La Porta's Finds

[LaPorta]

I suppose since it is in vogue now to make a find's thread, I'll start with one of my actually new-to-me machines (meaning I have not had one before). I just picked up a Classic II today from the same print house that Tobar got his pair of SEs from (he beat me to them!). I fired it up to a screen of garbled junk with no startup sound: I will assume the leaking caps have caused their usual damage. Thankfully, the battery had not blown. I asked the lady when I looked it over to see if I could look inside: she was somewhat flabbergasted, but allowed me to pull out my long torx and looked inside. After seeing that the battery hadn't blown, I pulled out the $50 and took it back. It also included a power cable, ADB mouse, and the usual ADB keyboard that came with these. Except for a small ring on the front chin, the machine is actually in very good shape cosmetically, and will clean up nicely. It is one of the later Classic IIs that has the speaker holes pre-drilled in the side of the case.

 

[CC_333]

Nice find!

You probably want to look at recapping the analog board and checking the opto isolator, as they seem to be made out of cheap junk on these models (relative to the SE, anyway; those seem to last almost forever!)

If you leave it on and let it warm up, will it begin to wake up and boot? If so, the A/B definitely needs work.

And the LB, of course.  It looks lightly corroded, but nothing a good scrub won't fix.

c

 

[LaPorta]

The screen fires up crisp and bright. The AB seems to work very well, in fact. I think the LB capping is what is really needed thus far. I must have pretty good luck so far as far as analog boards: usually they work fine even before I recap them.

 

[Juror22]

The screen fires up crisp and bright. The AB seems to work very well, in fact. I think the LB capping is what is really needed thus far. I must have pretty good luck so far as far as analog boards: usually they work fine even before I recap them.

I agree that a LB recapping is needed, and with just a few exceptions (like about 5% of the compact Macs I've had), I have had the same experience with AB's.

 

[Scott Baret]

Good call on always taking the Torx with you when you buy a Mac.

I admittedly did the same with the SE/30 I bought today. I opened it up on the padded seat of my car so I could check for a leaked battery before I bought it. This isn't the first time I've done it, either...once brought the tools into a coffee shop and opened a Classic II in front of a crowd of people...

 

[LaPorta]

Bought a copy of Macintosh Family Hardware Guide off eBay today. I figured it will make it much easier to figure out some of these circuits, rather than hunting down various scans of things online.

 

[krishnadraws]

Nice score! I'll have to remember to bring my Torx screwdriver when I’m trawling our neighborhood garage sale this weekend. There may be some hidden Mac gems waiting to be purchased and I want to make sure that I'm not buying something with a corroded battery. 

 

[LaPorta]

...or at least know that up front so you can get it for $10.

 

[LaPorta]

On Craigslist last week, I found a local ad for Apple manuals and advertising documents for $20. I couldn't pass that up no matter what it was. The gems of the collection were the advertising sheets. Look below:



This stuff is amazing, the lady I got it from said it was her father's who passed away a few years ago. The guy must have been a sales rep, or someone a rep was dealing with. The thing that caught my eye in her photos was the poster at bottom left, which I think I'll frame. The amazing thing about all of these things is they are absolutely perfect and flawless: except for the two newspaper-type folded ads which were folded in half, none of these has so much as a crease or smudge on them. Here is the reverse side of the poster:



Here are the binder insert fold-outs with machine-specific information:



Next, the magazine-type things are in good shape, too (one, sadly, had its outer pages split on the spine). They are pretty massive: 22x17". They each have about ten pages of ads, not all which I will show here:



The sheer size and quality of these prints is amazing to me. Anyone else have these? I haven't seen them around myself. 

 

[Byrd]

Great haul of documentation - what's the one with "The Performance Test"; does it benchmark Macs against each other or PCs of the era?  They could all do with a HQ scan ....

I've got the Details, Details, Details flyer but in a smaller format which tucked under a special mouse mat - presumably in an Apple store.  Apple stores (and their resellers) were so much different in the 90's.  Very bland and professional, business looking beige shopfronts.  I recall a lot of the A4 flyers you have there were available for customers to take home.

JB

 

[LaPorta]

The A4s I am attempting to flatten out with some heavy books as we speak. Once they are flat, I may be able to scan them...however, my scanner doesn't have a bed large enough to accommodate something that large!

 

[LaPorta]

 

[joshc]

@LaPorta Can you please scan those brochures in as high a res as possible and upload somewhere? Especially the sheet with the SE/30 on it...I would really appreciate it.

 

[LaPorta]

I'm currently flattening them out. I wish I had a larger scanner for this! I will try to get them as best as I can.

 

[LaPorta]

@joshc @Byrd I will be attempting scans of those documents any day now. I was able to flatten them enough to open them quite a bit. Do you know if anyone has these same scans anywhere?

 

[LaPorta]

Thanks to @ttb, I now have a Macintosh IIsi. Not really a conquest, this one was donated for shipping, and I am very happy to have it. This machine, along with my II and IIfx, covers a "black hole" in my Mac experience growing up. See, my dad got a Mac Plus back in '88, and he had that for quite a long time until getting his new job, and then buying a Quadra 605 and then 660av in quick succession. There is a huge span and tons of models between those that I was never exposed to, so these machines are kind of like a lost branch of the family that I never knew.

It appears to be in very nice shape, in need of a recap, but at least not battery-damaged at all. I look forward to restoring it in a thread.

P.S. - it has the usual slight yellow tan on it, but only on the front. When people retrobrite, do you usually achieve a totally normal overall hue, or is the darker area usually a bit darker no matter how much you whiten it?

 

[desertrout]

Not sure what others' experience is, but the way I've been retrobrighting seems to normalize the color... I do full submersion in a high water-to-peroxide ratio solution... about 60L of water with maybe 250mL of 40 volume peroxide developer. I don't measure, so sometimes the concentration is higher or lower. It takes a while depending on how much sun there is, the container I'm using, and the amount of yellowing of course -- from a couple days to a week, but I'm intentionally keeping it mild and slow. I've never had issues with labels or logos, and of course no streaking or such bleaching artifacts. I also reuse the solution... the current batch has done an SE/30, a Keyboard II, two mice, a StyleWriter II, and a IIci -- all of which were quite yellowed and inconsistent, and now are lovely and consistent.

 

[LaPorta]

That’s encouraging to know. I’m going to be trying just oxyclean and water.

 

[joshc]

Nice looking IIsi. Try retrobright on something you don't care about first, I did it on a perfect Classic II case and ended up with streaking even with the submersion method in water so I'm now wishing I hadn't tried... Good luck!