Sony PS1 optical drive laser repairs

This was a great two-parter. The good news about 'junk' 9000 and slim units with dead drives is that rama's upcoming mStation ODE will work on them.

This is great. I’ve always considered laser issues “too hard basket” but you’ve given me inspiration to tackle my ever growing collection of dud laser PS1s.

Excellent video. The 'Tubes is oversaturated with people blindly POT tweaking their lasers. I'm actually relieved to not see this here. The worst part about these is the ribbon not being interchangeable. I wish they'd have made this portion more serviceable. Great job on this.

Nice work mate. The PS1 was a real upgrade from my humble old A500 back in the day, played that thing to death.

Thanks! I pretty much followed your lubrication guide and now my PSX reads audio CDs. Prior to that the corroded sled motor was not even rotating and the spindle motor crackled quite a bit. The old lube on plastic gears was out or completely dry. Used transparent silicone lube for it and sewing machine oil for the motors.

My goodness the memories you have brought back this morning are intense as it has been probably close to 20 years since i worked on one and like i say i may have opened a good double figures a day back then for mainly modding.Maybe i should see what i still have and have a play.Thanks again.

4:38 THANK YOU. I was clicking on this expecting yet another dumb "laser adjustment" BS video to throw in the dislike bin, but from that section alone it shows you (at least superficially, haven't watched many of your videos yet) seem to know what you're talking about :D Also the entire drive mechanism for any PS1 (including the slim PSone) are generally compatible with each other, the only issue is cable length on one of the middle-of-the-era models (7002 i think? where it's absurdly long), but flex cable extensions exist for those. Last time I looked, a whole drive assembly is somewhere around 10-12eur from CN. Keywords to search for on ali or elsewhere are KSM-440ACM/ADM/AEM/BAM (with yours being a 440AEM as visible at 5:15 ). And yes, the slim PSone drive (440BAM) can be used in older models if you switch out the gray plastic cover with a black one, as it's the only part that's physically different. It's common to replace the original bad drives of the SCPH-1002 (100x, the first one with direct RCA jacks on the back) with a slim PSone 440BAM drive, as it's pretty much a drop-in replacement other than the grey cover, and the original SCPH-100x drives are pretty much all worn beyond repair (metal laser on plastic slide surface right next to the power supply that makes the plastic softer via heat. great design there sony... NOT. It's also the reason why on later models the drive points the other way, away from the PSU heat). Little "secret" to test if the guide rail is worn before you even open the console: put a disc in, flip the console upside down so it rests on the drive door and turn it on. if it reads the disc fine that way but not the right way around, the rail is worn and it's essentially scrap. And wow this ended up as quite a wall of text 😅 sorr

Thanks a lot! This video really helped me out to fully fix the reading issues of my PS1! (And it's also very relaxing to watch, like all the other of your videos).

I remember going from my Sega Mega Drive to the PS1 and I still have it in the original box on a shelf, think I need to give it a run after watching this series. Great Video Mate.

Those PS1 lasers can be so fickle, and I had a similar case like yours where I cleaned, and re-lubricated everything, and eventually when I got a third party laser, some lubrication was all it needed, and it's going two years rather strongly. I didn't expect it to even last several months, but a little pre-maintenence on that one went a long, long way, and still works like new!

Thank you for the work and efforts, we learned a good tips from the video

Really enjoy your videos and troubleshooting

Good job , very well done . I’m going to be checking mine out. It sat for years and now it don’t work, it was working good. It was connected to power but I rarely used it. It does have a mod chip so I’m going to check that as well

Thoroughly enjoyed the video, i'm certain this will help me somewhat in the future and no doubt plenty of others too! Subscribed 👍

Thank you so much for your very helpful video. I was struggling fixing a PSX bought Used which disliked a lot of games.. and now it reads all of them. Still have to sort a bit of skipping on some of them.. but cleaning and lubing everything and cleaning lens and mirror(prism) did the trick! I also boosted a little bit the laser pot and become even better. I am so happy!

Just discovered your channel. Your perspective and methods were refreshing; I can actually say I learned a thing or two. The design of that laser relying on plastic in such a manner is disappointing. I currently do identical work on OG Xbox's - especially the DVD drives, which information was relatively scarce. About 6 out of 13 OG systems I resurrected/restored required pot adjustments to get the DVD drive mostly reliable, which bothered me to no end, as none were relegated to parts and no compromises otherwise had been made. I refused to believe the oft-repeated "yep bad laser" statements, which just lacked substance. Started learning a lot about capacitors, purchased an in-circuit ESR meter and started testing. Every single DVD drive I tested, I found significantly out of spec caps. All 4 manufactures. Thomson, Samsung, Philips, Hitachi. All 5 models I had on hand, SDG-605B, SDG-605F, GDR-8050L, VAD6035, TGM600. No DVD was safe nor tested well - Not even the fabled "best drives". I'd recommend ESR testing/recapping the mainboard - wherever the capacitors involved with the disc drive dwell. They're likely starting to identify as resistors. You can also temporarily drop their ESR by applying heat. Since these pots are analog and fixed to the value they're set at, they do not compensate for increased ESR and the drive just stops functioning as it's no longer being adequately driven. If you do recap, i'd recommend tweaking the pot to ensure you're not feeding the laser too much. Wouldn't by a bad idea to check the output of the PSU as well, make sure it's within 5% tolerance. Heart of the system. At the moment I adjust pots the hard way... Start with "high" resistance (relative) and work my way down. I gauge their performance by... Their ability to read discs, play seamless video content off a DVD, and the speed it takes to fully rip an entire game to the HDD - all while listening to the drive closely for audible struggling, error correction kicking in. I convinced Console5 to start carrying kits as well. Last time I checked, they still needed work, but progress none the less. If you'd like to know more, I've got numerous reddit threads such as "Update #7 - DVD Recapping Capacitor Lists Complete". If you happen to upgrade your oscilloscope, i'd love to see a video regarding how to use it to calibrate the potentiometer. It's one tool i've been putting off, unlike my recent voltage injection/thermal camera additions which have taught me even more.

16:21 Watching that little laser look up and struggle against the plastic is like something out of a Tool music video.

Today Sir. u have gained a subscriber!. I'm in kind of a same path trying to revive my old ps1 and I've encountered a similar point with mine. at first it worked perfectly but the next day the spindle made a grinding noise. and since then it wont boot games at all. now Im trying to get white grease or some sort of lubricant friendly enough to not fuck it up even more but Im faily certain that is the spindle doing the problem instead of the lens. either way u explained as simple and straight forward as possible and Im pretty grateful for your job, cause so far it's been really hard to get accurate data or practical data on the matter. Im too broke to support u on patreon but who knows, maybe tomorrow I would. Regards

A great video, with a successful outcome. Well done.

Just subbed I find this relaxing and interesting to watch and learn