What lubricants do you use when restoring floppy disk drives?
For a few years now I've been using,
- white lithium grease (spray -> q-tip) for the head motor screw
- Triflow https://www.amazon.com/TF0021060-Lubricante-s … 90186011&sr=8-1 for the rail guide
This has generally worked well for me but I'm 100% open to learning the error of my ways and choosing a different method 😀
Fancy stuff. I just grease them 😀 The important thing to remember is any lubricant will eventually attract dust and get dirty, so the first step is to try and clean the old gunk. Then apply something suitable, grease for slow-moving metal parts, some kind of oil for fast moving ones. WD-40 is not a great lubricant but can be used to loosen things a bit first - obviously, don't just spray it or it'll get everywhere. Q-tips are great but take care not to leave any whiskers.
Oh, and for plastic parts I use silicone grease, the transparent one that's also used in brake calipers. Actually I use that for a lot of things, CPU thermal interface to heatsink including. Never had any issues.
I use light weight white grease, Lithium based usually. I use a Q-tip dipped int ISO Alc to soften the old grease off the worm drive and other areas before applying new grease, it actually works quite well to soften and remove most of the hard old stuff. It also will not hurt any of the nylon or bakelite based plastics. I would never use WD-40 on anything like a floppy drive or cdrom.
added: I use same white grease on the head slide rails. I would be very leary of using Tri-Flow on a floppy due to this statement: "Excellent for chains, pivot joints, and for loosening rusted and corroded nuts and bolts " that leads me to think it has a solvent in it like WD-40 and Liquid Wrench. If the head slides are a bakelite plastic that moves over metal slide rails the solvent in the oil could slowly destroy the bakelite.
added #2: I know many of the quality built 5.25" floppies have brass tubes inside the plastic head slides so that it is brass against the steel rails but those brass tubes are held in a bakelite type plastic. Most 3.5" drives, specially newer (2000 and up) ones have just the bakelite riding the steel rails...
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
I've done one of these lubrications+gear replacements on an old Mac floppy drive. The auto-inject ones are quite complicated with lots of springs and panels to be taken apart in the right order. I used spray lithium grease and was kind of amazed how well it works. The thing ejects the disk almost like bread popping out of a toaster now.
