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Newbie questions picked up a bunch of compact macs.

melbourne

Member
Hi,

Recently picked up a bunch of old macs. I primarily collect Apple II, Atari and Amiga home computers so not new to vintage computing. These were sitting on a shelf in an unheated garage for at least 20-30 years. I’m guessing most of the caps and batteries are toast. Where can I source cap kits and replacement parts and batteries? I’m in the US, I have a floppyEmu that I should be able to boot these from. Also picked up two Mac portables and a bunch of misc. boards and items. Beyond cleaning and board / monitor caps and chucking the batteries is there anything else I should watch out for? I will order a new ROM for the SE/30’s so I can use the floppyEMU in HD20 mode and look into replacing the internal hard drives if they are gone. Looks like Blue or ZuluSCSI are popular, any recommendations? Lastly one of the macs looks to have an expansion card (network card?)

Thanks

-Mike

Pics

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melbourne

Member
1st SE/30 board out, looks like 11 surface mount caps leaked, battery removed it did not explode overall board looks clean. No internal SCSI drive.

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Nixontheknight

Well-known member
SE/30s can be very picky about their RAM, so if you install RAM and it gives you a mosaic pattern, don't panic, and test the SIMMs in another machine in pairs, or swap RAM from a parts machine
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
As far as leaky caps go, that board you pictured is in excellent shape for an SE/30. C13 looks to be the only cap that really barfed up all over the board. The rest are visibly leaking, but not as bad. I think you lucked out. Should be a relatively easy recap.

Here's a recap guide for an SE/30. Here also is a video. Same website has information for different boards.

The usual places for caps is Mouser or Digikey. If you're Australia (just guessing from your name), then you could try emailing the chap from the Recap Guide I linked to. He may have some recap kits.
 

melbourne

Member
1st SE/30 boots off floppyEmu, screen is bright but never finishes loading to the desktop. I tried an 800k system 6 image. Not sure if its an issue with floppyEMU.

The box on the left is full of 3.5 floppies with SW. I also got a bunch of external SCSI drives but no cables.

2nd SE/30 board is cleaner than the first but screen is dim, it has 7.5.5 loaded on it. The expansion card is an Asante ethernet adapter. It has 128 megs of ram on it, is that right? It has an original Apple 250 MB drive.

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melbourne

Member
3rd one is a Mac SE, but it looks like a different type of SE/30 logic board inside. It also has an external monitor cable addition inside the case. Very strange, will take a look after lunch.

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3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
Nasty caps on that third board. The style of the caps with the labeling on the side indicates that this is an earlier production unit I believe.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
2nd SE/30 board is cleaner than the first but screen is dim, it has 7.5.5 loaded on it.
Daft question, but have you seen the brightness knob on the left hand side of the overhang near the bottom of the front of the computer?

Vanilla SEs are less prone to cap issues (almost unheard of on the logic board, but sometimes on the analogue board), so the SE/30s need urgent logic board recapping, but the SEs are on case by case condition.

Batteries are mostly 3.6v 14250, you can get them from Amazon. Or you can get coin cell adapters. Some older SEs have axial batteries with leads, but you can either add a socket to fit a normal 14250, replace with another axial battery, or wire in a coin cell holder.
 

Cam

Well-known member
Nice haul!
On the question of capacitor kits, I've been using recapamac.com.au as a reference, and ordering them off digikey.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
Caps on an SE/30 logic board are 10x 47uF @16V SMD electrolytic and a single 1uF 50v SMD electrolytic. I'd just buy them rather than a kit, because there are only two types.

I tend to replace them with tantalum, and it is good practice to use 25v tantalum for the 47uF caps.
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
Board 3 isn’t gonna boot until you recap it, those caps are pretty well leaked, much worse than your first two. Definitely worth fixing it though, it appears to be one with a socketed CPU. Probably won’t benefit much to have it, but there were a couple accelerators that used it instead of PDS.
 

melbourne

Member
3rd boots now. The internal drive is corrupt, so I hooked it up to the 1st SE/30 drive. The issue was the plastic SIMM holder the plastic tab on the left was missing the locking tab. I jury rigged some electrical tape on the ROM SIMM to provide enough pressure to make contact. This SE/30 also has 128 meg. Excuse the mess, I couldn’t figure out how to remove the internal drive without taking more stuff apart.

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melbourne

Member
Yes, I’m surprised all the batteries so far have not exploded and everything has worked so far. These machines were made to last, quality of the boards is much higher than the old Atari boards. This will be the last one I’ll look at today, wife is not happy about all the mess. It is an SE FDHD with a 40 MB internal drive. I already removed the battery.

Also on the dim CRT I did try the front brightness adjustment, I’ll need to recap all these machines and retrobright the cases as they are quite yellowed.

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Byrd

Well-known member
Welcome, that’s a nice lot to keep busy with. Does your username suggest your location - I’m also in Melbourne, Australia happy to help out if you ever need.
 
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