Yet another PC adventure – floppy drive cleaning

Floppy drive is way dirty

We all know – well, most probably don’t nowadays, arguably enough most people don’t even know what a floppy disk is as of today – that Floppy Drives could have become dirty overtime.

Most people don’t know though that Floppy Disk might eventually KILL Floppy Drives. That is, a Floppy Disk becoming a Floppy Drive killer. It happens when the magnetic layer from the Floppy Disk has become too thick, or too old, or whatever, and looses its natural stickyness to the medium, eventually getting attached to Floppy Drives heads.

You should visually inspect any floppy disks

Especially the ones you are acquiring from outside your home. But also your old ones who have been long forgotten until today, where you became nostalgic of the ol’noise. See my (too late, too bad) post [0] about this.

Check this link for guidance on how to inspect the floppy [1].

So, what about it?

Every now and then I don’t inspect floppies. Last time I didn’t, it bricked my drive. Though, no IPA against the heads would succed in making it alive again. I had to find some other one.

I bought a bunch of two which I need to check prior to test floppies out.

Behold the 30YO dust collecting device

Well, to clean up this, you simply have to use a steady hand, brush, cotton buds, IPA, and possibly a vacuum cleaner. Of course, you need to be very firm when working around the heads. Any mechanical stress would make them unusable, AFAIK.

So off we go with the heads, anyway:

And grease off the motor parts as well with silicon spray oil. Here I’ve covered the heads with some paper prior to spraying, as that would have hit the heads as well.