Hi, I just joined this forum and I thought I'd introduce myself quickly.
It's 2014 and this is the first time I've ever seen a Turbografx in real life, though I do remember seeing on once at some home store once back in the 90s up on a shelf. So I'm not very familiar with the Turbografx, but I'm learning about it now and I'm really interested in all the games I missed out on. I was initially confused by all the attachments/cards/CDs, but after some initial research I settled on a Turbografx 16 and the CD attachment, which I waited to get until I found them both for a reasonable price. After more reading it would seem that a Turbo Duo or PC-engine might have been the better choices, but I'm happy with what I got. It's in really good condition, works well, got it RGB modded for my PVM monitors, and it only had one small problem (hopefully small) with the CD Drive, which is what brought me to the repair forum here.
The CD drive would get stuck if not used for a period of time and it wouldn't spin, which obviously means games will not load. At first it seemed to be the "swelling" middle gear issue I saw mentioned around online, but after seeing some more information it would seem it might really be the 20+ year-old hardened grease that was causing it to stick. That would make sense since the middle gear spins fine if I open up the case and spin it with my finger until it gets unstuck. If the gear was swollen I would imagine it wouldn't be able to spin at all.
I attempted to do some cleaning that didn't involve me taking the whole drive apart. I cleaned the worm gear as best I could and lightly reapplied some new grease. This new grease did seem to help a lot in terms of the drives ability to load information/audio tracks faster and it would take longer for it to get stuck again. It didn't completely stop the sticking though as I tried to use the CD drive after waking up the next morning and it was stuck again. After applying some more grease though, and waiting another night, it appears to be working fine without any sticking, so far.
So, I wanted to ask if this was something I should get fixed soon with a gear replacement or is it fine to just wait until it might break and then replace it?
I wasn't sure if waiting for it to break could result in more damage.
Topic: Quick intro and question about the middle gear (Read 350 times)
