From: Patrycjusz R. Łogiewa (silverdr_at_inet.com.pl)
Date: 2005-06-16 23:35:39
On 2005-06-16, at 20:53, Spiro Trikaliotis wrote:
[...]
Congratulations on getting your first 1581s!
> Thus, my experience is: Two 1581, and both seemed to be defective
> after
> being sent by mail. Is this common, or did I just have "bad luck"? I'm
> happy I happened to repair both, they might have gone to the garbage
> otherwise, even with this very small flaws. If this is common, I do
> not
> want to know how much 1581 go to waste because of this.
>
> What are your experiences? Is this really normal?
IMHO not really. Long time ago I happened to have a number of new
1581s in my (work)shop for sale. None suffered the symptoms you
described and none of those sent wherever (not to mention the way
they arrived to my place) were returned. Then I left one for myself
and... sold it when a customer came in and offered an amount I
couldn't refuse. Of course I regretted it later on ;-) Several years
passed and I eventually managed to collect a couple of working 1581s
again and again none suffered the symptoms you described. Although I
recall I had several 1581s from my customers for servicing, which did
have problems with the drives. In most cases those were the very
same, somewhat unreliable Chinons, which were so often loaded into
A-500s. Those often had various problems, including head
misalignment, stepper problems (they utilised a kind of spiral
transmission system with a steel wire fitting the spiral thread). In
many cases when the mechanism fell out of the regular range (e.g. due
to failing or misaligned T0 light gate), it got "stuck" in the
extreme position and couldn't move back on itself. Thus to sum it up:
problems you describe aren't IMHO really typical for 1581s but at
least one of them was quite typical for the Chinon's FZ-(was it 354?)
drives.
BTW. The head should do the headseek (similar to what the older PC
BIOS does on startup) whenever a diskette is inserted on power-up. It
doesn't have to be PC formatted one.
--
It's not the voices in my head that annoy me, it's the ones from the
outside.
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