Floppy Drive Clean-Up

Macintosh Classic Floppy Drive Repair

Hello Birders! 🐥💾🎉

Yesterday, I worked on cleaning up the floppy drive from the Mac Classic as mentioned in my earlier post:

Macintosh Classic Repair

Problem:
When inserting floppies, they are not recognized right away. It may need a little push further. Inserting floppies makes grinding sounds, and the drive struggles to eject. A reboot while clicking down on the mouse will usually force it to eject.

When it does pick up that there is a floppy though, about half the time, System 7 will give this message:

 

I was able to get AfterDark installed successfully, which was one of my main goals for the repair. Yay!

 

But I still was not satisfied with the floppy drive, so I opened it up.

Process:

I found this video super helpful during the process.

How to Fix Your Macintosh Floppy Drive

I carefully took out the whole hard drive mount from under the CRT; they were all Phillips screws.

 Gross! 

I removed the dust with compressed air and 99% alcohol.

Now to remove the top mechanism. It was kind of tricky to remove; I had to carefully move some of the springs to release the top.

 Removed the rings that holds the bottom part.

 Removed the eject motor.

I added white lithium grease to the center and to all the points where metal meets and needs to move.

 It looks a little messy, but it worked much better! 

Inserting and ejecting floppy disks works perfectly now. I will post a short video of it soon. 

What is still an issue, is reading the floppy disks. I have a feeling that there are parts of System 7 that are missing.
For example, the sound settings are missing, but it still plays sound with some of the AfterDark screensavers.

I will need to get some System 7 floppies, not quite sure which exact version, and perhaps do a reinstall. I have seen some Tune-Up floppies floating around on eBay, but I'm not sure what Apple meant by "Tune-Up" in the 90's. I'm debating on whether it's a system update or a repair tool, maybe both!

Feel free to leave comments. Anything helps!

-Pico