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Cleaning Bernoulli 20 drive heads

david__schmidt

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Joined
Jun 5, 2007
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Southeast US
I was helping someone prepare for VFC East this year, and long story short - I ended up with five Bernoulli 20MB 8" floppy/cartridge drives. One of the five works wonderfully; the rest refuse to load the media after inspecting it. Given that these drives came shipped with a cleaning cartridge, and that consisted of wiping an alcohol-soaked pad back and forth against the head(s), I am hoping that at least some of my problem lies in dirty heads.

Lacking any cleaning cartridges myself, has anyone done any manual cleaning operations on these drives? They're pretty involved to disassemble, so I can see why a cleaning cartridge was a more viable option...
 
I used a very long cotton swab dipped in rubbing alcohol to rub the heads. I had the machine partially dismantled to remove a blown tantalum and this also gave me the chance to hold the head assembly in place during the task. I my case at least it seemed to work.
 
Ok, it sounds like I'm not getting away without at least partial disassembly. I have a hard time even seeing well enough into the back of the drive from the aperture in the front to even see the heads - so blindly jabbing at it with one of those long wooden Q-tips is probably not the best option for me.
 
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