XF551 repair success and question

[adam242]

A while back, I picked up a broken XF551 drive for a good price on eBay, thinking it would be a simple matter of reflowing the SIO jack solder joints to get it working. I finally got around to cracking it open today and the repair was even easier than I expected!

 

There's a small metal shield that sits on top of the upper head (in the attached picture, it's the U-shaped piece sitting to the right of the head) and is held in place by three little bits of double-sided tape. The tape had deteriorated and crumbled onto the heads. I carefully cleaned the heads and removed all the remaining tape and adhesive - a little rubbing alcohol, a Q-tip and some compressed air, and I now have a functioning XF551!

 

My question is, is this piece important enough to go through the trouble of reattaching somehow, or can I leave it out? An EMI shield of some kind?

 

[MEtalGuy66]

Yep.. Glue it back on.. and be careful.. the top of that head is very delicate.. Use something like hot glue, around the edges of the plastic carrier only.. dont get any glue down inside the head, itself..

 

If you dont replace that shield, you will get intermittant data errors when using double-sided (360k) disks..

 

And yeah, they all fall off of the mitsumi mechs.. The crap double-adhesive "foam padding" they used to attach the shield at the factory disintegrates with age..

 

You should do a forum search for XF551.. all of this crap has been covered many times before.. I personally have probably written 30+ pages of posts about these drives, their common failure points, reccomended repairs/replacements of various components in the drive, etc..

[adam242]

Many thanks.

 

I did a (perhaps not thorough-enough) search but didn't find anything about the metal shield.