> On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Zane H. Healy wrote: > > In some ways he should be paying you to remove the RA81's! > > They're *that* common?

No, they're large, heavy and winchesters (HDA which can only be repaired in a clean room).

A winchester has am HDA (Head Disk Assembly) which can only be taken apart and repaired in a cleanroom. I don't have a cleanroom at home, so I can't repair HDAs.

At 12:33 AM 7/20/01 +0100, Tony wrote: Actually you can make a clean room fairly easily with a 10 gallon aquarium tank and a blower. First, find a tank that has polycarbonate (aka Lexan) sides (generally they are the cheap ones here.) Remove one side, cut two 6" diameter holes in the side. Now glue a pair of latex tubes (6" O.D.) on to the sides by overlapping about an inch, stretch the latex, and epoxy to the sides. Now tighten the end of the tubes by overlapping the edges to make their diameter approximately 1/4" less than that of your wrists. Build a new top for the tank using another piece of Polycarbonate (note you can do everything from the top but it gets crowded. Install a squirrel cage blower and a HEPA 0.1 micron filter. The filter is going to slow your airflow considerably so you want your blower to give you a net positive pressure _after_ it blows through the filter. Now create another hole in the top and cover it with three or four heater type filters. If you get the kind they sell for folks allergic to pollen they should be great. This is your "exit" smoke stack. It isn't filtering so much as trapping the particles that you are purging from the work space. Now put your disk and tools in the tank, put on the top, run the blower to "purge" the air (leave your hands out of the tubes for a minute or so), wash your hands really well, stick them through the tubes until your hands pop out the end and the tube is sealed on your wrist. Wait a bit more to purge any particulates you've introduced. Now fix the drive :-) I've seen heads replaced this way (in a hand isolation tank) but typically unless you have a head assembly handy you won't be able to do much in there. I can't remember where I saw the plans to build something like this but I believe it was the Amateur Scientist column. They also had you put on latex gloves but since you aren't worried about getting infected or anything from the drive I don't think you would need them. The trick here is that you don't need a clean "room" you only need a clean "workbench" area to work. --Chuck

On Thu, 19 Jul 2001, Chuck McManis wrote: For those who are too lazy, or of dubious skill with hand tools, Harbor Freight Tools sells extremely cheap (<$100) abrasive blast cabinets that reguire little modification to match chuck's description. They have a door that needs only a little more weatherstripping, a window, and attached gloves. The gloves might be a little too heavy for the purpose, but could be cut and spliced to install lighter weight ones. Add a good fan and some filters, . . . -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com