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Inspecting and Shipping RL02 Drives

NF6X

NF6X

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Joined
Sep 9, 2013
Messages
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Location
Riverside, CA, USA
I'm communicating with an eBay seller on the opposite corner of the country about some RL02 drives that he has for sale at an interesting price. I already have a stack of RL02 packs that I've acquired, and I'd like to get at least a couple RL02 drives to go with my PDP-11/44 project. The seller doesn't know how to operate the drives, and I have never had my hands on one before, so I'm looking for some advice and instructions to help me tell him how to open them up to take pictures for me, how to engage any shipping locks, etc.

The seller can power up the drives, and he sent me pictures of one of them plugged in and lit up. He doesn't know how to open the top cover, and he says the latch doesn't budge. I can probably put together some instructions by studying the manuals, but I would really appreciate it if somebody with RL02 experience could post some step-by-step instructions for him to open up a drive (including how to defeat interlocks if the drive doesn't power up and unload properly), unload packs if they're present, what details I really need to see pictures of to determine whether I want a particular drive or not, and how to prepare them for shipment. Pictures showing what to do would be super extra awesome!

I have a pile of PDP-11/44 stuff that I hope to turn into one working machine, and I have a Kennedy 9610 tape drive and an Emulex TC12 controller on the way from a couple of eBay purchases. I figure that the PDP-11/44, tape drive, and two RL02 drives would make a nice system configuration if I can find a suitable rack to put them all in. What do you DEC experts think about that configuration? That particular stack would occupy 23U of rack height, and it looks like the PDP-11/44 is the deepest item at around 28" deep. I have a 7' rack that would probably hold them, but I want to find a much shorter rack that can roll through a regular doorway.

So anyway, if these drives look good then I'd like to buy a couple of them from him. Or maybe some extras to fill up a pallet since they'd be traveling by truck freight?

Thanks in advance for any help!
 
The RL drives are a great system; unlike modern drives everything in them is big and repairable. The electronics are not much more complicated than an analog VCR but there are a couple points you should know. First the drive door can only be opened when the drive is connected to a working system being that without a clock pulse it sits in fault and will not unlatch the drive door switch. There is a small metal plate on the side of the drive that can be removed and the latch can be released from there. Second is that the address for the drive is set by the cover that fits over the ready light. Very important that you don’t get two with the same number. Third thing is that before you remove a disk pack you have to be Cretan that the head assembly is retracted! When the system is in use if you release the load button the head automatically retracts and unless an idiot was the last one to use the drive the operator should have done that. There is a small metal plate that can be moved up to lock the heads in position for shipment that’s right below the place where they come out. I have both RL-01 and 02 drives on my two systems and if you send me a blank disk pack I can put together a RT-11 boot disk for you and if you want to see what they look like when running I have a YouTube video of my 11/34 at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK99WuaU_k8

Qbus
 
Actually, the RL02 doesn't need a controller or computer connected to it in order to unlock the top cover. Just turn the drive on (the LOAD, READY, and FAULT lights will all come on if you don't have a controller connected and powered up), and wait about 30 seconds. You will hear a faint "click". The top cover is now unlocked.
 
Never tried that with one of the 02 drives, know that the 01 has to see clock to do anything and assumed the 02 was the same. There are three different sets of controller cards that go in the drive. One that’s just a regular RL-01 only, a card that’s the old style RL-02 and the last card produced that can be jumped for the RL-01 or 02, wonder if both different 02 control cards do that or just the last of the series?
 
Hi, below is a copy of an email I sent to an ebay seller in Germany recently to get him to open and lock the heads of 2 RL02's I bought from him. Doing it this way you dont need to power up the drives.
Hope this helps.
Dave



Hi, some photos of a RL02 to aid with the locking of the heads, sorry about the quality, just a cheep camera with no macro.

If the lid will not open when you push the lid release,

Photo 1
Remove the front cover, 6 screws, 3 a side, watch out when it comes of as there is a cable to the main unit.
Photo 2
Push a stiff wire into this hole, I use a tool I have for opening CD Rom drives, you may need to angle it down a bit, don’t need a lot of force, once the latch is released remove the wire and the top lid will open.

Now if there is a cartridge in , I hope not, then DON’T JUST LIFT IT OUT, as you could damage the heads if they are not retracted , you will need to apply power to the drive to make sure they are out of the way, BUT only if there is a cartridge in the drive.

Phot0 3
Assuming no cartridge, this is the head with the locking plate in the normal position, loosen the screw a turn or 2
And rotate the plate
Photo 4
And re tighten

Hope this makes sense, sorry if you are already familiar with this procedure but thought it would not hurt.
As you cane see from the photos this drive is not in the best of condition , that’s why I need another

1 front cover screws.jpg2 latch releas.jpg3 head in normal.jpg4 head locked.jpg
 
BTY, when you take to the seller see if he has any of the RL02 rack side sliders, the RL02's need to be slid forward in the rack in order to load/ unload the cartridge and the sliders seem to be harder to get hold of than the drives ! I have 4 and a half drives and no sliders ! so im going to have to try and make some.
Dave
 
Thank you all for your help!

Here are some pictures that the seller sent me. They are small and blurry, unfortunately. In the last picture, does it look like the shipping lock is already engaged? It does look engaged to me, but I'm not positive about it.

1.jpg 5.jpg 6.jpg 8.jpg
 
Please keep us posted on this. I have a couple of perfect looking RL02's as well. Over the next few months I'd like to start preparing one for use as well.
 
NF6X said:
Thank you all for your help!

Here are some pictures that the seller sent me. They are small and blurry, unfortunately. In the last picture, does it look like the shipping lock is already engaged? It does look engaged to me, but I'm not positive about it.
Click to expand...


Agreed, does look like its locked, but you may like to ask for a close in pic just to make sure .

Looks like a nice clean drive, must get round to looking at mine but the current project is the RX01.
Dave
 
I've exchanged more messages, pictures and a phone call with the seller. He now knows how to lock the heads for shipping. None of the drives have rails. He's found one "3" and a bunch of "0" drive select lenses in his pile of drives, so I guess I'll get three "0" drives and one "3" drive, and hope that I can find/make other lenses or just hotwire whatever contacts the lenses actuate.

My controller card in my PDP-11/44 pile has a round cable to the first drive, and I have a terminator on the way from eBay. I'll need to locate 1-3 of the daisy-chain cables. I don't know yet whether I'll stack a 2-drive system up in a single 24U cabinet with the CPU and tape drive, or put four drives in one 24U cabinet and the computer, tape drive and unknown future add-ons in another 24U cabinet. I'm open to ideas and brainstorming: What other sorts of stuff might I like to put in a rack with a PDP-11/44? How much would I be limited with only 1-2 drives vs. 3-4 drives? I don't know what I want to do with my system yet; for now it's just a fun project to get it working, and I don't even know what OS(es) I will run and what applications I might have on the system.

The seller is working on a freight quote, and we've verbally agreed on a price for four drives. He says he got his pile of drives from a government auction in Kansas. I'm crossing my fingers that I'll be able to build a nice system with these drives!

In my PDP-11/44 chassis pile, three of the chassis have the half-sized Unibus expansion backplanes, and the fourth has the full-sized Unibus expansion backplane (I don't recall the slot counts). Unless there's some reason to avoid the wider expansion backplane, my natural tendency would be to try to use the wider one in my build. Even though I don't have enough boards to fill the narrower kind, and I have no idea what I might want to cram into the system later.
 
I have a couple of DEC BC17F-10 RL02 drive-to-drive daisy chain cables. They are yours for the cost of shipping if so desired. Send me a PM if you are interested.

Don

They look just like this:

mEQGYDx9iAaJYwYZJUkr7qA.jpg

I got them with some other stuff I bought, but have no use for them in my setup.
 
Start off with a trip to Bitsavers. (Where would we be without them?)

DEC Documents EK-0RL02-IP-004 and EK-0RL01-IP-005 are the parts drawings for the RL02 and RL01 drives respectively. The following info is from those documents.

DEC PN 12-13686-00 is the drive slide. Obviously you need two per drive. What the drawing doesn't show is that the right and left slides are not the same. One of mine is stamped 12-13686-00_Rev H-L and is the left slide. The right slide is stamped similarly but ends with an R.

DEC PN 74-19261-00 is the slide bracket that is attaches the slide to the rack uprights with machine screws. You will need two per slide.

DEC PN 74-19262-00 is called a bar nut. Just a plated steel bar with two or three threaded holes in them. If your rack has threaded holes you don't need them. You could also choose to use conventional nuts or Tinnerman nuts. But the drawing shows these so I included them here.

The two documents I cited above also have a lot of info on all the gizmos in the drive, how they fit together, and how they are mounted in various kinds of racks. I would definitely suggest you take a look at them.
 
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I forgot to mention. If you search the web for slides like I had to, you will find lots of "recyclers" who list the part number you want but are always out of stock. I managed to find one at Pinnacle Micro. They explained that when a machine is "recycled" the cables are usually cut, the marketable subassemblies are pulled out, and things that are still attached to the rack (like slides and half of the cut off cables) are scrapped with the rack. That's apparently why lots of people have drives but no slides or cables.
 
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Thank you!

I have four drives on the way. They should be picked up around Friday in New York and held at a local freight depot in southern California for me to pick up, so I figure I'll have them in 2-3 weeks. I don't know how long it'll be until I try spinning one up, since the PDP-11/44 I'll use them with is still a pile of parts waiting for me to get started on them. I'll keep y'all updated on my progress with these wonderful dinosaurs.

If I can't find original rack slides for them, maybe I can use some generic slides?

I am still undecided about trying to build a 2-drive vs. 4-drive system, but I'm leaning towards a 2-drive system so that I can fit everything into a single 24U rack.
 
Update time! My brain is addled by a cold, so I apologize if this rambles more than usual. :)

I picked up the pallet of drives at the trucking terminal on Monday. I was delayed by about a week because the shipper didn't call me to tell me they arrived.

IMG_0802.jpg

Then on Tuesday, I got them unloaded from my truck. I haven't had a chance to play with them much yet, as I've been asleep most of the time with this darn cold.

IMG_0803.jpg IMG_0804.jpg IMG_0806.jpg IMG_0807.jpg

Like I said above, I haven't decided whether to build up my PDP-11/44 with 2 or 4 drives. I'm looking for a good rack to use for the system. I have a 7 footer that would hold everything, but it would be stuck out in the garage because it's too tall to roll through house doors. As a minimum, I'd like to rack up the PDP-11/44, two RL02 drives, and a Kennedy tape drive I got recently. That stack would take a minimum of 23U of rack space, but I may need more if I can't find the correct rack slides and end up mounting things a bit out of alignment with the standard rack spaces.

I'll begin looking for the right rack slides for the RL02 drives, and I have a set of slides for the PDP-11/44. I'll also need to find suitable slides for the tape drive.

I will also need to find some more ID lenses for the drives. They came with three "0" and one "3" lens.

I have enough daisy-chain cables to build up a 4-drive system if needed. I've been toying with the idea of trying to make an FPGA-based controller to talk to the drives, so I wouldn't mind it if I can find another cable to hack up or loose connector.

The maintenance prints I got from BitSavers show a latch solenoid access cover on the right side that is not present on my drives. They also show the brush assembly that I gather was eliminated later, so maybe I have a newer revision of drives? I was able to bypass the interlock by removing the panel at the top rear of the drive, as was recommended to me.

I was having trouble with the BitSavers prints initially because they scrolled really slowly on my Mac. I found that printing them to new PDFs resulted in much larger files that scrolled much more smoothly. That might just be a round-about way of changing the compression type.
 
NF6X said:
The maintenance prints I got from BitSavers show a latch solenoid access cover on the right side that is not present on my drives. They also show the brush assembly that I gather was eliminated later, so maybe I have a newer revision of drives? I was able to bypass the interlock by removing the panel at the top rear of the drive, as was recommended to me.
Click to expand...

the drawings for the RL02 weren't actually there. I took care of that
MP00553_RL02_RevB_Engineering_Drawings_Nov79
 
Thank you! I'll go grab the drawing!

Am I correctly assuming that the RL02 will not try to spin up until it receives its 4.1 MHz clock from the controller board?

After growing up with sealed hard drives my whole life, it sure is weird to see how open to the environment everything is in the RL02.
 
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