Tutorial: Cleaning, lubricating and fixing an Apple 800k 3.5" floppy drive
Why Retrocomputing Stack Exchange recommends it
Retrocomputing Stack Exchange answerers point people to it for a complete walkthrough of cleaning, relubricating and repairing Apple 3.5-inch floppy drives, including the failure-prone eject gear.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What it is
A 37-minute repair tutorial from Adrian's Digital Basement on servicing a Sony/Apple MFD-51W-03 800k 3.5-inch floppy drive. It covers disassembling and cleaning a gummed-up drive, troubleshooting a faulty eject mechanism, and replacing a stripped eject gear with a 3D printed one.
What people said
Recommends Andrew Morton · 2021-09 · Retrocomputing Stack Exchange · on “How to repair IIgs 3.5 floppy drive?”
Here's the video I was thinking of: Tutorial: Cleaning, lubricating and fixing an Apple 800k 3.5" floppy drive [this video] : "...Then, the eject mechanism was not working correctly so I troubleshoot and fix that. Finally, the eject gear stripped so I replace that."
Recommends Eight-Bit Guru · 2024-05 · Retrocomputing Stack Exchange · on “I cleaned the grease off an old floppy drive’s motor; do I need to lubricate it?”
It sounds like you've cleaned-off the lubricant grease that is there to facilitate the movement of the rotor. It was almost certainly the original factory-applied material, and therefore likely to be fairly dirty after years (decades?) of use - hence it performing poorly. Removing it entirely was good, but only as a first step - you now have to apply some new clean lubricant (I'd suggest lithium grease if you can find some) so that the moving parts can in fact move. Here's a [this video] showing how to correctly service floppy drives like yours.
Recommends Greenonline · 2025-06 · Retrocomputing Stack Exchange · on “How to repair IIgs 3.5 floppy drive?”
For Apple's auto-eject mechanism, there are three small white gears (or cogs), one of which (I think the middle one) is prone to disintegrating, cracking and generally failing. It is possible to 3D print a new gear, or purchase a replacement set online. There was a video that I saw a year or so ago, that went through the complete repair/restore. This is the video, Tutorial: Cleaning, lubricating and fixing an Apple 800k 3.5" floppy drive [this video] and the relevant part about the eject mechanism starts at around 20:00 [this video] . In the image below, it is the "yellowed" gear that is usually the issue: [LINK]