Sony PlayStation 1 SCPH-1002 Laser Replacement
The early PlayStation 1 consoles appear to still have quite a following, probably down to those audio people raving about how brilliant the sound quality is on them. I recently picked up an SCPH-1002 in with a bunch of machines, and it does have a certain ugly charm to it! Anyway, the laser was prone to start playing up in this, and the SCPH-1000 and SCPH-1001 models. There’s plenty of good quides on the web on how to restore the laser unit such as one by Mick Feuerbacher, and more from Michaeljohn Mercury.
I however went with the easy option, and swapping out the laser with one from the redesigned PSone console. It’s quite nice that the last model PS1 has a suitable laser unit to donate to the first model PS1. Not everyone agrees with sacrificing a donor console, but I guess if you’ve got a PSone that has a different fault or whatever, then in the grand scheme of things, what the heck, it’s a nice easy way of getting the KSM-440BAM Laser Unit needed.
You can see that the spindle is also bust on my old PlayStation, I seem to remember that was quite common with this model as well. Anyway, it’s connected by two cables, easy to just pull them from their connectors.
Undo those two screws and unclip and remove the black cover.
Herre’s the donor unit, exactly the same process to remove it
And whilst you’ve got the grey cover off, you could check to see if anything needs greasing up again.
Just in case you get your lasers mixed up, that there is the newer one, the KSM-440BAM!
Fitting is just the reverse, pop the black cover onto the newer laser unit, fit the unit back into the console and re-attach the two cables. Too easy really.
