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Beating a Mitsumi D353F3 drive into an NC200

Started by Bryce, 17:03, 08 March 14

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Bryce

Hi All,
      as you may have read elsewhere, I got myself an NC200 a while back, but unfortunately the internal drive was damaged (chunk missing off the lower head). After unsuccessfully trying to find a replacement, I gave up and decided to find a modern drive that might fit and ended buying a Mitsumi D353F3. This drive is physically very close to the original NC200 drive. Its width and length are identical, but it's 3mm flatter. It has the same 26pin interface, but this is on the wrong side of the drive and turned out to be a completely different connector too :( Both use a flat cable, but the NC200 has a 1.25mm pitch and the Mistumi has a 1mm pitch. Annoying but not the end of the world.

[attach=2][attach=3]

First off I removed the connectors from both drives:

[attach=4][attach=5]

Because I needed to do some serious soldering on the Mitsumi I decided to cut back the metal casing behind the connector too.
The next (extremely tedious) part was to solder individual wires to the 26 pads and solder the other end to the NC200 connector that I'd taken off the original drive. The connectors are also mirrored to one another, which is why it then ended up looking like this:

[attach=6]

There's not that much free space inside the NC200, so there was some hammering and pushing involved to get the new connections into a place that didn't interfere with the display hinge or short against anything. Eventually it all fit in and I could give it a test. I formatted a disk and copied some files across and all seems to work as expected. Although the drive is a 1.44m the NC200 can still only handle 720K disks, but that was to be expected. Other than the small gap above the drive, it all looks rather presentable.

[attach=7]

This isn't a job I'd recommend as your first attempts at soldering, in fact I wouldn't recommend it as your 2nd, 3rd or 4th project either. Soldering loose wires to 1mm pitch pads is a royal pain in the arse, even for someone who has been soldering their entire life.

Bryce.

Edit: Another interesting thing I discovered along the way... The NC200 drive is actually belt driven!!

redbox

That is the definition of awesomeness!

Well done, great job and glad you persevered.

Gryzor

Great job!

So, if the NC200 uses a belt, how come we don't hear about them melting over the years? Different material?

Bryce

No idea. It looks very similar to the CPC one, but it's even thinner, so it should be even worse. Maybe not enough people are using the floppy drive?

Bryce.

Gryzor

Yeah, but belts fall apart even due to inactivity...

Bryce

#5
Well be glad it doesn't fail that often, because it's major heart surgery to get to the belt. Changing one would be a nightmare. As this drive is never going to work again I striped it down and took some photos. To get this far, both motors and the mechanics had to be completely removed and they would need to be re-aligned after it was put back together. I refitted the motor so that you can see exactly where the belt is tensioned. Here's the belt:

[attach=2]

And here's the reason it wasn't ever going to work again. This is the lower head. You can see there's a chunk missing (including part of the core-ring) on the left, exposing the coil inside.

[attach=3]

Bryce.

Gryzor

Thanks for the pics; so I guess this is practically unrepairable. Well, at least they were made to last.

Bryce

I'd probably try the replacement if I had a working drive with damaged belt. But I wouldn't recommend it and a "How to" would be ridiculously complicated.

Bryce.

Gryzor


Bryce

 :D    Aaaarrrggghhh, infinite loop!! I can't leave the thread!!!

Bryce.

Gryzor


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