shrinking the GC disc drive

Post by **Triton** » Sun Mar 18, 2007 9:38 pm

i am thinking of starting a GCP and ive been looking at the disc drive and holy mother of god is it thick! the lense assembly is at least an inch tall (thickest think on the whole drive as a matter of fact) and i have been trying to think of ways to shrink at least the lense assembly but i dont know if its possble and i dont really wanna go hacking away at my only gamecube disc drive to find out

anyone got any ideas or wanna donate a disc drive?

Dark Lord · Post by **Dark Lord** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:14 am

i also noticed how large it was when i took apart my brothers GC
i could only make it so thin by moving as much to the sides of the disk drive and even then it is still really thick because of the disk drive.

maybe you could have the drive extend farther out of the portable to save space

khaag · Post by **khaag** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 8:25 am

I have one, but I don't want to give it away. Maybe for a fair price...

PM me.

Post by **Triton** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:54 pm

well looking at this last night i was struck with TWO ideas!

firstly the track motor (that moves the lense assembly) is identical to a PSX spindle motor, same shaft same mounting holes and everythng, very odd. my thought was using the motor from the psx disc drive (not the spindle motor the other one for the lense track) it would save something like a quarter to a half an inch with good placement but it depends on if it matches up speed wise to the gc one, probably wont work

secondly i can save at least a quarter inch depth by changing the spindle from the tall gamecube type one with the popper thing to a psx style one with some modification, the cube one is really tall

unfortunatly i havent thought of any way to make the lense assembly shorter, i am hoping that part of the lower half could be cut off or something but more likely than not it would break it

TheOnlyOneHeFears · Post by **TheOnlyOneHeFears** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:36 pm

The GC disk drive is huge and very annyoing for portabalisers. Good luck trying to fix that! By the way, have you seen the schematics/speculation threads about replacing the disk drive with a hard drive? I think it was on crazynations.

Jongamer · Post by **Jongamer** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:44 pm

TheOnlyOneHeFears wrote:The GC disk drive is huge and very annyoing for portabalisers. Good luck trying to fix that! By the way, have you seen the schematics/speculation threads about replacing the disk drive with a hard drive? I think it was on crazynations.

Yes it was but for some reason Every link that I find to it says cant find page, so I think they removed it, which totaly sucks balls.

TheOnlyOneHeFears · Post by **TheOnlyOneHeFears** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 2:16 pm

I found the schematic for it, but it looks hideously complicated...my guess is that someone got hold of one of the Dolphin dev kits, which has hard disk carts instead of a disk drive, and managed to reverse engineer it to produce the schematic...I don't know if anyone managed to make a prototype, or even attempted making one...Still, I'd love to be able to do it...imagine, booting 20 or 30 games off one huge hard drive

Post by **Triton** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:00 pm

that would be NICE lol. but not counting the damn lens assembly i can probably get the whole drive to under 3/4" which is an improvement, with a bit of work i could probably get it to about half an inch unfortunatly i havent the slightest idea what to do about the lense assembly, it may be possible to cut it down some but more likely than not it would destroy it, which is no good obviously, ill keep brainstorming lol

ShockSlayer · Post by **ShockSlayer** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:07 pm

I cut mine way down, but you have to extend the ribbon cables if you really want to flatten it

SS

Post by **Triton** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 3:44 pm

are you talking the disc drive? if so ELABORATE! what and where did you cut it down, PICS DAMNIT!

ShockSlayer · Post by **ShockSlayer** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 6:13 pm

Triton wrote:are you talking the disc drive? if so ELABORATE! what and where did you cut it down, PICS DAMNIT!

No, my drinking habits.

http://benheck.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=17095&start=0

The 3rd pic shows the mobo and such, Very small.

The plastic can be cut up a lot, for the only thing holding you back from there are the ribbon cables. You should see how much with general judgement.

SS

Post by **Triton** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 6:17 pm

more pics of the actual lense assembly if you would please, did you cut that down any because thats the major factor right there

Bass Creator · Post by **Bass Creator** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:03 pm

if i ever make a gcp id just make it externel so you hook it on the back

Turbo Tax 1.0 · Post by **Turbo Tax 1.0** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:23 pm

why? its not the the xbox where it can be replaced with the harddrive.

that would only make for a bigger case also

Bass Creator · Post by **Bass Creator** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 8:30 pm

it would make the cube very small because the main board is small and a little slot on the back for the disk drive