Clamshell SE Restoration

[CYB3RBYTE]

Hey everyone, thought I would share my clamshell restoration project on here. My first ever mac was a 366MHZ SE G3 iBook, that I got in 2010 to mess around with. It was a cool machine but it soon had logic board issues and eventually refused to turn on. I recycled it, and I recently began to miss it a lot. So, I took to eBay, and came out with this 466 MHZ SE, one of the last ones made.



I haven’t done a take apart on one of these ever, so it was a learning experience for sure. I can say it’s better than the iBook G4’s I remember disassembling from back then. Anyways, it got a 120GB mSATA SSD, and 512MB of PC-133. It already had an airport card luckily.

It got a nice case / board cleaning. It also had the common charging port issues with flakey connection, so I resoldered that as well. The DVD drive is very picky on this iBook, so I guess a laser cleaning / guide lubrication is in order.





I will be trying to look for some cosmetic parts for this machine, primarily the missing DVD drive bezel / the cracked screen bezel. The battery also is present but holds no actual charge by now, so I’m gonna embark on rebuilding that as well.



I’ll be posting what I learn as I go here. Thanks!

 

[LaPorta]

Definitely interested, and I am the original owner of the same model. No cracks in the hinges, thankfully, and I want to do a full teardown and recap at some point. Thanks!

 

[CC_333]

That looks like a nice looking iBook you got!

It also looks like you lucked into a somewhat unusual version I think, as it appears to have a late-stage prototype logic board (that's the only logic board I've seen with "PVT" silkscreened onto it). I don't think it's anything special, though, and is probably 99.9% ordinary otherwise.

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[CYB3RBYTE]

I work at an AASP, and according to a friend who works at corporate, it‘s indeed a prototype model, but was so late stage development that it has no differences from a regular production model, it was just maybe one of the first ones to be sold to a consumer is all.

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

According to this video, all earlier 2nd-gen iBooks had the PVT silkscreening on the board. I have no idea why they didn't remove it for production, I guess it wasn't important to them.

 

[Franklinstein]

I guess that's sort of like the early LCs with the "Apple Confidential" EPROMs in them. I got one of those LCs years ago and thought it was special but apparently it's just an early production unit where they used up some of the DVT stock they had. Could be the same story here, or they didn't bother to change anything from the final development model to production. I do have a semi special iBook FW 466 that has a CPU with "IBM CONFIDENTIAL" stenciled on it. I guess it was one of the very early production iBooks using leftover very early production CPUs.

As for replacing the DVD drive, there was a PB G3-related website I came across that had drives that were compatible with various front bezels but basically with these models you were stuck with the same Matsushita drive it shipped with, which is total junk. Matsushita's desktop optical drives weren't terrible back in the '90s (at least, they could often be repaired) but their notebook-size drives were never very reliable for me to the point that I basically assume they're not going to work properly. I would prefer to slap a TEAC or Pioneer or even a Sony into an iBook clamshell but sadly none of these will fit the Matsushita bezels, and not even between CD or DVD versions for some reason. I need to buy a few spares for a couple iBooks of my own.

And the plastics on these are cracked to some degree more often than not. Good luck finding some nice pieces.

 

[dan.dem]

Cannot say about the DVD drive but the original iBook's CD-ROM drive was/is very picky about CD-Rs from new on. Industrial produced CDs all work properly but home-toasted CDs usually needed many slow re-reads or are often unreadable. Eventually I found a (slow 4x) CD-RW (or was it CD+RW?) media which worked nearly flawlessly.

BUT, as picky the drive is, it still works after 21 years.
I cannot say so about the later, slim 9 mm drives of the MacBooks/MBPros. More than half of the slot in optical drives here died after few years.