Save Your Vintage Machines' Saves with This Patent-Approved DIY Floppy Drive Cleaning Disk

Mononymous vintage computing enthusiast Ben, also known as "Gammitin," has been doing a little research into keeping magnetic floppy disk drives in tip-top condition — delivering a guide to building your own cleaning disk, now that such things aren't being manufactured professionally any more.

"So, the last few cleaning disks I've made, were based on laboratory filters," Gammitin explains by way of background to the project. "They're hard wearing but probably slightly too abrasive. I found [a] link to an early 1980s cleaning disk patent, [and] the recommended material to use is Tyvek."

For those who grew up after the rise of near-ubiquitous connectivity and the death of magnetic removable media, floppy disks are made by coating a plastic disc with iron oxide or a similar magnetic material and placing it into an envelope where it can be handled safely yet still spin freely. Physically inserted, with a satisfying clunk, into a disk drive, magnetic read-write heads spin over the surface and either measure or encode the magnetic flux — loading or storing data.

These heads, though, get dirty over time — and the dirtier they get, the less likely you are to be able to read and write your disks correctly. Worse, that dirt can be transferred on to the disk itself and even scratch the surface — which is exactly why cleaning disks were once commonplace in computer and office supply stores around the world.

The patent, granted to Innovative Computer Products in 1981 based on the work of C. Paul Davis and Joseph Sandor, describes just such a device: "a cleaning disk made of an absorbent and porous fibrous material which has an area substantially saturated with a liquid cleaning solution," with sheets of DuPont's non-woven polyethylene fiber Tyvek suggested as an ideal material. While commercial cleaning disks are hard to find today, Tyvek isn't in short supply — so Gammitin set about building a cleaning disk of his own using exactly that.

The process is simple enough: carefully cut open a floppy disk, removing the metal shutter if it's not a shutterless 5.25" or 8" disk, and remove the disk and lining. Glue the metal spindle onto a donut-shaped sheet of Tyvek, then reassemble the disk with more glue. Finally, as the patent calls for, soak the visible portion of the Tyvek in "a liquid cleaning solution" — simple isopropyl alcohol.

"My Olivetti Prodest PC1's B drive is dirty, sometimes it has issues reading disks, so I thought this would be a good candidate to test it out on," Gammitin writes. "It worked a treat, the drive heads are now clean and working well. Mission complete, now to make a few of them."

The full guide is available in Gammitin's Mastodon thread.