Repairing a Sharp Twin Famicom Disk Drive
Replacing the belt on a Sharp Twin Famicom Disk Drive
I recently got a Sharp Twin Famicom for around 70€. This is rather cheap, they usually go for over 200€ in good condition. The Twin Famicom is a Famicom with a built-in Famicom Disk System drive. This was a floppy disk system for the Famicom that was only used in Japan. The one I got worked well with carts (at least with 8BIT MUSIC POWER FINAL), but disks wouldn’t read at all.
The drives on these systems are famous for using really bad belts. I hoped that the only thing broken with my system would be the belt, so I opened it up (it’s very straight-forward), and sure enough, the belt was half ripped apart and half fused with the gears.
I ordered a new belt on ebay, which arrived a few days later. It’s important to first remove all the residue of the old belt. At it was sticking very firmly to the gears, I used some rubbing alcohol to remove it. This took 15 minutes or so.
I followed this video (https://hooktube.com/watch?v=fOY1G3Sg11Q) to replace the belt, which worked very well, except the final part. The spindle hub alignment seemed to be off, as I now got read errors for the disk, even though the new belt worked just fine. I added some WD40, but that didn’t seem to help. After using this (http://www.famicomdisksystem.com/tutorials/fds-repair-mod/belt-replacement-adjustment/) guide to align the spindle hub, the disk drive started working fine and loaded up the wonderful game “Smash Ping Pong”.
Happy about my success, I closed up the system, started it up - and received read errors again. After opening it up again, I saw that the reading mechanism didn’t fully retract. This was because the switch that is used to detect a full retraction was bend down too much, so it actually prevented the movement of the reading mechanism. In the picture you can see the part in question. I bend it back a bit, closed it up again, and it started to work fine.
The Twin Famicom is fully functional now. The disk drives on these systems seem to fail a lot, but at least they are rather easy to fix.
