My idea of the Retro uIEC was coming along nicely, however I wasn't happy with the front of the drive. When the Cardco was originally manufactured it had a 5.25" floppy, and now that this particular unit contained a hard drive, the hole where the drive mechanism facia was originally was now empty. I put a blanking plate there, the kind that come with most PC cases, but it just didn't look right. There wasn't enough room to put the original mech back, it would have fouled against the hard drive, unless I moved it and I didn't want to remount it anyway unless I absolutely had to. So I left the blanking plate in there while I worked on other things, and, as often happens when you have your mind on other bits and pieces I remembered I had some old 5.25" 360k pc floppy drives in my parts cupboard.
Opening it up revealed a number of old drives and while most of them had facia's that didn't look quite like what I was after, one of them did! Looking at the drive I knew it wouldn't fit, however that was never my plan. I looked at how the facia was attached to the mechanism body, and if the two could be removed at all.
Good news everybody! (Sorry, i'm a Futurama fan,heh). This particular drive had it facia held in place by two screws and two clips, and, as a bonus, the drive activity LED was connected to the controller pcb by a two pin header socket. I had already removed the LEDs from the uIEC PCB and replaced them with header plugs, so the facia activity LED would connect to the IDE activity header, perfect!
So, I now have a 5.25" drive facia intact with it's activity led, the only thing I had to do was glue on the clamping lever as there now was nothing for it to be held in place by. Once the glue had dried I had what looked like a standard drive mechanism, except it was only the plastic facia ready to be mounted, somehow, in the Cardo.
While I haven't decided on how I will permanently fix it in place I have temporarily glued two metal tabs on it that extended inwards and reach the hard drive, which they are attached to with some double sided tape.
Once the new facia was mounted in place all that was left to do was connect the facia's activity led and the Cardco's power led to their respective headers on the uIEC pcb. That done, it was time to connect the drive up and give it a test.
Above is a picture of the drive loading a directory.
Looking at it now I realise it might have been more realistic to have the clamping lever verticle rather than horizontal, oh well, I still like it!
Next will be work on the facia mounting, put the cover back on and then give it a bit of a clean. Like I said previously this drive had a hard life in the hands of a previous owner, some marks won't clean off, but at least it will look a bit nicer when given a once over with some appropriate cleaning products.
When I have done that i'll post pics. Oh, and i'll post some pics of what I used to power the drive in coming days too.
Enough for tonight though...
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