Panasonic luggable

[Tony Duell]

> > How do you break the pins?  I most often see the plastic parts that grip
> > the pins breaking more often.
> 
> That is correct.

And that's what had failed on my drive.

> 
> In a lab full of college students, I noticed two behaviors associated with
> broken door hinges of Tandon drives.  Instead of gripping the door between
> thumb and forefinger and easing it open, some students hooked it with
> forefinger, and snapped it open, letting it slam against the stop.  A few
> others would poke the upper part of the door to make it slam open.

Actually, I've found pressing on the upper part of the door to be much 
kinder to the pins than pulling the door open from the bottom edge (think 
about what the applied force reacts against). The trick, of course, is 
not to let the clamp arm slam open, but to guide the door open gently and 
let the arm rise slowly

> Instead of replacing the drives, we bought a large quantity of doors and
> hinges.  When the college switched to mostly new machines, the college
> administrators threw out our box of repair parts, rendering all subsequent
> ones that broke "unrepairable".

:-(. I'm getting low on replacement doors too. I may have to start making 
those hihgt parts from scratch. 

Of course I've kept the parts I removed from this drive. If nothing else, 
the door itself is fine, and the broken parts of the hinge may be useful 
if I do have to fabricate one.

-tony