Bodge Wires on LC III Motherboard?

[TurboDan]

Hi Everyone,

First time poster here.  Just picked up an LC III in great condition and I'm working on setting it up now.  I popped the cover off and was surprised to see some bodge wiring on the VGA chip on the motherboard.  Has anyone seen anything like this before?  I'm wondering if this is from the factory or if it's been messed with.  Here is a photo:



Thanks!
Dan

 

[Johnnya101]

Looks like it was messed with to me, because most of the time the wire would be more straight and neater looking.

 

[TurboDan]

That's kind of what I was thinking, thanks for the reply.  I did some more searching and it seem like apple repairs usually used blue wire too.

 

[sstaylor]

I've seen green wire on Apple repairs.  This does look like more work than usual, and not quite as neat as usual, but I wouldn't rule out official Apple work

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Looks a tossup to me. That's pretty damn good for an unofficial fix, if a just a little crappy for factory rework. Maybe it was done by Apple in the refurbishment process as opposed to production line rework? Multilayer PCBs of that era were still worth quite a lot of patch wiring rework to save the board.

 

[Johnnya101]

But could it be original factory?

(In response to sstaylor)

 

[Juror22]

My LCIII doesn't have a component in that location (upper right corner - just the pads for one).

 

[TurboDan]

My LCIII doesn't have a component in that location (upper right corner - just the pads for one).

That's weird, maybe an optional feature? I'll post a closer pic later today.

 

[TurboDan]

Here's a closer view of the part in question.  It looks like it's mounted upside down and the bottom is labelled "taiwan."  I'm still waiting on my VGA adapter so it will be a little bit longer before I can see if it actually works.  The unit does seem to be an early model, 11th week of '93.  So I guess there is a chance I got one with an "late breaking" fix haha.

 

[mrpippy]

My (socketed) SE/30 LB has a green wire on it that looks pretty similar (including the glue dabs at corners). It's just one wire though and not as long--this is a heck of a rework to have to do to every board!

 

[sstaylor]

But could it be original factory?

I wouldn't rule it out.  I'm afraid I couldn't be more specific.  I'll maybe dig out my LCIII and see what it looks like.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

.  .  .  this is a heck of a rework to have to do to every board!

They probably only did it on boards that failed to pass standard testing, to do a much more simple fix on a bad run of boards or to rectify a layout error on very early production runs.

Does the LCIII board have the edge card connections on it for low level testing? I'm assuming that's what the contacts are for that are located on the edges of logic boards. Narrowing down the subsystems to check on a failed board would be an obvious use for them. If a bad board exhibited multiple failures or didn't indicate the location of a failure, it probably went straight into the dumpster as not worth the effort.

 

[unity]

I doubt Apple did it, two shades of green wire? And the stuff Apple uses, at least that I have seen, is thinner.

But I swear I have seen this before.

edit: Is there a couple revisions of this board? I dont know the III well, but I do know there is a + version. Anyway, there are no pads for the IC that would be there normally like I find in pics on the web. Those pics show an IC and pads 90 degrees to this. This one is missing the pads but clearly has a silkscreen locater for the IC in a different orientation. Also on the boards I find online for an LCIII done show that box out for the LC.

Any pics of the board part number/serial?

 

[unity]

I may stand corrected on the factory thing... And I have seen this before. This is not the same board, but another.

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/25164-lc-iii-amusement/

 

[Johnnya101]

Guess it is!

"So I can kind of envision some Apple Exec calling the Factory floor and saying.... uh guys, you know those 10,000 boards we were all set to send out? well... yeah... just a bit of a problem with those. They... uh... need to be fixed by Monday. Welp, I'm off to the bar! Thanks for taking care of that! see ya boys! " -MJ313

Hahaha

 

[TurboDan]

Very Interesting!  Good find with that other thread, that definitely looks like the same repair as mine.  I think I'll consider it a factory repair for now, seem like there must be a sizable number of boards with these mods.

 

[techknight]

Looks like its clock chipped. 

 

[olePigeon]

Out of curiosity, is there an FCC sticker on the case?

Edit:  Nevermind.

 

[Iesca]

I know that this is a slightly old thread, but I wanted to weigh in on the topic!

If any of you follow David Murray, The 8-bit Guy, in an old unboxing video (June 2017) he received an LCIII towards the end of the video. That LCIII was actually one of a few LCIIIs from my high school's music department (Tim, the person who donated the one in the video, is an old friend of mine).

Anyway, if you watch the video, you'll see David opens the machine up and you can clearly see the same green wires connecting a few of the chips across the board. Tim actually gave me one of the LCIIIs from the pile and mine has the same configuration.

I've tested my machine and it is in complete working order. I've attached some pics from my machine's board so you can compare.