SCPH-1000 spindle motor derailing.

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16shot
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PlayStation Model: SCPH-1000
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SCPH-1000 spindle motor derailing.

Post by 16shot » December 21st, 2023, 9:02 pm

Hello everyone! First post here after a while spent lurking, looking for some feedback...

I have an early SCPH-1000 here, bought back in the day when they were new. After perhaps only a couple of years of pretty light use (must have been around 1996), it developed a fault where the spindle motor would derail sometimes upon 1x 2x speed switching.

The issue worsened slowly but surely until the unit no longer booted reliably.

It was left aside for years until i picked it back up recently upon discovering the spindle motor may have gotten slightly seized up, and so tried out the WD40 + light oil maintenance with the help of a small battery to run the motor.

This worked great for a couple of days until the issue slowly krept back in.

At that point i went and bought one of these aftermarket BAM drives locally. Replaced the cover, popped it in and it worked perfectly for about 3 weeks straight of regular use, after which the very same problem started happening again (spindle derailing although machine recovering ok).

That got me back to wondering whether the fault lies somewhere else on the electronic side of things and if not, just how sensible/intolerant can these early PlayStations be towards the slightest delay of that spindle motor!??

Was this something all PlayStations did before Sony revised the CD control circuitry in later revisions?

Very thankful for any feedback from other SCPH-1000 or SCPH-1001 owners!

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Post by nocash » December 22nd, 2023, 1:16 pm

Do you really mean derailed like this https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=derail&i ... &ia=images ? The spindle motor isn't on rails. The sled is on rails, but it couldn't possibly derail - unless you are located in a war zone and have observed several direct bomb hits in past some weeks?

16shot
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PlayStation Model: SCPH-1000
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Post by 16shot » December 22nd, 2023, 6:27 pm

Thanks for your reply nocash! Not to worry there's no war around here :)

What happens is from time to time, upon switching 1x 2x speed, the spindle motor goes into an abnormal acceleration that lasts for perhaps about 3 seconds before slowing down and recovering, or when things have worsened, crashing the machine altogether.

Here's the video from Naitoraven that finally gave us a hint of what was wrong (starts at 51:30):

https://youtu.be/UH4OvuABZk8?si=PDucn_q2lakuhQjS

What can be seen in that video is exactly how my unit still behaved only a few weeks ago. It was no longer booting...

After following the process described by Naitoraven and oiling up the spindle motor, i got the old original AAM reader to work properly again for a little while before the issue re appeared slowly. Changing the entire optical block afterwards for an aftermarket BAM seemed to have fixed it definitely, and it does work, but still has done this on a couple of occasions, even though it does recover now and carries on reading like it did back in 1996...

It does look like it is related to the mechanical state of the spindle motor combined with tight timing requirements on the SCPH-1000 or is it..?

Does the thing really require an impossibly prefect, spotless spinde motor in order to read reliably?

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Post by nocash » December 23rd, 2023, 3:00 am

The drive controller has some test commands that can make the spindle motor spin very fast, and it could spin forwards and backwards. Such effects are well possible, and don't mean that you have a mechanical defect.

Normally, the drive controller is watching the incoming bitstream, and if it has reached the desired bitrate, then it keeps the spindle motor at that speed. I that goes wrong then it would most likely treat that as a read error, and stop the motor.

I could imagine that one of the cdrom controller chips has somehow crashed, causing it to request the unlimited maximum spindle speed. I guess that could happen if one of the digital power supply voltages is too low. What I would first look for is: Bulged capacitors on mainboard & power supply board, and broken solder points on the power supply board.

16shot
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PlayStation Model: SCPH-1000
Location: Sweden

Post by 16shot » December 23rd, 2023, 8:31 am

I see... Thank you for your input!

I had re capped the entire mainboard (PU-7 as it should be) last year following advice from someone with a similar issue, to no particular improvement, but at least we kind of know that part is fine.

CD control system looks ok with no bad connection on any of the chips.

The PSU is untouched, original capacitors look fine although i guess i could look into that as well... In fact it's the first thing i should have perhaps looked into.

It's strange really how taking care of the spindle motor made such a huge difference. I had sort of ruled out the mechanics since the unit started playing up after so little use at the time... it does work very nicely now, but having seen it do its acceleration a couple of times made me wonder wether it's going to go downhill again sometime soon :)

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