keith$20 on ebay got me one of these
Brian Instruments Brikon 723 Floppy Drive Analyzer
Ever since I’ve seen this device mentioned in the datasheet of many different floppy drives, I knew I wanted to get ahold of one. There are some disreputable companies selling refurbished versions of this unit for $800 or $900.
Mine does need cleaned up, but it appears to work ok.
(CLICK FOR FULL SIZE)
This thing is a monster. It’s about 25 pounds. And has a heavy duty oscilloscope-like handle on the front, as you can see. I have to take it apart and clean it up.
But I really need a manual for this thing. I’ve figured out some stuff, but could really use a manual.
A Bob from the Classic Computer mailing list provided me with several Brian Instruments manuals.
I’ve taken those PDFs, OCR’d them taking care to correct any mistakes, and then recreated one large single PDF file for the five different manuals. The original PDF’s were about 105MB, the new recombined PDF is about 13mb. The quality should be pretty good, including the fact that I actually fixed typos in the original, and that the text itself is newly rendered (instead of being just scanned old text). Since they’ve been OCR’d, they can now able to be searched.
The five manuals that are combined are:
BRIKON 723-4M
FDD TESTER/ANALYZER
OPERATION AND USE
BRIKON 723-4M/QT
WITH INTELLIGENT SERIES/CATEYE ALIGNMENT SUPPORT
CONFIGURATION WORKSHEET AND PROGRAMMING INSTRUCTIONS
OPTION R
A N A L O G / A L I G N M E N T A T T A C H M E N T
( S I N G L E / D U A L C H A N N E L)
W I T H I N T E L L I G E N T S E R I E S / C A T E Y E A L I G N M E N T S U P P O R T
O P E R A T I O N A N D U S E
UNIDAPT 450L
OPERATION AND USE
SINGLE/DUAL CHANNEL ANALOG ATTACHMENT
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
Hopefully these Brian Instruments Brikon 723 manuals will be of use to someone.
https://techtravels.org/tech/BrianInstrumentsManuals.pdf
I am just learning how to use an oscilloscope and thought that aligning a floppy disk drive would be a good practice project. Is there a place where I can get a step by step procedure? Will I need any other tools? I thought a fresh, never used MS-DOS 5.0 disk could be used in place of an AAD. I dug up an old Corvus service manual from my school library but that is an 8″ drive with a 250 microsecond pulse so I don’t know if the spec or procedure will match. Can you provide any advice?
I’m really unfamiliar with the process — I’ve never aligned a disk drive.
Sorry I couldn’t help more!
Thanks for the manuals much needed!
I have Brain Brikon Model 723 for sale in the UK if anyones interested?
Powers up but I don’t know how to test these things
Jon 07925 168936
I have a 723 in like new condition if anyone is interested.
varmit86@yahoo.com
I really enjoyed repairing floppy drives in the 80ties. Made a living from it. The floppyAAD is a analog recorded disk that displays cats eyes (2 circles) and the object was to make them even. It had a 2nd signal for azimuth 2 square on outside and 2 rectangle in middle for the angles. The probes would go to index for the timing and 2 for the head outputs. I bad head would ruin your $50. The small thermal printer was not needed for the alignment but manufacturers wanted the printout.