ian1035nr
Well-known member
After working on and off (mostly off) for 10 years, I’ve finally gotten a PowerBook 540c that was bought off eBay completely refurbished to my liking and ready to go.
The unit came to me in pretty decent shape, but definitely needed some help. Lots of corrosion in the battery bays from leaked cells, and of course the batteries it came with were completely dead.
Some busted trim pieces and broken screw posts in the screen.
Pretty much the normal stuff one would expect from an old Blackbird.
The last thing I needed to do was find a way to get the clutch cover below the screen to stay in place, while still being removable in case I ever need to remove the screen.
I was using double-sided tape. But the only stuff thick enough to bridge the gap between the screen and the cover was just thick enough that the clutch cover would always protrude outward.
My solution was to grab a pair of small rare earth magnets from the local hardware store. These work great at keeping the clutch cover firmly in place, while still allowing it to be lifted and removed.
The machine hums along nicely now with a 1GB hard drive (a standard IDE hard drive mounted on Apple’s IDE to SCSI bridge card), 20 megs of RAM and Mac OS 7.6.
I took some pictures of it running untethered, and a “family photo” of it running alongside the Powerbook 170 I bought used in 2007 and dragged with me through high school and college.
The unit came to me in pretty decent shape, but definitely needed some help. Lots of corrosion in the battery bays from leaked cells, and of course the batteries it came with were completely dead.
Some busted trim pieces and broken screw posts in the screen.
Pretty much the normal stuff one would expect from an old Blackbird.
The last thing I needed to do was find a way to get the clutch cover below the screen to stay in place, while still being removable in case I ever need to remove the screen.
I was using double-sided tape. But the only stuff thick enough to bridge the gap between the screen and the cover was just thick enough that the clutch cover would always protrude outward.
My solution was to grab a pair of small rare earth magnets from the local hardware store. These work great at keeping the clutch cover firmly in place, while still allowing it to be lifted and removed.
The machine hums along nicely now with a 1GB hard drive (a standard IDE hard drive mounted on Apple’s IDE to SCSI bridge card), 20 megs of RAM and Mac OS 7.6.
I took some pictures of it running untethered, and a “family photo” of it running alongside the Powerbook 170 I bought used in 2007 and dragged with me through high school and college.
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