Tinkering

Bringing into shape a worn out keyboard cable:

 

Recapping a 1541 drive. Why recap it, you say? Well, these two big caps are part of the power supply, and most of them are dry as the desert after 30+ years and act more as a resistor than a capacitor. That makes for “bad” power with lots of ripple which will damage components eventually, like blowing up the tantalum caps (ripple heats them up).
As axial caps are very rare and disproportionally expensive these days, I decided to use radial ones by extending one leg.
With all due respect, but it is “just” a 1541 and not a 1540 with original blue-white box. In my opinion it is not “worth” spending 20 Euros on caps for each drive for axial ones when I can do it with 2 Euros with radial caps, especially when you have 100+ Commodore drives like I do.
Due to the fact that caps are much smaller nowadays, it will not look original even with the expensive axial ones unless you get ones with a much higher voltage rating for around 20+ bucks each. So no 🙂
And hey, if done properly, it doesn’t look that bad, does it?

 

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