I have a lot of non working Macintosh computers, and they’ve been sitting on the shelves of my lab room and cellar for too much time; since I’m out of space for “new” computers at the moment, I decided that I must focus on repairing what I got.

I’ve started with a pile of different Apple Macintosh LC models, and most of the work is replacing all the capacitors on the motherboards and power supply units.

After the “recap job” I check the disk drive and the floppy drive: the latter, after being cleaned from the old grease and lubricated, sometimes just needs a new eject gear, that is available online as a 3D printed replacement.

Most of the hard drives still work after 30 years – they range from 40 to 230MB on these LC models. When I tried to mount this 80MB Quantum hard disk, I always got a hardware error. The PCB looked fine, so I decided to dismantle the drive just to understand what went wrong… I already knew that it was beyond repair, but since I was a child I always liked to take apart stuff just to see how it’s made.

I discovered that both the rubber rings (I don’t know if there’s a better technical term for these items) that protect the head from banging on the metal have become sticky and slimy.

This is a close view of the sticky rubber under the disk platter:

And this is the top metal plate of the drive head:

Since I had it dismantled, I created the exploded view of the drive.