Welcome
Hello Sid Sippers!
Welcome back to Retro Recipes
Now, in the last couple of episodes, I've been working with this Macintosh Plus
I gave it a good clean up
Removed that Polaroid filter that it caused that to kind of that ski-goggles-yellowing around the screen
And tried putting it in a bag full of ozone as a test to see if it would retrobright
When I pulled it out of the bag after three days
Unfortunately, there was no sign of deyellowing
But even worse, the ozone had seemingly caused this drive gear to break
People confirmed to me that ozone gas can degrade plastic which is what the gear is made of
In better news, in the next episode
I reveal this new lightbriting technique and the hypothesis behind it
And we got these startling results after three days of simply putting the machine in the Sun
So now the machine looks the part it's time to fix the part
And here's the machine
My gosh, it shrunk in the sun!
Oh, wait, no that sorry.
That's the Apple Macintosh from my Seinfeld set replica
Put that back there for Jerry
This is a perfectly to scale replica of the Seinfeld set from the 80's
And over there you can see Jerry's Apple Macintosh
He actually used a few different Macintosh's through these series
But the most common one is probably the Macintosh SE
Which you would have seen a lot of the earlier episodes
However, when Hulu brought the pop-up location of the Seinfeld set to Los Angeles
They put in place of the Mac what people called
'Some bullshit PC!'
'No Mac for you!
So, I quickly rushed it to the set
But thankfully by then, they had to put this Macintosh Performa 200 in its place
Not quite an SE but close enough
Wait, no, you weren't meant to see that
Wait, wha.. how are these?
Oh my good... make it.. just sorry. Sorry
Well, we'll leave the Seinfeld set behind and return to my set
And for this mod, we're gonna need a screwdriver.. a long screwdriver
No, a very long screwdriver
And on the end, we'll need a Torx T15 tool
And one of these to discharge the CRT just in case
And of course, you will need to buy a Darth Vader oven mit
I find your lack of eject disturbing
I am in power here
But I do have the power to steal Puppyfractic's bed
Talk about if looks could kill
Think I'm forgiven!
And there you can see the Torx screws
So we simply stick this in here
Give it a turn
And..
Oh..
Oh... all that's left of .. how do I?
Right..
Oh.. ow!
Jeez!
This is getting ridiculous! maybe I can
Maybe I can..
Nope.
Still no.. Come on!
Finally!
So cancel that and I'm gonna use this small T15 screwdriver
There's another one here above the battery which thankfully the previous owner had removed and to add the base
And then a little bit of force and we just use the screens over weight to remove the back case
And things are looking pretty good in here, I'm not noticing any bulging capacitors
It is recommended to usually replace these but I'm guessing we're okay
And there's the floppy drive
So one thing I like to do is attach this screwdriver to this ground lug
And we'll need our oven mitt
I'm actually just joking.. personally, I don't think this is necessary
But you do try this at your own risk, and if you do die ..don't come running to me
The one thing I like to do is just make sure I've discharged everything there including the flyback transformer
Finally, even though we're not working on the CRT, it's just a good habit to get in there and discharge that too
OOP
Now things are safe
We can start to remove the bad floppy drive
So, we'll switch our T15 for a Phillips screwdriver
Make sure we give it back to Philip afterwards
Remove the analog bulb connector from the logic board
And the logic board slides out
And that again looks in pretty good condition.. you can see our one megabyte of memory
So powerful!
And out comes the floppy drive cradle
We'll get to work on that in a second
And here is the drive... now usually they are not coated in this much dust
Often the Mac's that have fans, create dust
But as possible that this floppy came from a Mac SE, like Jerry had
And it had a fan in it
Either way, I'm gonna get my reliable air duster and give this thing a squirt.. a blow
..Get the air out
All right, what's this, hmm
It's some kind of Lego Commodore 64 article
Oh.. that looks pretty cool actually
I'll probably vote for that at Lego.com
Alright, and here's the drive
So to refurbish one of these, firstly, we're going to remove this black clip that keeps the drive head up away from the disk
And then you'd attached just these two springs here
And they are actually all that's keeping this top piece of the mechanism in place
Now the top piece is easier to remove when the disc is in the ejected position
So I'm gonna put a disc in there, eject it, and now you can see it pops right off
Next we get our rubbing alcohol
And I'm gonna clean all the areas that had tried grease on them
It's basically all the moving parts where things slide metal grate against metal
And some contact cleaner on these two sensors here
I think that's the right protect sensor and the high density sensor or the disk insertion sensor
Then we'll get some lithium grease
Come on .. come out
And regreese every area where things have moved against metal
You can remove these four washers, but there's a chance of damaging them and I don't know where you get replacements
I think it's substantial.. they're just grease through the holes
And you can see a lot of dried up grease here
30 years of Jerry saving many many jokes to many floppy discs
We just regrease those again
Next up I'm gonna clean the read/write head
Just use a cotton ball and a bit of neat alcohol
Neat
And then you can drop the top piece back on and don't forget to reattach those two springs
And of course the head support
We all need a bit of head support from time to time
As seems to be ejecting much smoother now
And while we're here, we can also clean the screw drive shaft
This little screw turns and actually moves the head back and forth across the disk
So just clean all the grime out of all those slots
It's just a lot of old grease and dust
Then you can turn it round, manually, using some needle nose pliers and do the other half
And when you're done.. get some of that nice new white lithium grease
So now on to the actual ejector motor which was causing that terrible noise
It's pretty simple.. just two screws
And pop out the cable
Nice!
So if we releas this catch here
We can just pry off the top and yet immediately we can see what's wrong here
This gear has broken and the pieces have gotten worked into the mechanism here
Get a grip man!
So just remove that one gear there
And yeah..
You can see here what's happened
So probably the motor was just freewheeling
As I'm demonstrating here
So next up we have to remove all the little bits of teeth from the rest of the gears
It's like pulling teeth, this
And when everything is clean, we can regress the gears
Yeah, it's like greasing teeth, this
wait, that doesn't...
And through the magic of 3D printing, here is a new gear
So I'm just gonna grease up where it goes.. drop it in place
It's very important to line up this rightmost gear at the three o'clock position, as shown here
That's 1500 hours
That will allow the eject mechanism to connect with the top mechanism and move it back and forth
You can see here where it attaches into that hole and it will basically slide this plate out
Like that
That's ejecting the disk
Screw it back into place
Don't forget the plug
And I'm gonna put it in this cradle just to protect the moving parts and the electronics while I test things
Back at the Mac.. that it's one of their adverts, wasn't it?
You can put the logic board back into place and the bottom shield
And let's make sure everything's still working
Lovely
Let's try and see if we fixed our objective mechanism
Fingers crossed!
Beautiful!
Great success!
But we'll have to just call this a partial victory
The disks wouldn't actually be read by the machine
I tried three different system disks, then three different drives..I had some spares
All of them just showed this question mark
But I confirmed that these screw drive shaft wasn't stuck
And the drive would spin
Then the machines stopped being able to actually eject and we just you'll hear this buzzing as they eject motor
Tried to function
Wait, does that say R2D2?
But we know the eject motor works
And I think this is down to one of these capacitors.. they look fine
But over the 30 years, they change electrically
And I think they've stopped being able to power the drive
Enough to read or in some cases eject
So we're gonna have to save that for a future episode
We will recap the board and maybe the logic board too
If worse comes to worse, we can just design and order a completely new Macintosh logic board from PCBWay
They have a deal now, where you can get a PCB assembly for $30 and free shipping
Because as we all know PCB stands for
Probable Capacitor Burnout
Doesn't it?
Well, either way I'm gonna leave the 80's sitcoms and computers behind
And just ask you: do you agree with the hypothesis that it's probably the capacitors causing the disks not to be read?
Either way, please like and subscribe.
Thanks for watching!
Comment below and Cheerio!