Yesterware

A while ago I wrote about firing up my Sega CD Model 2 and finding that it did not work.  Not only did it not work, but it was broken in more than one way. To recap, first discs were making a terrible scraping noise and getting rings scratched into them. I discovered that this was due to the shock dampers having cracked and collapsed. Page 11 of the Service Manual courtesy of the Console5 Tech Wiki The dampers deteriorated with time and use. When the shock dampers fail like this, the CD drive sits too low and the discs will scrape the tray as it tries to spin the disc. My first solution was to add some home-made washers to prop up the collapsed dampers.  While this did work, it had two major problems.  Firstly, with the CD drive rigged like this, the CD spindle was not properly level.  While the magnetic clamp holds the disc in place anyway, it seemed like being off balance like that might be putting extra wear on the spindle motor. As far as I can tell, direct repla...

From time to time I like to fire up my disc based systems to keep the grease viscous and make sure everything is in good working order.  Well last night I fired up my Model 2 Sega CD and discovered that all was not well. The disk tried to spin up and this horrible grinding and scraping noise came from the drive.  After several attempts the disk finally loaded, but it was painful and I shut it off immediately to prevent damage.  I managed to do some damage getting the silly thing apart, but everything is back in working order now. Problem: Grinding The grinding noise from a Sega CD Model 2 is evidently a pretty common issue.  There's a laser limit switch which the system uses to tell that the laser assembly has reached the center of the CD spindle.  Over time this switch stops working as desired.  The switch is essentially just two thin strips of copper inside a plastic shell.  When the sled touches the switch, the two strips are supposed to make contac...