Replacing the floppy drive head with another from a different but similar drive?

[khaz]

Hi there, I have a floppy drive that belongs to a Tandy 1000HX that had its head bent upwards, and the spring that kept it down was stretched beyond repair. For several reasons I don't want to replace the drive in full (original Tandy drives are impossible to find, off the shelf 3.5 drives need a cable adapter, and the front plate is different enough that it will bother me forever.)

However, I have found out that the drive is from Sony, and the drive head, or the little caddy that moves back and forth when reading disks (how is it called?) is identical in several of their other older drives. More generally, the whole assembly is similar if not identical between Tandy 1000HX drives, Mac SE/30 drives, probably the other Classic Macintoshes, and regular old Sony drives.

Though the big question is, would it work? Would it be a drop-in replacement or will it need fine adjustment to get it right on tracks? How does a floppy drive find where the data is when powering on?

The drive in my computer is the Sony MP-F63W-72D.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Not just radial alignment, but the tricky adjustment is azimuth. Hope you've got an alignment floppy for that.

 

[SomeGuy]

If the dimensions of the entire head assembly looks 100% identical and the wires or flat flex connecting them look identical, then it might work, but no guarantees.

The key things you don't want to mess with when disassembling a drive are the track zero sensor, and do not separate the top/bottom heads in the head assembly. I don't know about this particular drive, but sometimes drives can not be dissembled without moving the track zero sensor. 3.5" drives are usually a pain (or sometimes even impossible) to disassemble.

The track zero sensor is how it finds the first track on a disk, and it is aligned and glued down at the factory. Move that, or if the head assembly is not really 100% the same, then you will have a headache trying to get it aligned.

 

[DeltaDon]

Maybe if you had a floppy repair lab and beaucoup amount of test gear. Not something I'd want to attempt myself.

 

[tingo]

If anybody does (or attempts to do) this, we'll appreciate the story (and pictures) here...

 

[hjalfi]

I stupidly undid the wrong screw of my NC200 3.5" floppy drive trying to get at the belt and screwed up the track alignment. Luckily, not the azimuth alignment but it's still going to be a nightmare to fix. I've no idea how they correctly aligned it in the first place as there don't seem to be any fine adjustments.