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6 Jul, 21 tweets, 6 min read

today on The Bench of Healing™ -- an original IBM 360K 5.25" drive.

it's very dusty

ooh there's a floppy disk still inside! it's also very dusty

IBM SOURCE INSPECTION. what does H/T mean 🤔

yep, dusty

this drive has two heads. the original IBM 5150 came with a single-sided drive at first, with a capacity of 160K (later versions of DOS extended this to 180K)

you can use a strobe light to adjust the motor speed.

if you look underneath the drive latch, you can tell that this is a 48 track per inch drive, double sided recording.

discovered that the plastic guide rails are just press fit into the metal casting. naturally the plastic tabs had broken off at some point. let's see if a little glue will hold.

hooked it up to my bench PC, let's see what it does.

the motor speed is dead on!

why won't it work, he asked stupidly, while holding the connectors from the rear/write head. 🤦‍♂️

much better

yeah this isn't great. I'm thinking about how to remove the plastic pegs

decided to drill into it and thread a screw in

snip

drilled holes in the other piece so they fit together

this provides a lot more surface area for the glue.

removing dust using my new favorite tool: ColorCoral.

here's another drive. someone's put a RAM chip in the socket meant for the terminator resistor array 😂

something is wrong with the belt. can't quite put my finger on it 🤔

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6 Jul

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