7 Mar
2011
7 Mar
'11
9:51 p.m.
On Monday (03/07/2011 at 09:31PM +0000), Tony Duell wrote:
Yes. Sorry about that. I figured that out soon after and sent an apology
post for changing the topic. It was not intentional... honest!
What I am seeing is that the intake side of the absolute filter is
completely black with dust from that decaying pre-filter. In fact,
I tore an absolute filter apart yesterday to reclaim just the outer
plastic frame and when I peeled the pleats apart, they were completely
covered all the way in with the black dust. The pre-filter on this
unit just crumbled when I touched it.
I've also used 409 followed by just a damp wipe after that.
Yes... that makes sense and I am likely to go back over the unit and do
that level of tune up after I've determined it's worth investing that
effort. As I found with the head crasher drive, spending a bunch of detail
time up front sometimes doesn't pay off ;-)
Yes. I've tried shopping by size on the web too... at all sorts of
HEPA filter suppliers... but not so easy.
I did find a couple sort of close (in size) filters at one of the DIY
centers here... one was for a stand-alone room air cleaner and one was
for a vacuum cleaner. I took one and peeled off the surrounding frame and
cut it to size with a bread knife... and then glued it into the plastic
frame I had scavanged from one of the real filters with elastomeric caulk.
I haven't tried it in the drive yet. I'm worried that it won't take
the pressure and will just blow right through the thing... so I need
to rig the drive so I can spin it up without a pack in there and have
the front air dam removed so that if it does blow it out, it goes into
the room and not into the drive itself.
> What do
you do? I know the stanadard procedure for RK05 packs, but what
> do you dismantle, and how do you clean, the RL's?
Actually, I was asking about cleaning the RL _packs_, but doing the
drives is an interesting subject too. Before I ever
try to spin one up, I take the front panel off and remove
the black pre-filter. It is guaranteed to be disintegrating and turning
into a fine black powder. Exactly the kind of thing you don't want
sucked into the drive.
Ineeed. That crumbing foam is a problem in a lot of old elecrtronics. The
RL is better than some, the pre-filter is at the front end of those 'heat
exchanger' tubes, so the decaying foam isn't plaseted straight onto the
absolute filters as it is in an RK05 or RK07. It still helps to remvoe it I then take
off the top covers and vacuum out the well where the pack
sits and wipe the entire area down with a damp cloth. Clean out ALL
I think I would use prapn-2-ol to dampen the cloth for this. Then I clean
out the rear near the fan. The fan blades will be loaded
up with dust and I take off the grill and wipe those down with a Swiffer
duster cloth as well as vacuum the whole fan assembly.
Most of the time when I'm restorign soemthing, not just RLs, I remvoe the
fan unit completely . Most of the time these fans can be taken apart
(fixings are often under the lable), there are many varients which I
won';t go into here (but will if somebody asks me), but basically you get
to the end of th espidnel, remvoe a circlip and washers, and slide the
rotor out. The housing and blades are then a lot easier to clean. and
you can put a drop of oil on the bearings. I was just
about to post to the list asking if there is a source for these
absolute filters still (which I doubt) or if anyone has a process for
I am tols that a farily common car air filter element can be modified to
fit. I do know that some older drives (RK01s?) used a car air filter
element as standard...
Anyway, the problem is that I can't rememebr which car is the one to ask
for. And at least over here, you go and buy a filter for a particular
car, the shops look at oyu like you're from amrs if you ask for one of
particular dimensions. Anyone got any ideas?
[...]
I believe it was doing both actually. Sometimes it would get past the
edge and onto the surface and then there'd be the tell-tale sound of
oxide peeling off and then it would fault and unload (what was left of)
the heads. Inspecting the guinea pig pack, shows a nice grove about 1/4"
in from the outer edge on the upward facing surface. Dang.
--
Chris Elmquist
At this point, I am brave enough to try to spin
the drive up. I will
take a known good not not precious pack and put it in the drive. You
of course have to have a controller connected to the drive and powered
on so that the drive gets clock over the interface. At this point you
should have the fault light out and the load light lit. You can press
load and hear the drive spin up. Hopefully. I have one drive that will
spin up, attempt to load the heads and then immediately fault. After
several experiments trying to get this drive to load the heads so that I
could do some of the alignment procedures, I found that it was actually
crashing the head into the media and I wrecked that pack. That drive is
Do you mean it was headcrashing in the normal sense (wich would indicate
possibly faulty heads) or that the head was hitting the edge of the disk,
or what?