The hard drives are all recapped, so we move along to the floppy drives. Ronnie from ASSEMbler Games had warned me about their leaky capacitors, and given how much work I’ve already put into these TeraDrives, I’d rather get them replaced before they cause any more trouble.

The Model 3 has just one floppy drive, so this should be a reasonably simple introduction before we tackle the two drives in the Model 2. Simple, of course, is a relative term when you’re dealing with thirty-year-old electronics.

Getting the drive apart involved rather more screws and connectors than I’d anticipated. I also managed to remove the wrong side of the casing first, although that did give me a rather nice look at the mechanism.

It’s quite a lovely piece of engineering when you can see all the moving parts. The heads, the motor, the arrangement that moves everything into position when a disk is inserted. All this just to read a floppy disk! Incredible, really.

Once I’d worked my way down to the circuit board, I found the two surface-mount electrolytic capacitors Ronnie had warned me about. There’s a 47 uF, 16 V capacitor at C22 and a 10 uF, 16 V capacitor at C26. Only two to replace. How hard could that be?

I’d decided this would be a good opportunity to try out my desoldering tweezers. They’d cost me over two hundred dollars, so I was rather hoping they’d make removing these old capacitors a little less troublesome.

The first capacitor came away quite nicely once both tips were hot enough. The second was a bit messier, and one of the old components made a rather unpleasant mess in the process. Fortunately, the solder pads survived, which was the important thing. Considering some of my recent TeraDrive hard-drive adventures, that’s already a considerable improvement!

There was also some green residue around parts of the board, including near the pins of another component. It certainly looked like something had escaped from those old electrolytic capacitors. I gave the affected areas a good clean before fitting the replacements.

With the pads cleaned and prepared, soldering the new capacitors into place was relatively straightforward. The smaller parts were actually easier to work with than some of the larger capacitors I’d fitted to the hard drives. One ended up slightly crooked, but the connections looked reasonable and the polarity matched the board.

Putting everything back together was a different story.

Those little flexible cables running to the heads were particularly troublesome. Some had tiny hooks holding them in place, and there was hardly any room to get hold of them properly. Every time I thought I’d managed to get one into position, something else would move. How on earth did they assemble these things at the factory?

Eventually I managed to reconnect the heads and motor, work out where all those slightly different screws belonged, and get the mechanism back into its casing. Nothing appeared to have been left over, which is always encouraging.

That’s one floppy drive recapped, with two more to go. I haven’t established whether it works properly after reassembly just yet, but at least the capacitor replacement is complete.

Next up are the two drives from the Model 2. Hopefully they’ll be a little easier to work on?

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