Once upon a time, you could buy floppy drive cleaning disks at just about any stationary or computer store. These days, they’re harder to find. If you want to build one yourself, though, you might do well to follow [Gammitin]’s fine example.
[Gammitin] has been down this road before, having built head cleaning disks before. This time, a US patent was the inspiration. It basically indicated that the spinning cleaning disc inside should be made of spunbonded polyester or spunbonded olefin (such as Dupont Tyvek)—so those materials were sought out.
The project began with [Gammitin] disassembling a standard floppy disk down to its bare components. The spindle was then separated from the magnetic platter, and refitted with a disc of Tyvek material using super glue. The disk housing was then glued back together with more super glue, and labelled as a “Floppy Cleaning Disk.” Using the disk is as simple as putting a few drops of isopropyl alcohol on the Tyvek material, and inserting it into a drive. [Gammitin] tested it with an old Olivetti machine, and found it cleaned up the heads nicely.
Sometimes, when a commercial product ceases to exist, you can just make your own at home. This is a great example of that ethos. If you’re cooking up your own tools and accessories to keep your old machines running, we’d love to hear all about it on the tipsline!
Most stores are stationary. But stationery stores are the ones that sell stationery.
Kind of like how a still scene can be so moving?
Or how we drive on a parkway and park in a driveway?
Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike that.
…Well now somebody needs to start a mobile stationery truck that drives to various companies to sell them fancy staplers and paperclips like Snap-On. Non-Stationary Stationery
You have never seen one of these?
https://www.wbmason.com/aboutus/our-f leet.html
Started out making rubber stamps, and now stationary trucks.
Really, non-stationary trucks that carry stationery, among other things.
The Snap-On Tool and mobile work shoe truck business model, but for office supplies. Cool.
Where did I just literally now read an article mentioning spell checkers I wonder
Which is why I don’t use one. My spelling errors are my own, and they’re mostly typos, because I can’t type worth a damn.
Stands to reason that, since they were using the most tried-and-true magnetic media technology inherited from the 70’s, that 70’s cleaning techniques would remain valid as long as they respected the read-head’s mounting strength. This solution does just that.
A couple of years back, I had to go through my old floppies looking for some files I thought I had already backed up but hadn’t. I only got through a small portion of the stack, when one of the disks shed a bunch of crud all over the read heads on my USB floppy drive. The USB floppy drive wasn’t designed to be taken apart, unlike traditional floppy drives that could be easily taken apart and cleaned. I thought, no problem, I’ll grab my floppy drive cleaner. That’s when I realized I no longer had one. Looking at the prices online, I wasn’t going to spend those kind of prices so i shelved the project for a bit and haunted the local thrift stores for a couple of weeks until one showed up. A few quick spins and I was back in business. It’s one of those pieces of technology you forget about until you need it.
I don’t remember having had to clean the heads of my floppy drives. I definitely cleaned the heads on a VHS VCR.