[cctalk] Re: Disk pack production tools

Hello list, Yesterday, I was wondering, if there are any multiplatter disk pack production tools known to exist? There are disk pack inspection and cleaning tools in the wild (also one on eBay for a ridiculously high price) and occasionally, I also saw unused and originally packed disk platters for sale, but these are, to my limited knowledge, worthless if the production and platter alignment tools are missing. I remember vaguely somebody writing on this list years ago that some last systems were tossed by some company in California. But disk packs were also produced on the European continent and in for instance in Bulgaria(ISOT) for computer disk drives in the federal republic of Germany and the Soviet Union. I was just wondering about this since it is getting more and more difficult to come across disk packs provided that spare unused platters arw available. The (9)877 for the CDC SMD 80MB drives 9762 and OEMs seemed to have been fairly wide-spread and these still show up from time to time for offer. But the 300MB packs for the CDC 9766 are rare now. Older drives are close to unobtainium. I never came across a five-platter pack for my CDC 854 drive and i have never seen packs for my MMD 844 or my CDC BC3xx disk drive for 200MB disk packs. The question will rise what I wanna do with these. I have a working 9762 drive and some day, I would like to try to restore the other ones I have. For the SMD drives, I have spare heads and alignment tools and a disk pack cleaner. I don't intend to run them for hours because I don't have a clean room environment that is appropriate to the specs of these drives. I just love these pieces of storage technology and it would be great to at least have one pack for the drives that are missing one. Any thoughts from the disk experts would be greatly appreciated :) Greetings, Pierre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.digitalheritage.de