The heads almost never ever go bad, they just get extremely dirty. Some IPA and a good scrub with a tape head cleaner Q tip, don't use the cotton ones. The ALPS ones were always the worst for me and my mitsumi ones lasted forever, and I used them for hours everyday for 20+ years. Alignment problems are also a myth most of the time and that was just something techs told people to make a lot of money on cleaning heads. Measure the head, I doubt it's open circuit. Also change the caps in them, they are ancient and fail and crap power will burn chips up, not to mention other problems and the voltage regs can get stressed.
Heads going open circuit on Newtronics mechanisms is so frequent it's almost a certainty. If you see "untested" 1541s with a Newtronics mechanism, you can be sure it's dead
The heads almost never ever go bad, they just get extremely dirty. Some IPA and a good scrub with a tape head cleaner Q tip, don't use the cotton ones. The ALPS ones were always the worst for me and my mitsumi ones lasted forever, and I used them for hours everyday for 20+ years. Alignment problems are also a myth most of the time and that was just something techs told people to make a lot of money on cleaning heads. Measure the head, I doubt it's open circuit. Also change the caps in them, they are ancient and fail and crap power will burn chips up, not to mention other problems and the voltage regs can get stressed.
I didn‘t show that on video, but of course I measured the heads. Trust me, they are open circuit.
Heads going open circuit on Newtronics mechanisms is so frequent it's almost a certainty. If you see "untested" 1541s with a Newtronics mechanism, you can be sure it's dead