Degauss floppy drive heads?

[RickNel]

I'm grappling with a couple of Sony 800k floppy drives from 64k Macs that are very unreliable at reading diskettes that they have written. As these are self-written disks, I don't think alignment is the issue here.
The disks can be read by a later Sony "superdrive", but frequently get the "unreadable" message with invitation to reformat or reject, from the drive that wrote them.

I'm wondering if the read/write heads would benefit from degaussing. I have a couple of the head degaussing tools that are used for music cassette deck heads. Thought I'd just check if there was any risk to trying this on the floppy heads?

Rick

 

[Chuck(G)]

Since disk (and tape) heads operate in saturating mode (either full "off" or full "on"), unlike audio tape heads, I don't think it would do any good. At least I've never seen it recommended in a maintenance manual.

If this were my drive, I'd first try giving the heads a really good cleaning. You can get gunk on heads that alcohol won't touch. That's why the "old" cleaning formulations used Freon TF in their witches' brew. You can use acetone or perc, but be sure to get the stuff only on the drive head, not on anything else--and don't try using acetone in a cleaning floppy--it'll make a real mess.