Alignment disks, and the creation thereof

I suspect that day will come (if ever) when the last floppy disk of that size is no longer useable, and there is no way to make a replacement. The drives themselves will be repairable (as I've said before, apart from the heads, just about any other part can be made or repaired in a good home workshop). Aren't there strictly 2 prolems, though. The first is keeping machines with flopyp drives running, assuming you have the software on something that's still readable. And for that a solid-state replacement is one possible answer. I seem to remember reading about some open-source floppy emulator on the web, the prolem being it only had enough memory for a single-sided (5.25" or 3.5") disk image. Which somewhat limits the usefulness. The second iproblem is that you find a floppy disk in good condition (not shedding oxide, etc) and you need to read it. To do that you could use an accurately aligned floppy drive, which means you need the alignment disk. -tony