floppy head failing

Disk drives, Monitors, SuperCPU etc.
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Gyro Gearloose
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floppy head failing

Post by Gyro Gearloose »

No idea where I'm going with this. Magnetics is not my thing. How write currents affect one head but not another is not something I can really comment on, there appears to be no manufacturing or data sheets available anywhere for floppy disk drive heads.

I've been contacting various existing companies that still deal with magnetic read/write heads. There's still a lot of stripe readers out there and some studio reel to reel machines.
Some companies even responded and said "sorry, the information to make disk heads is long gone" or "we never made those".
I have one manufacturer response so far that indicates some interest though...

I was asking them if it's possible to remanufacture these heads.

Of course market size is important to know. How many people have dead 1541s (any model) because the head failed? Anyone know if this was a common issue among Atari and Apple and other drives?


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rmzalbar
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Re: floppy head failing

Post by rmzalbar »

There are a ton of dead 1541's out there with bad newtronics heads, and there will be many more. Most of these probably were tossed in the trash or were cannibalized, because let's face it, once you understand the heads are not obtainable, these things take up a load of space and weight. This unfortunately will affect the number of potential repair targets out there should heads become available again. I think too that the desire for floppy disk drives even among enthusiasts is declining, because after all, even the media itself is not being made anymore. Enthusiasts generally have some interest in fixing the hardware for preservation's sake, even when working drives are still realatively cheap and available. I could imagine a rush for a few hundred of these heads, if the price is reasonable, followed by a slow tapering-off trickle after that. That may not be enough to get production going.

I have a couple of Atari 1050's, there's no talk in the community of bad heads on those. Plenty of spare parts or substitutes still available.. for now. Atari drives can be a pain to maintain due to power supply woes (they lose capacitors, diodes, rectifiers, regulators.. traces to capacitor plague..) but generally they don't lose anything unreplaceable like the head. Disk drive emulation a-la-pi1541-style is fairly mature now for the A8 world, too.
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Gyro Gearloose
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Re: floppy head failing

Post by Gyro Gearloose »

You're making sense. Oh well. I'll satisfy my curiosity about the head and see how far I can get.
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Re: floppy head failing

Post by Gyro Gearloose »

Eventually, all floppy drive heads will wear down. Once the smooth finish wears off, the head will start damaging the discs themselves.

For theoretical research, how can I get a few more defective heads? I'm getting one x-rayed but I'd like to send one out to Durascan too.
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Re: floppy head failing

Post by Gyro Gearloose »

I've also contacted Mitsubishi again just to see if they have 35 year old archives on their floppy drive heads...
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