My new home built 8 inch Altair Disk for Altair-Duino

[Gurbymurble]

Hi all!
I thought you would find my copy of an 8 inch Altair Floppy disk drive interesting.
The case is a repurposed Motorola base station radio of some sort. It is lucky that it just happened to be almost identical in dimensions as the Altair case.
I gutted it out and repainted the top cover. The paint match is not as close as I would like but not bad.
I will keep looking for a closer color. Maybe someone knows of a better match?
The front panel is made from some really thick and rigid plastic. Maybe acrylic...
The plastic is from an old LCD TV backlight.
I cut it to size on my table saw.
The drive is a Tandon TM848E
It was not too hard to get working. Three chips and a track zero sensor.
It has been working reliably with good repeatability.
All the lettering and branding was done on my vinyl cutter.
It is working fine with my previous drive one, which is a 5.25 Teac in an amazon project box and appropriate painting and branding.
You can see my previous post to see the two matching 5.25 drives I made

G

Thread 'My new Altair-Duino setup with custom made floppy drives and VT100 terminal'

Mar 12, 2026

Hello all!

I have completed my Add Water and Stir Altair-Duino pro kit.
I built two custom drives for it. The enclosures are from Amazon. So are the power supplies and the stainless steel logo plates.
I used my vinyl cutter for the lettering. I 3D printed the bezel to hide the freehand cutting of the opening and to balance out the size of the drive compared to the case.
I also built a centronics board and a floppy drive controller board. I got the PCB's from PCB way. Sourced all the rest of the parts mostly on Mouser and some on Digikey.
Of course when you order boards from PCBway...

• Gurbymurble
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You may notice my VT100 in the previous post was black and white but now it's green screen.
I swapped out the old video driver board and crt with ones from a green screen monochrome monitor because the flyback failed and I could not find a replacement.
I have since repaired the flyback and I will change it back at some point but not a very high priority at this point.
Anyway... here's photos!

 

[cruff]

Very nicely done!

 

[jlang]

You're being too critical of the color match. Its good enough.

Nice project!

 

[ajacocks]

Very nice work @Gurbymurble!

- Alex

 

[maxtherabbit]

I'm jealous. Finding ANY cabinet suitable for an 8" drive is nigh impossible these days, much less one that fits the aesthetic so well

 

[Istarian]

Wow! That turned out really well for just reusing some cases you can readily buy.

 

[tingo]

Very well done!

 

[maxtherabbit]

Wow! That turned out really well for just reusing some cases you can readily buy.

Where can I readily buy this?

 

[Gurbymurble]

Where can I readily buy this?

The case? It is not something you can buy other than finding one on ebay I would think. It used to be a Motorola radio. The model number of the radio was L43MNB-3100CM.
I imagine you would have to pay at least $100 in shipping alone as it was very heavy before I gutted it out. The radio would probably be pricey too.
A friend of mine had this one and he gave it to me for this project so again also lucky.
You can buy an Altair case from Chris at https://adwaterandstir.com/
You would still need to make the front panel of course. I was going to do that if I could not find a suitable case.
As you said it is not easy to find any case suitable for an 8 inch drive.
Everything I have found was way too expensive.

 

[Gurbymurble]

You're being too critical of the color match. Its good enough.

Nice project!

Thanks!

Yeah little things bug me...

 

[maxtherabbit]

The case? It is not something you can buy other than finding one on ebay I would think. It used to be a Motorola radio. The model number of the radio was L43MNB-3100CM.
I imagine you would have to pay at least $100 in shipping alone as it was very heavy before I gutted it out. The radio would probably be pricey too.
A friend of mine had this one and he gave it to me for this project so again also lucky.
You can buy an Altair case from Chris at https://adwaterandstir.com/
You would still need to make the front panel of course. I was going to do that if I could not find a suitable case.
As you said it is not easy to find any case suitable for an 8 inch drive.
Everything I have found was way too expensive.

Yeah I know it was a rhetorical question directed at istarian