Turbo CD / PCE CDROM2 Broken Gear / Warmup Issue - Solutions in Development!

[Mathius]

Leave it to chop to blow my mind! When/If my Turbo CD bites it I may consider this.

[Keith Courage]

How much for the gear? I am always trying to find cheaper and easier options.

[SignOfZeta]

So this is brass?  I really have to wonder how long that one nylon geer will be able to deal with that. I would certainly keep it well lubricated.

[chop5]

chris the gears are 1.99 each at hobby stores and easily available,only problem is they do need to be worked on first. any fix i do must meet criteria where its cheap as possible,from easy to obtain materials,and easy enough a small chipmunk can do it. I will pm you later with deets and post them on here when i make my for sale thread.

zeta they are curved and polished at the teeth to prevent any friction whatsoever or biting into the plastic. The main reason i used soft copper gears because they are easier to work with than with plastic. heres a pic of plastic proto:




cons of using plastic gears are they are not found easily in the teeth,dimension and pitch of the hole. i had to make those 2 gears there. Ideally if 2 gears made this way professionally would be nice but i dont have the money to make any. but if they are plastic the third gear may shatter all over again after time. Alot of pressure is put on that tiny middle gear.
pros of using soft copper is i can drill each hole myself and all it needs is good lubricant and will last for years on end if not forever. the copper is a little more stronger than a hard plastic gear anyway. Ive ruined many a copper gear with just the brute force of my hands getting them to fit 
these are remote control car gears so they have to be able to survive much punishment. Its not unheard of mixing plastic with metal gears with the cars and other remote control devices. Thats what this basically is like a remote control car but it plays pce!
more info soon 

update:
gears on sale in the sale thread  https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=11677.0

[RR1980]

wow the phat gear looks like it would be very sturdy and ensure many many yrs of obeying to come! you are just amazing Chop!

[TR0N]

About time you announce this gear fix chop but congrats any ways 

With the fix you cooked up it does gives me a reason to hang onto the,TG16+Turbocd i have.

For awhile there i was debating if i was gonna keep turbo-cd or not due to the gear issue.

[Windy]

great stuff there! the stuff of legends!

[pngo]

looks really good. I am loooking forward to trying to bring my cdrom2 back to life with this fix.

[Official Ninja]

Thats fantastic Chop. Looks like a great fix. My brother and I cast a copy of the gear with resin. It didn't work. Although it looked like maybe we could improve it we lost interest in the project because of life circumstances. I'm glad to see a fix to this issue!

[BlueBMW]

Thats fantastic Chop. Looks like a great fix. My brother and I cast a copy of the gear with resin. It didn't work. Although it looked like maybe we could improve it we lost interest in the project because of life circumstances. I'm glad to see a fix to this issue!

Official Ninja, we appreciate you guys trying!

It seems like the only sure way to reproduce the original gears would be to have a true injection mold made for them.  Even a small MUD type mold (a small mold designed for rapid prototyping of parts) would still probably run around $4K to have built.  If I only I was still making injection molds for a living.. this would have been done by now!

[BlueBMW]

A little update info here:

Today I took two CDROM2s, one with a broken gear, the other with a surprisingly good original gear (still functional! wow!)  and installed a Keith Courage gear into one, and a Chop gear into the other.  The job took about 10 minutes for the keith courage gear and maybe 8 minutes for the Chop gear.  End result, both CDROMs work perfectly!   I noticed the first time I used the Chop gear that the system made a little more noise when seeking with the laser.  I wanted to compare the Keith gear to the Chop gear as far as noise.  So far as I can tell, both produce about the same noise level as each other.  While louder than original, both of these solutions work great!

Update on belt drive:

You'd think it'd be easy to find a good steady supply of pulleys for the belt drive... not so much hehe.  I have found several sets of pulleys that work, and I found some belts that were close in size, but not quite small enough.  I'll continue to work on the belt drive for anyone interested.  The only benefit of the belt drive over the other gear solutions is the noise level which is much much lower with the belt drive.  The downside with the belt drive is the install is tedious and time consuming.  You need to remove the whole laser sled worm gear and press the pulley onto it.  You need to file away some clearance for that pulley, and then you need to remove the center gear post and fit the second pulley to the motor drive spindle.  Then pop the belt on.  Lastly you need to modify the metal clip that puts tension on the laser sled worm gear.  You have to have not to much, but not too little tension.  Too little and the laser will be much more susceptible to interuptions / skips due to vibration.  Too much tension and the belt drive will not be able to turn the sled rod.

[csgx1]

Good info.  This is great, not too long ago we had no gear solutions and now we have two replacement gear solutions to choose from. 

Did you find a noticeable decrease in load time that 'Keith Courage' suggested to have with his single gear replacement?

[BlueBMW]

Good info.  This is great, not too long ago we had no gear solutions and now we have two replacement gear solutions to choose from. 

Did you find a noticeable decrease in load time that 'Keith Courage' suggested to have with his single gear replacement?

I dont regularly use a turbo CD for play, so I couldnt compare it very well.  But it seemed to load quick enough   I didnt notice a load wait time, so i guess that means it was pretty fast!

[dremcast]

well firts of all hello im edu from spain im video game collector since 1990 and i read this forum alot to find solution to some nec system i have and after some years i think i can bring back to life some cd rom units when i read this post and i try this mod on mine using my own pieces because here no body make a guide or something but i have some problems well the disc spin and i can use cd music and i can hear music in headphones and change tracks no problem but when i instlla cd games dosent work the disc spin but can not read data some timeas read some but just main screen of game or have wierd graphics so i think the solution i made is not enought acurate to read data for run games maeby to fast or to slow can some body helP. (any way i found a compani here in spain can make pastic geras i sent mine to make copys then they will sent me prices and if some body are interested i can sell to anybody same price than i pay to factory plus shiping rates) but firts i need to know prices and check if workin as soon as i got new info i will post here.

picture here:

/lafotoco.jpg

[chop5]

if the data is weak and wont read it can be 2 things. bad laser or you need to adjust the pots. if its the unit you have pictured there sometimes after a belt or gear change you need to adjust the pots. i don't really have a general way to change the pots just turn the first 3 pots on the left until you get results. also before you adjust them take note where they originally where and work from there turning ne at a time.

this is how i take note and find is the best combination:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v238/jetbue7/pots.jpg

[Snow Crash]

Are any of these methods available yet?

Also could orthodontic elastic be used for the belt? These come in about the right size in varying degrees of elasticity.

[BlueBMW]

Chop's gears and Keith Courage's gears are working solutions that are readily available.  Contact either chop5 or Keith Courage as I'm sure they'll sell you a replacement gear / gears.

I haven't spent much time on the belt stuff as there have been a lot other projects demanding time, but eventually I'll figure out a good source of parts.  With the two gear solutions out there already though, it might not be necessary.

[Sumez]

Just popping in for the latest developments in this issue/fix.
First let me say that I think it's beyond awesome that as late as 2011, there are people willing fix an issue with this age old hardware (we're talking the very first disc based console here ). I haven't been able to play my PC Engine CD-ROM games for several years, and I seriously miss them. I actually passed up on buying Nexzr for a decent price because I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to play it.

A friend helped me pinpoint the issue a couple of years ago, and there's really no doubt, once we found out that damned tiny rubber gear is missing a tooth. I'm amazed I was actually able to play a few seconds of CD audio despite this. At the time things were looking really grim, considering I probably wouldn't be able to find a replacement gear anywhere other than salvaging it from another CD-ROM2 unit, and buying a broken one of those, I bet there'd be a pretty big chance the problem was the same.
The same guy then discovered this forum thread, and it seriously made my day! Now we both want one of those replacement gears.

Reading through the thread, it seems the best fix is Keith or Chop's replacement gears? As far as I can tell, Keith's is able to speed up loading times, too? That does sound really sweet! I've sent you both a PM regarding it, hope you don't mind.
The belt solution looks very nice too, but I don't think I have the guts to modify my system that much.

[Keith Courage]

There is no best solution. There are pros and cons to both. It's more of personal preference really. Chop sent me a set of gears to try out and they work well. I just use the gears I found basically because I am more familiar with the process.