First I've heard of it. I don't remember seeing a lot of 800k drives with the upper head ripped off in those days. Sure, there was the odd one here and there, but I put that down to rough handling and disks with jammed up shutters.

Along similar lines, I recall Apple sending out a warning to their service agents about the dangers of putting the yellow "piece of cheese" plastic shipping "disks" in the 1.4MB floppy drives. The "piece of cheese" was strictly a 400k / 800k drive only thing and could damage 1.4MB drive mechanisms.