bredfrown
Well-known member
Hello there, I’m new to the forums, but have been lurking for a while. 
I’ve recently been returning to my roots in vintage Mac collecting, and I picked up a Macintosh SE. This machine runs great besides a dying hard drive (I’m using a BlueSCSI) and flakey floppy drive, but I’ll talk more about this machine in a bit.
For now, I’d like to shift gears and talk about the machine it was intended to “replace” - my Macintosh SE/30.
In 2007, I was gifted an SE/30 that suffered from the infamous simasimac issue.
After sitting for about 20 minutes or so, it would boot normally. (I also want to say that it would also chime up after the simasimac cleared away, but it’s been so long that I can’t quite remember.)
I played around with the SE/30 intermittently for a few years, until its hard drive failed in early 2010. By this time, I had lost interest in vintage Macs for a while, so the SE/30 sat quietly on my bookshelf for over a decade.
Fast-forward to the past couple of months, I’ve been feeling nostalgic and have been wanting to get back into the hobby.
I dusted off the SE/30 and tried booting it up, and the simasimac was still happening of course, but this time it wouldn’t boot at all, no matter how long it left it on.
Until a couple of weeks ago, this machine had not been opened before, to my knowledge.
Back then, I was scared to death of opening it up and the whole discharging the CRT process.
But recently, after reading the horror stories of leaving the PRAM batteries inside these machines (and them exploding), I summoned enough courage to open it up, discharge the CRT, and take a look at the board. …and it wasn’t pretty.
Before I even removed the board, I saw that the battery’s electrolytes had ate away at the back of the I/O shielding, and the battery itself was detached from the board and was rattling inside the SE.
At this point, I didn’t even bother removing the board since I could see some heavy corrosion near the serial ports and towards the PDS slot. Feeling bummed out, I started browsing eBay for boards.
I didn’t find any logic boards for an SE/30, but I did find a clean and completely functional Macintosh SE!
This machine had 2.5 MB or RAM, its original keyboard and mouse, a carrying bag, and was in near perfect condition with minimal yellowing. The only issue was a small case crack near the CRT, which was super minor.
The price seemed decent too at $150, so I jumped on it.
I’ve had that machine for a few weeks now, picked up a BlueSCSI to replace its dying SCSI hard drive, and have been having a lot of fun using it to make some pixel art, but I couldn’t help but hunger for more.
So, over the past weekend, I took apart the broken SE/30 again to better inspect the board.
This time, I took the logic board completely out, gave it a good clean with some alcohol and a soft toothbrush, and cleaned the corrosion off the best that I could, along with the areas hit with capacitor leakage.
There’s a bunch of tarnish near the capacitors, but the board cleaned up pretty nice.
The ROM appeared fine after a good cleaning, and the slots for the ROM and RAM seemed to be just fine. It’s almost as if the battery slowly leaked towards the right side of the board. I think I’ll be out one ADB port at the least, as well as the PDS slot in the best case scenario, but there’s a lot more I’m probably not seeing.
The RTC chip has had a couple of its legs hit with heavy corrosion, and most of the traces near that battery seem to be in bad shape.
Anyway, after cleaning it out, blowing it with my handheld air blower, and letting it dry overnight and most of the day Monday, I put everything back together and tried booting the machine.
Needless to say, it didn’t work, which is what I sadly expected. The simasimac pattern was still there, and it seemed more or less the same.
So… I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring and ask this community to see if there’s anything I could do to save this beautiful machine?
I’m not too skilled with soldering stuff this small small, nor do I have the equipment or time, but if this board seems like it could be saved, I would be willing to pay a reasonable amount to get it working again, as well as try a few things out with the community’s suggestions.
Regardless, I thought about taking the RAM out of this SE/30 and putting it in my SE to max it out, and possibly swapping both logic boards around just to see what would happen. I need to open the SE anyway to clip its PRAM battery out.
Anyway, thank you all who read through this rambling, lol!
I’m sorry this post is so long!
I’ve recently been returning to my roots in vintage Mac collecting, and I picked up a Macintosh SE. This machine runs great besides a dying hard drive (I’m using a BlueSCSI) and flakey floppy drive, but I’ll talk more about this machine in a bit.
For now, I’d like to shift gears and talk about the machine it was intended to “replace” - my Macintosh SE/30.
In 2007, I was gifted an SE/30 that suffered from the infamous simasimac issue.
After sitting for about 20 minutes or so, it would boot normally. (I also want to say that it would also chime up after the simasimac cleared away, but it’s been so long that I can’t quite remember.)
I played around with the SE/30 intermittently for a few years, until its hard drive failed in early 2010. By this time, I had lost interest in vintage Macs for a while, so the SE/30 sat quietly on my bookshelf for over a decade.
Fast-forward to the past couple of months, I’ve been feeling nostalgic and have been wanting to get back into the hobby.
I dusted off the SE/30 and tried booting it up, and the simasimac was still happening of course, but this time it wouldn’t boot at all, no matter how long it left it on.
Until a couple of weeks ago, this machine had not been opened before, to my knowledge.
Back then, I was scared to death of opening it up and the whole discharging the CRT process.
But recently, after reading the horror stories of leaving the PRAM batteries inside these machines (and them exploding), I summoned enough courage to open it up, discharge the CRT, and take a look at the board. …and it wasn’t pretty.
Before I even removed the board, I saw that the battery’s electrolytes had ate away at the back of the I/O shielding, and the battery itself was detached from the board and was rattling inside the SE.
At this point, I didn’t even bother removing the board since I could see some heavy corrosion near the serial ports and towards the PDS slot. Feeling bummed out, I started browsing eBay for boards.
I didn’t find any logic boards for an SE/30, but I did find a clean and completely functional Macintosh SE!
This machine had 2.5 MB or RAM, its original keyboard and mouse, a carrying bag, and was in near perfect condition with minimal yellowing. The only issue was a small case crack near the CRT, which was super minor.
The price seemed decent too at $150, so I jumped on it.
I’ve had that machine for a few weeks now, picked up a BlueSCSI to replace its dying SCSI hard drive, and have been having a lot of fun using it to make some pixel art, but I couldn’t help but hunger for more.
So, over the past weekend, I took apart the broken SE/30 again to better inspect the board.
This time, I took the logic board completely out, gave it a good clean with some alcohol and a soft toothbrush, and cleaned the corrosion off the best that I could, along with the areas hit with capacitor leakage.
There’s a bunch of tarnish near the capacitors, but the board cleaned up pretty nice.
The ROM appeared fine after a good cleaning, and the slots for the ROM and RAM seemed to be just fine. It’s almost as if the battery slowly leaked towards the right side of the board. I think I’ll be out one ADB port at the least, as well as the PDS slot in the best case scenario, but there’s a lot more I’m probably not seeing.
The RTC chip has had a couple of its legs hit with heavy corrosion, and most of the traces near that battery seem to be in bad shape.
Anyway, after cleaning it out, blowing it with my handheld air blower, and letting it dry overnight and most of the day Monday, I put everything back together and tried booting the machine.
Needless to say, it didn’t work, which is what I sadly expected. The simasimac pattern was still there, and it seemed more or less the same.
So… I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring and ask this community to see if there’s anything I could do to save this beautiful machine?
I’m not too skilled with soldering stuff this small small, nor do I have the equipment or time, but if this board seems like it could be saved, I would be willing to pay a reasonable amount to get it working again, as well as try a few things out with the community’s suggestions.
Regardless, I thought about taking the RAM out of this SE/30 and putting it in my SE to max it out, and possibly swapping both logic boards around just to see what would happen. I need to open the SE anyway to clip its PRAM battery out.
Anyway, thank you all who read through this rambling, lol!
I’m sorry this post is so long!
