Hey everyone, new to posting on the forums, though I've been a reader for a while. I'll try and get my posting off to a helpful start. I'll try and get pic's ASAP.

I've seen a few suggestions on making head spacers for preventing the trauma of head-head contact while the head assembly is removed. These makeshift tools range from pieces of folded plastic or foil, to small bit of soft heat shrink tubing. Of course there are purpose built custom moulded tools or platter "combs".

Well I'm one for fabrication so I had been mulling this over while practising swapping heads. I was working on a few old IBM DeskStar drives, trying a few of these "homebrew" tools as I went. These DeskStars have a nice little set of parking ramps for the heads and I was admiring their perfect design for moving the heads off the platter safely. These are very similar to the purpose built platter combs as they have small ramplike projections on the front to ellipse the top and bottom of the ramp which the heads can slide on, off the platter and onto the spacer. The DeskStar drives I was practising on have three of them on each ramp unit.

So I stuck upon my idea for just using these as my IDEAL HEAD SPACER WIDGET! (add spacey echo for best effect)

I took a ramp set from one of the more scrappy drives and one of my favourite tools, the straight razor. After a little work I had cut out three of these, but I still needed to get the fit a little closer on their ramp projections. I pinched these in a smidgen and after a lot of practice head swaps I've found these are working very smoothly and predictably. I wanted to post this as I have not seen a similar use of these parking ramps as tools.

Well I'm I hope this will help someone out there. I'm sure it will make more since to anyone wondering what I'm talking about when I get these pictures. If your not sure on the poll, wait for the pic's.

Here are some pictures. Which might illuminate this a little more.

Sorry I could not show this durring an operation. I had to stage the pictures where I'm unable to open drives.

One of the forum's members posted pics some time ago (last year?) of a makeshift tool in which he utilized the ramp to remove the heads, however, his approach was ....... well, let's just say that he made a piece to attach to the headstack and ramp both. Essentially keeping the two together as one.

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Yeah, I think I can picture what your talking about. This would also keep the heads alligned just as they are in the drive, parked normally.

This brings up another point about the tools I made. Do you think they spread the heads too far apart? If they heads don't flex some, there will not be enough tension to hold the spacer in place while the head is being moved. I have seen other post where very well known experts were user spacers like these and the heads were spread apart a bit, maybe not as much as mine.