8" Floppy Drive Restoration (YD-180): Part 1
25Well ... attempting to restore. First - apologies - it's a long one ... mainly so I've got a reference of how I pulled it apart. So feel free to skip, skip, skip (like you needed my permission ...)
00:00 ... Soviet-era EС 5274 (ES 5274) 8" floppy disks
05:04 ... looking at the YD-180
11:35 ... removing the belt (no, I'm keeping it)
12:35 ... first PCB removed
17:15 ... removing spindle motor & PCB
20:44 ... scrub-a-dub-dub
25:50 ... index hole detector
29:40 ... disk eject mechanism
31:00 ... other part of the index hole detector
32:15 ... disk activity LED
33:30 ... write protect detector?
33:50 ... track stepper motor & heads
37:15 ... head solenoid
39:50 ... how to fit a cricket ball through a golf ball-sized hole?
42:05 ... snippity-snip
42:50 ... ready for cleaning
45:11 ... cleaned & drying in the sun
46:03 ... end result
50:23 ... quick test of the head solenoid
Some Soviet-era EС 5274 (ES 5274) 8" floppy disks arrived from Ukraine. These are Bulgarian-made (ИЗОТ ... IZOT) SS/SD 80KB disks compared to my DS/SD Verbatim disks. Man, stylised Cyrillic is hard (for me) to read 🤯
Next, I start pulling apart the YD-180 drive that Ben (@bennvennelectronics) kindly donated to me. Actually, the drive seems a lot simpler than 5¼" drives of similar vintage ... I guess there's a lot more area so things don't feel so cramped. It was made in Japan by YE Data.
This drive is a DS/DD 160KB drive from 1981.
The two circuit boards were washed (dish washing liquid) & cleaned - perhaps a 2nd washing with cream cleanser might be needed to finish off.
The various parts were then stripped. I had to de-soldered one motor and cut the wires of a 2nd as it was impossible to remove otherwise.
Discussing with Ben, he advised that the head solenoid (24VDC Koike 147007-02) might be a problem and it looks like he's correct - it seems to be seized in position. Let's see.
You can still buy examples of this drive online ... but that's no fun (or cheap!). Ben also has some examples but most are working. I'm thinking I might need another ... already broken ... one for a part or two. Let' see (again).
Other videos in this series:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5pwokf56wMK3oPQWpUKtZk32M6PM0tII