppy as 1.

I'm obviously going blind in my old age, I found a sticker, they are made by Shugart.

I managed to figure out how the motor board comes out and found this:


So I will replace the caps and see what happens. Looks pretty bad though, and I may end up doing both drives as they may have equally rotten caps.

Well, caps on order, because surprise surprise I didn't have ANY of the correct values, not to mention some of them are BiPolar!!!

How can I have a big box of caps and none are the values I need!!

GRRR

Ok, so caps arrived today, and the good news is that the motor is now spinning again!

The bad news is that the head isn't moving, so there is work to do still. It can be moved manually, but won't move electrically, so more digging to do.

Well, progress.

stephen_usher wrote: 27 Aug 2022 17:06 Well, progress.

I'll take it :)

OK, so some progress today as feeling a bit more like myself. I filled the ashtray on this machine and it all works great:


Also I had some success with the FDD. I can boot from drive 0 :) Of course the FDDs are being tested on my other BBC with the Sidewise setup as this machine now sports an MMFS SD card solution, but overall getting somewhere.

:bravo:

So, it's been a while since I've posted about a BBC, but a new upgrade just arrived for this one:


It's a PiTubeDirect and works as a 2nd processor for the BBC B. I need to get the software downloaded and onto an SD card next, then figure out how its all powered. It plugs into the BBC B tube interface, which does have 5v on it but not sure if that is all it needs, so some install instructions are needed.

I really want to try the enhanced Elite, hopefully I can do so soon :)