My SE Restoration(Pic Heavy)

[Ike]

Hey there Paul!

Welcome to the club !

I can at least answer some of your questions, but also take solutions of others into consideration as there are so many people here with way more experience than myself.

1.

The batteries are a bit of a difficulty, there are a few options with these:

*The older soldered ones tend to keep charge for a very long time, and are not really prone to leaking/exploding, so you can just leave them in.

*The safer option however is to just remove de-solder them, or clip the leads and just remove them.

*Third option would be soldering a battery holder to the board so it can be easily swapped out.

(I just clipped mine to be sure, and I myself don't mind setting the clock when it's been unplugged.)

2.

Caps!caps!caps!

The caps most talked about here are the logic board caps. The SE models have the older style axial caps that do not tend to leak or give much trouble.

Much worse are the SMT-style aluminium can capacitors on the newer board.

I would NOT recap your style of caps, I WOULD however cap the newer style caps in newer Macintoshes.

The caps on the analog board may also need recapping in the near future, however if you have no serious (video-)trouble and see no serious leakage, I would leave them alone for now.

The rest, I can not really help you with.

Good luck!

 

[PaulHigg]

Hi Ike, thank you for the quick reply to my questions.

This is THE place to be it looks like.

This is good news to me. I appreciate it.

There is a guy here named 24bit who told me about this site. Glad I could finally join today.

 

[volvo242gt]

Paul,

I'd just get a new battery for your friend's board and use it. If it was originally a SuperDrive/FDHD board, it will likely have the battery holder, so you can use a generic Mac PRAM battery in it. On the 800k boards, there is someone on eBay selling a triple AA battery pack with leads for the Apple IIgs computers, which will work fine when/if the old Varta batteries do finally kick the bucket on an early SE or II/early IIx.

-J

 

[PaulHigg]

Hi Volvo,

I think he said his was the same soldered battery and it was cut off.

Will have to wait till I see it.

Besides, I have an IC extractor coming from Ebay and it's not too difficult to remove the ROM chips right? I've done it many times in the past using a screwdriver (yikes!) but it worked.

How about this for a story.

Way back in the 80's a friend had a Mac 512 and he wanted me to upgrade his RAM.

So I got a Computer Shopper magazine, opened his cade, got the part numbers of his RAM chips and ordered some more.

Then using a piece of thin cardboard I placed each chip on top of the originals and soldered each and every leg. Took me all day but when I removed the cardboard for some cooling it worked and he never had a problem.

I wonder where that Mac is today?

 

[volvo242gt]

I admit it, I've had to do the small Wiha screwdriver trick... Slide it between the chip and the socket in the middle, then lift up. Ah, so his board may be a very early SE FDHD board, or an upgraded one...

-John

 

[PaulHigg]

Not sure on either, I'll have to call him.

Yeah, with the screwdriver the pucker factor can get kind of high. I'd hate to break one of these are they seem as rare as hen's teeth.

But with a real IC extractor I don't think I'll have any problems.

Gotta pull six and install three as his board will be a spare for both SE's I have.

Got an internal 1.44 floppy on order so I'll be all set.

This SE will have gone from a 1MB RAM, 2 800K floppy system to a 4 MB RAM, one 50 MB Apple internal HD with cover plate, and a HD floppy. I'm happy with that.

I wish someone would get back to my original post about some of the other questions I have.

There seem to be a LOT of technical guys on this forum. I am REALLY glad I found it.

Where is this forum located? Is it Australian? Just curious.

 

[volvo242gt]

The admin is based in Arizona. It's just a global community. I and a few other members are based in the Seattle area. Then there are a few members in California, Oregon, Iowa, Maine, New Jersey, Michigan, Florida, etc... Plus a few members in Europe, Asia, Australia...

-J

 

[PaulHigg]

That's cool. Looks like there's a lot of old Mac fans out there. There's something about the Mac SE, they were from a simpler time I think. I remember my original and what I paid for it. I remember being a sysop in Idaho. That was fun. I miss the days of BBS's. I have a third party modem and there is even some modem software on the SE so I was thinking about seeing if I cna still log in to a BBS. I know there's still some out there. I used to know all those command codes. Those were the days!