Reusing drive bodies

[jvoigts]

Have you had success reusing the body, and only exchanging the tetrodes, or even reusing the entire thing with tetrodes?

[jvoigts]

I've never tried reusing the body, only the screws and eibs. I guess it's possible, but not worth it.

You would need to replace the spring, because it usually gets a bit too worn out and rusty after use, so at that point you'd have to drill off too much dental cement etc. just to get the spring off. The other issue is that im not sure if i would trust the cleanliness of the guide tubes after they've been used. I'd be worried that there's leftover csf or something in there. You cant even dunk the whole drive in ethanol to clean it because the epoxy and pastic would suffer.

The eib can be reused a few times with no issues though, same with screws (clean them with acetone or a lot of ethanot to make sure theres no plastic dust on them).

If you are anticipating using a bunch of drives, i'd recommend looking into making them 'assembly line style' : make 10 guide tube arrays in a row, then drill out 10 drive bodies and glue them all in in one session, then solder and put springs on them and keep these prepped drive bodies in a clean box for use later. You save a ton of epoxy curing time etc. and you might be able to prep ~10 like this in a day and i've found it significantly reduces the initial energy requirement for making a new drive.