Chris, I was wondering the same thing. I would say from experience with repairing Commodore 64s at the workshop, I would bring 5-10. Some you would use for parts, but I would expect at least 5 can get fixed. But this workshop is unusual because we got a lot of people that know their stuff coming to help and lots of people working on fixing. If you want to bring 20, that is great. I wouldn't expect all to get fixed, but there is a great possibility that they can. For myself I will bring 5 working drives, and 10 non working drives. Some of them I have labeled as to the dysfunction with a post-it note. I don't have a lot of experience fixing them, I have tried cleaning some and they remained unfixed. My gut tells me that a smaller percentage can be fixed with cleaning them 10%, a bigger percentage could have chip issues like 25%, maybe 50% have component issues (capacitor, resister etc.), another 15 percent are disk head or speed issues. What does everyone else think? Jeff On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 12:15 PM, Chris Fala via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I have been really looking forward to an opportunity to get some experienced assistance repairing 1541 drives. I acquired several on eBay and other sources over the last couple years. Some were functional, some worked after the heads were cleaned, and some are still malfunctioning for unknown reasons. I haven't had the time to dig deeper and diagnose the problems on these. I hope that I can learn more about these this weekend and get at least some of this last category working.
Practically speaking, how many drives should I bring this weekend? Is 20 too many or is it possible to actually work on that many in a day? Are there common problems that can be addressed quickly, or is it more likely that each drive will require unique troubleshooting?