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Okay, I've had it. . .

Nothing. If you open a hard disk to lubricate it, you expose the platters to dust. Even microscopic dust can cause head crashes and loss of data.

Hard drive repairs are for clean rooms. Don't open them.

For lubricating floppy rails I use either a silicone lubricant or something with Teflon floating in it. Radio Shack has a very nice 'precision lubricator' that is a light oil with Teflon in it.
 
Most of the mechanics of ProFile & Lisa 2 HD's aren't kept under a metal chassis like today's HD's. there have been several cases where the lube of old HD's & FD's dries up from being kept in hot attics for long periods of time & causes them to lock up.
 
It really doesn't matter. WD-40 is not designed to be a lubricant, and it's a poor lubricant at that. So in your case you won't contaminate the platters because you won't open the casing, but you would still be using a poor lubricant that probably won't survive the heat of the spindle.

Even slow hard drives spin at over 3000 RPM.
 
If you get your hands on one of those drives I would find somebody who used to work for Connor, Maxtor, Seagate, Imprimus, IBM, Fujitsu, etc. who used to do repairs in a clean room. Nothing beats talking to the original source - the engineers who designed and repaired these things. It's worth doing the research to do the job correctly.

Silicone or Teflon type lubricants are still for light duty stuff, like the drive rails that a floppy diskette drive head glides along.
 
mbbrutman said:
It really doesn't matter. WD-40 is not designed to be a lubricant, and it's a poor lubricant at that.
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+1

WD-40 is the absolute worst thing that you can use as a lubricant. It will actually break down any existing lube/oil that still remains and then it will dry up and go away. WD-40 is, however, great for CLEANING a mechanism prior to re-lubricating it.
 
mbbrutman said:
Back in the mid '80s I authored BBS software than ran on an XT in New York City for about two years.

If I had to do a forum (which I will get to eventually) it will be in the form of a telnet BBS.


Mike
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I'm going to agree with Mike on this.
Granted- we'd have to give up our nice avatars- but think of how much brushing up we could do on our ascii .sigs!

I personally like the tried-and-true BBS style.
It just seems to have more personality and flair than a web based system.

-kahn
 
I'm still working on it. I decided to take a little breather and write a sample file transfer app for the UDP/IP and ARP piece that I have done so far. It's a good exercise of the code, and it's taught me a few things about the performance of the code I've written so far.

(UDP checksumming on an 8088 class processor is expensive!)
 
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