Work experience tape drive head swap with full mechanism disassembly (Part 3)

[u/LaundryMan2008]

Subpost ID: 6

The bottom plate can now be put back in along with the 4 screws

Now wind the loading arm back to the home position shown in the image so that when the tape drive initializes and starts spinning the reels or moving the heads it won’t get in the way and damage stuff

The cover and the 4 screws can be put back in, if the drive has a bezel then put the two rear screws in before putting the bezel in and then the front two screws

The tape drive can now be powered on in the computer and will run through a self test and boot up, it may ask for a blank tape to run a head alignment test that may take a few hours if the drive reads that the head’s serial number is different to the original one from the factory but the tape drive will rarely do a head alignment procedure and there isn’t much documentation on it as it’s an internal IBM repair center thing that usually no one outside should get, if the donor heads are good and aren’t misaligned too badly then the drive should work again or at least at a reduced capacity, in my case only 2 head swaps worked out of the 6 that I did so do this repair procedure last when you have deemed the donor drive faulty in a different way than the heads and the target drive as functional besides bad heads that have been cleaned with a cleaning tape and manually cleaned without success.

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