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Do you have any pictures of this monstrosity?  I'm curious how on earth somebody put a paper clip where the FBT belongs...

I attempted to test an LC last night since it appeared fairly clean and I didn't see cap goo on the logic board.  I powered it on, floppy drive made some noise, but there was no startup chime. Powered down, tried reseating the speaker/fan assembly (this is an early LC with the fan and speaker in...

A reformat won't, but physically removing the drive and giving it to them to destroy as they see fit would ensure that I didn't get their data.  This is an option I'd happily offer in most cases of old hardware I want to buy.  Probably the only time I really really want hard drives is if they're...

How I usually handle this is:  If the data appears to belong to the person I got the machine from, I'll ask them "Hey, you left old files on this machine, do you want copies of them?" but if the stuff belongs to somebody else I'll just wipe the drive.  I'll admit I've found some pretty strange...

On the trackball, I'd guess that the end of the shaft the wheel and blue roller are mounted on is supposed to go into something on the black plastic frame to keep it from moving on that side.  The side with the blue roller on it is free to move back and forth, but there's a spring to push it...

I don't recommend using a magic eraser for cleaning retro computers.  Contrary to popular belief, they are in fact abrasive, and if you use one enough to remove yellowing it will remove the texture from the molded plastic.  For now, just cleaning the case with a good all-purpose cleaner that...

If you've cleaned the floppy drive and the carriage moves freely now when you manually insert/remove a floppy, the problem is probably in the eject motor.  One of the gears in these likes to strip out on occasion, if you remove the eject motor assembly and take off the metal plate on the bottom...

A fan that works fine on a good 12V supply over-revving on a questionable PSU sure sounds like an overvoltage issue to me.  I wouldn't use that PSU with an actual logic board until you figure out what's wrong with it, if the overvoltage is high enough to make a fan run substantially faster, it...

If the disk isn't going all the way down, the top head won't necessarily touch the disk.  If the head actually got bent up somehow, he probably has a nice paperweight though - I'm not sure how to align heads on one of these drives, and if the alignment between top and bottom is off as opposed to...

Yeah, that 'middle' switch that's shorter should touch the bottom of the metal carriage the disk goes into.  To me it sounds like the disk carriage isn't going down all the way, probably time to clean and grease the drive.  If you look on the side of the drive you should see two little metal...

Half the keyboard going dead sounds suspiciously like a failure mode I've seen on the cheap rubberdome "Apple Keyboard II" that shipped with LCs.  An original ADB "Apple Keyboard" or "Apple Extended Keyboard II" would be the most appropriate for an SE, they are mechanical switch boards with the...

How did you connect the drive outside the case?  The FDD cable on an SE/30 is pretty short.  It doesn't seem that likely to me that just trying to eject a floppy and failing would kill the drive altogether.  I could maybe see it damaging the eject motor, but in that case the drive should load a...

Best way I've found for writing old 400K and 800K Mac and Lisa disks is with a 90s Mac.  I keep a Wallstreet PowerBook around for that purpose.  IIRC OS 9 will even still ask you whether you want to format single or double sided when you insert a double density floppy.

I think the guy got tired of accusations that he didn't really have a Lisa.  I doubt we'll see any with the back off though, my guess is that there are no cards in the cage or they've all been wrecked by leaky NiCads.  Note that all three of the expansion card slotcovers appear to be missing, so...

According to http://www.applefritter.com/content/apple-lisa-serial-number-info "83125" in the serial number does mean 125th day of 1983.  I believe the source for that document was actually Apple's tech info on how to order new video state PROMs.  At some point they stopped including the decade...

Actually I'm pretty sure those Varta batteries were made in West Germany.  East Germany was the one that ceased to exist, and I doubt that Apple would have been importing batteries from there anyhow, U.S. based companies giving money to Soviet Bloc countries tended to be frowned upon by the...

Ah.  According to https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/16733-macintosh-portable-recappingrepair-progress-questions/ what's actually in there is two 1N5817 Schottky diodes.

So there's nothing of interest inside the piece of black heatshrink tubing visible on the red wire running from the 9V clip to the switch here?  Sorry I don't have a better photo, that was the only one I could find, and it's possible that it's been repaired and the heatshrink is just covering a...

Thanks a lot for your responses.  And I definitely wouldn't ask somebody to cut up a working portable, worst case scenario I'll just try to buy a replacement harness from someone.  A polyfuse makes a lot of sense, as would a diode, although 0.02V seems like an awfully low voltage drop for one.

Ah.  I actually have a good battery, and just replaced all the caps in my Portable tonight. I'm just trying to figure out what that extra part between the + terminal of the 9V clip and the switch is before wiring in a new 9V clip.  Somebody would have to cut open the heatshrink wrap to know for...