Extending manual floppy drives for around £10

[mikeDnight]

Modern floppy drives tend to be painfully stiff and often too short if you're using a longish scope. Force flexing your floppy drive in every direction frees up the tightly wound spring, giving it more flexibility. 

Extending the flexi can be done quite easily if you have access to an angle grinder for cutting through the tough spring.

By cutting the spring about two or three inches from the control knob, the spring can be perminantly fixed into an aluminium tube using epoxy metal filler, both available from B&Q.

A quick rub up with brasso makes a shiny manual drive or drives. Total cost approximately £10.

No more stretching!

Mike 

 

[101nut]

Was it just me who saw "floppy drive" and was expecting a thread on antique magnetic media?

I'm getting too old ...

AndyG

[Xplode]

I thought the topic was about one of these 

 

[101nut]

Call that a floppy drive? This is a floppy drive!

[Davey-T]

Still got three and a half and five and a quarter floppy drives in my desktop, you never know when they might be needed 

Dave

[Gina]

I thought the same

[mikeDnight]

Sorry!, It didn't occur to me about "floppy drive!" I should have used the scientific term "twertler", then there'd have been no confusion!

Mike 

 

[Gina]

Ah well, it's probably only us oldies who remember floppy drives

[Sp@ce_d]

Aw.. you got me all excited... I was all geared up to extol the merit of Punch Tape over magnetic media..

[Ouroboros]

14 hours ago, mikeDnight said:

Modern floppy drives tend to be painfully stiff and often too short if you're using a longish scope. Force flexing your floppy drive in every direction frees up the tightly wound spring, giving it more flexibility. 

Extending the flexi can be done quite easily if you have access to an angle grinder for cutting through the tough spring.

By cutting the spring about two or three inches from the control knob, the spring can be perminantly fixed into an aluminium tube using epoxy metal filler, both available from B&Q.

A quick rub up with brasso makes a shiny manual drive or drives. Total cost approximately £10.

No more stretching!

Mike 

Looks like a nice solution. What's the pier made from by the way? 

[mikeDnight]

1 hour ago, Ouroboros said:

Looks like a nice solution. What's the pier made from by the way? 

The pier was made by a local sheet metal worker and is made from steel. It's sunk into the ground and embeded in rapid setting postcrete. It's as solid as a rock and cost £35 to have made. Then I painted it with red lead and later hammerite. Total outlay was probably around £70. The pier was 7 feet 6 inches tall with a access hole on one side for locking the mount to the welded top. There's around 18" buried in concrete, then my observatory floor is raised off the ground. Ultimately the pier head ended up being set at just the right height for observing from a standing position and also from a seated position using a hydrolic swivel chair. The pier was set true vertical wile the postcrete set. I didnt bother with an adjustable top plate as the pier top is level, and im purely a visual observer and avoid anything computerised. Simple on so many levels! 

Mike

 

[Ouroboros]

I think that looks really good. The pier embedded in postcrete sounds like it confounds the need for a metre cubed of concrete. But maybe you dug a huge hole and used a lot of postcrete. 

[mikeDnight]

2 hours ago, Ouroboros said:

I think that looks really good. The pier embedded in postcrete sounds like it confounds the need for a metre cubed of concrete. But maybe you dug a huge hole and used a lot of postcrete. 

It's not on a cubic metre of concrete! The ground is very dense clay and after the hole was dug, approximately 2 feet square, I packed the hole containing the pier with concrete blocks, which held the pier in position once vertical. The postcrete cost £5 per bag and I think I used four bags. I can swing from the pier, so whatever I did worked! There's definitely no need to use neat concrete to fill a cubic metre. Filling the hole with rubble or blocks to occupy space saves on the amount of concrete needed!

Mike ☺