I bought an electronic typewriter recently; I’ll tell you about it later. What’s important about this typewriter is that it includes a floppy disk drive to store and retrieve documents. I was disappointed to discover that the drive didn’t work – it couldn’t read or format a disk. I took the typewriter apart because I thought the drive’s read / write heads needed cleaning, but everything was pristine. About to throw my hands up in the air, I flipped the drive over and realized that belt connecting the motor to the spindle had rotted away.
I didn’t have a replacement belt or disk drive. Knowing that I couldn’t make things any worse, I had an idea. What if I tried a rubber band? So I did. I thought the next step would be cake, but I couldn’t get the typewriter working after I reassembled it. At first it did nothing, then all it did is push the printing cartridge up. I flipped wires around a bunch of times (note to self: take a picture before disconnecting wires next time) and eventually got the screen to turn on, but it still wouldn’t type anything.
I disconnected the floppy drive and suddenly it sprang to life. I reconnected the drive and it wouldn’t type again. After some fiddling it turned out that one of the mounting screws for the floppy drive was causing some sort of a short. Without the screw the typewriter started correctly, typed correctly, and most importantly, could read and write disks!
I’ll be posting more about the typewriter in a bit, but wanted to share this fun DIY fix job first. How long the rubber band will last and whether that screw is important is anyone’s guess. I’m just happy it works again.
Relatively Ambitious 