The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!!

[Running Bear]

Good morning. It's 49° with 95% humidity. The high will be 67° and feel like 71°.
with

I might need some help. Anybody here know how the rebuild a Franklin Ace10 BVI floppy disk drive? Just kidding. The day I can't rebuild one of those things with my eyes closed and one hand behind my back is a bad day. I had to take my old Franklin disk drive out of the stack this morning because it was showing verification errors on diskettes that have no errors, mostly in the higher tracks. Electronically there's nothing wrong. It's problem is strictly mechanical. In the bottom of the drive there's a stepper motor. Forget it, it's too large for most model railroad applications. On top of this is what I term the tracking disk. This is a flat platform with a spiral groove in it going from the outer edge to the central shaft. On this is mounted a metal apparatus that has a small ball bearing that rides in the groove. As the tracking disk rotates back and forth (yes it's bi-directional) it causes the apparatus with it's bearing to move back and forth and thus move the read/write head back and forth. When all this can happen smoothly things go very well. The problem is the groove is quite worn and is allowing the ball bearing to wiggle. This causes the metal apparatus to wiggle or shake and effects the alignment of the read/write head and can and often does skew data. This can be fixed by replacing the grooved disk. Problem is I don't have a parts drive at this time. I used the parts from it to rebuild a Mitac drive to take the place in the stack that the Franklin drive had occupied.

Today I hope to get started on the initial stage of Oliver's train adventure. I'm also watching for the mail delivery. My Happy Potter Deathly Hallows 2 DVD is coming today. In my spare time today I'm watching a rather long show called 'The Lost Room'.