Quadra 700 Electronic Floppy Disk Ejector Fix

[intric8]

A week ago I was installing a birthday present my brother sent me: Pagemaker 4 for Macintosh. It came with several disks, and I was happily installing disk after disk onto my Qudara 700 - one of my retrocomputing crown jewels. The Quadra 700 was shown several times in Jurassic Park, for those wondering what the heck it is.

Ah ah ah - you didn't say the magic word!

Released in 1990, the Quadra 700 would have been a competitor to the Amiga 3000.

Me, in 2020:

It can be used vertically as a tower or horizontally depending on your preference and space needs. The entire machine can be deconstructed in about 2-3 minutes with only needing to remove 1 single screw. Everything (PSU, speaker, hard drive caddy, motherboard, etc.) just pops or slides out using simple pressure latches. I can literally remove the side (or top) of the case and remove the motherboard in less than 2 minutes. It’s amazing.

Over the years I've upgraded my Quadra 700 about as far as it can go considering it doesn't have very many expansion slots.

• DayStar 040 40 Mhz accelerator card (it shipped with an 040 in 1991 at 25Mhz)
• Maximum RAM of 68MB
• 2MB VRAM upgrade
• Radius Prism video card, so I can run dual monitors and an LCD at 1024x768
• Floppy Emu, so I can install disk images I get online easily and hassle-free

Anyway, I was installing Pagemaker and during the 3rd disk I started to see errors. Lots of errors. I went to eject the disk and it was stuck! I used the old paperclip trick (one always needs a paperclip near an old Mac to pop out disks or CDs), and put a different disk in the drive. That's when I realized something was very wrong. The new disk couldn't be read or be ejected, either.

After talking to some friends and doing a little internet searching, I discovered that one of the gears in the electronic ejection module was created using a very brittle plastic by Sony, the manufacturer of the drive. I'm not sure why they did this; one theory is this weaker plastic created smoother and/or quieter function. Regardless, the drives failing due to this one tiny gear is extremely common. I had no idea...

Thankfully I discovered this excellent video of an 800k drive being completely disassembled and restored. It's not the same drive, but it looks almost identical - my drive is a 1.44 superdrive. But the ejection mech is identical as is the overall drive design.

In any case, I soon learned there is a seller on Ebay who creates fantastic 3D-printed replacement gears. Yesterday, I pulled the old drive and opened up the ejector mechanism.

The beige gear is the problem child. Sucker lost nearly half of its teeth! What a mess.

When you order replacement gears, you get 4 in a package. I actually only needed 2, as I have a backup drive that also needs fixing. But it's nice to get some to put in storage in case it ever acts up again. My 3D printer could never print anything with this kind of detail...

Here is the new gear installed. Isn't she pretty?

After putting everything back together, it works GREAT! Such a nice feeling to have hardware win.

[Zippy Zapp]

If you ever need any replacements you can get 12 (Extra Large Quantity for sharing) from Shapeways.com for about $7, although they do charge $12 for shipping.

Shapeways Mac Replacement Floppy Gear

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