Swapping motherboards from Se/30 to plus case

[mogmog]

I've been keeping an eye out a Compact Mac for a while, and have a particular fondness for the case of the Mac Plus. However the specs of the Plus are a little under powered for what I want - I need a 030 processor to give installing NetBSd a fighting chance. I guess I also might need a floppy drive that can read disks I prepare on a modern usb drive, and ethernet is required too.

I basically need a SE/30. But I am not a fan of the grills on the front - does anyone know if it is possible to transplant the Mac SE/30 innards into a Mac Plus case? Or maybe just swap the fronts?

[Apostrophe]

Someone with an SE/30 will have to verify what I say here, but as the owner of many different kinds of Compacts, including a Plus, I can basically say for certain that the only differences between any of them are slight cosmetic differences on the casing and the capabilities of the various components.

So you should have no problem with your transplant. Just keep in mind that the Plus was not meant to support an internal hard drive, so if you want that SE/30's hard drive in there in addition to the floppy drive, you'll have to get a bit creative. I believe there's a special bracket that a third party company sells to aid in this.

-Apostrophe

[phreakout]

To answer that question: No. The front bezels are different in where the screw holes are located. The chassis are different for the previous reason and are made to support PDS cards; the Plus doesn't support PDS. The internal hard drive was not an option for the Plus, so you'd have to case mod one in. Finally, the SE/30 logic boards won't fit in a Plus chassis, since the SE/30 chassis was built to support the taller height, due to the RAM and ROM SIMMs. Also, the back case cover and the chassis of the Plus would have to be modded to line up with the rear ports of the SE/30.

In short, a lot of work to merge the two worlds together. It's much easier to just take an SE/30, spackle the front bezel's grooves and repaint to match.

73s de Phreakout.

[Dennis Nedry]

The Mac Classic II has similar specs and just one groove all the way across. It also has an internal hard drive and a high-density floppy drive.

[LCGuy]

Apart from the fact that it has no PDS slot, therefore the only way to get ethernet on one is via a SCSI -> Ethernet box.

[mcdermd]

And it's RAM-crippled with a 10MB ceiling compared to the SE/30's 128MB.

[mogmog]

The front bezels are different in where the screw holes are located.

Is this the only difference with the front bit of the cases? Cause if so I would have thought that if everything else 'lined up' then modding new screw holes might not be that hard. Of course for it to look neat then the rear case fitting of the SE/30 would have to be exactly flush with the plus front and not just vaguely similar.

[Mac128]

The Plus bezel will not fit flush on the SE/30 case, mainly at the bottom indented base "pedestal" where the Plus angles backward and the SE is straight in line with the "pleated" skirt. This prevents the upper case from fitting flush.

I have never tried to secure the SE chassis to the Plus Bezel, but the parts otherwise fit entirely inside the Plus. The ports are a problem however. The entire port panel would have to cut out. But as far as I recall, I believe the SE/30 logic board will slide into the Plus chassis no problem.