Before I picked up the Powermac G3, I got my hands on a fantastic professional
IBM CRT. However, I started feeling buyer's remorse as it was $100 and I could tell that it needed cap replacement as the image was completely red unless I put the red channel down to zero. Space was also a bigger issue as I lived in a tiny room. I sold it off, and now in retrospect, I wish I hadn't. Oh well, at least I have my two Studio Displays.
Speaking of. Next pickup was a Powermac G3 with Studio Display 21" and external hard drive for $50. It had actually been on sale for several weeks but without a buyer since the seller demanded a local pickup. It was a little under a 6 hour round trip away from me. I initially thought it wasn't worth it, but the auction also included the matching 21" CRT, which was tempting - I wasn't sure if I would see one for sale again (a year later, I don't think I've seen one again around my area). I ended up taking the chance and first travelled by train to pick up the computer using a hand cart, and then with a rented car for the monitor. I would've taken the train both trips, but the seller had put a picture of the 17" CRT on the ad instead of the 21" - so I thought he had typed it wrong. Well, it ended up being the
gigantic 21", so I had no other choice than to rent a car.
Hauling it home was reckless, as I didn't test it beforehand and had no idea how the quality was. Thankfully it was in good shape. Not as bright as my 17", but fully usable. Seeing this high CRT resolution was really awesome in person, and I'm glad to have it, even if I still don't have space to use it. I tried placing it on a cheap IKEA table I had found which somehow managed to carry the weight of this beast without problems for several months.
My next step was to start upgrading the PM G3. As I wanted to run a G4 system, I researched and rationalized which parts to upgrade - i wanted to bump the logic board to a 133mhz bus model to make the most out of any CPU upgrades down the line. But the problem was that newer logic boards needed a different chassi to account for the standoff screws and IO. The number of PCI slots changed, too. I didn't have any tools, neither the ability to use them in my cramped room, so I resorted to buying a Sawtooth metal case and logic board from eBay and swapping over the B&W plastic pieces.
The next upgrade while waiting for a CPU upgrade was the graphics card. I managed to get a
Radeon 9800 Pro for cheap ($20) on eBay, but some solder had gotten old and two components falling off. This was essentially my first attempt at proper soldering, and while it's not pretty, it fixed the issue. However, as usual with the Radeon cards, these need to be flashed in order to work on the mac. I managed to find a cheap Dell with AGP, which I successfully used to flash the card (although it was somewhat problematic, as the first flash failed and the Dell refuses to boot properly if it doesn't find a working card. I eventually found a way to temporarily reset the ROM, though, so I
succeeded in flashing it anyways).
During this time, I got my hands on another iBook G3 Blueberry, but this time in excellent condition. No serial number burn-in and a complete and
matching keyboard. Not much to say about this one other than I used parts from both of the iBooks to produce a better looking one. In general, I would say that it's always good to get a worse condition item as your first thing, because then you can learn how to disassemble it without being afraid of snapping or ripping something apart. Like I eventually did with the trackpad flex cable on one of these iBooks (thankfully, you can get replacement parts extremely easily). I was also pleased to have another battery on my hands, as I was planning to eventually rebuild one of them.
Have a
nice image. Have
another nice image.
Then it was my last iBook purchase.
I eventually managed to get a hold of a Tangerine version of the iBook G3 around summer, thus reaching my self-imposed limit. It just wasn't worth it, in my opinion, to chase after the later ones (as by then they started dropping the translucent theming), and especially not rarities like the Lime. Instead, I felt satisfied with the blueberry and tangerine, which left me with two spare iBooks that I didn't feel attachment to. A few months later, I ended up stuffing the 466Mhz graphite logic board in to the Tangerine iBook, so it still lives on, just not in its original form. The broken blueberry was stripped for parts, and I used the parts for the next project.
Around this time is where I started to experiment with making resin copies of the plastic parts of the ibooks, both for myself but also for others. My initial goal was to make Strawberry versions to make a sort of alternative-history iBook, however, I ended up mainly focusing on creating accurate color copies of blueberry and tangerine logos as I was getting pretty busy from real life. It required
much trial and error, but eventually I found a recipe that worked. I ended up selling the copies on Etsy.
Later in autumn is also when I managed to get a
Fujitsu Siemens diamondtron in excellent condition for $20, only an hour away. After hauling it all the way back home, I felt fairly tired of dragging these monstrous things home, so I told myself to hold off from the CRT market until I get to own a car.
Towards the end of the year, I found and moved in to a new apartment with much more space, and so it alleviated the worry about the clutter - at this point, my tiny room was shock full of random computer parts and a terribly cramped "retro corner" - so with the new place, I could finally have a dedicated room.
However, I was still stuck on the measly 400Mhz CPU, which limited how efficiently I could work on the porting projects. Around October is when I finally got my mail package from a friend in the USA, importing a few excellent translucency-themed accessories I had bought from eBay such as the Logitech Blueberry mouse or the Macally trackball, but more importantly, one of Herd's CPUs that I had bought many months before. It worked perfectly, and this really improved the experience (it finally felt usable, in my opinion) of OS X with a 1.4Ghz CPU upgrade.
For the rest of the year, I did not work a lot on this Powermac project. One reason was because of how hacky it felt, trying to stuff all kinds of components and upgrades to what was essentially a Sawtooth still running off the G3 PSU. I upgraded the logic board to a Digital Audio one for that sweet 133mhz bus, even cutting out the backplate to make space for a new IO panel (and learning to use a dremel for the first time), as well as converting an ATX PSU to work with this - but in the end, it was a complicated mess, and the system was prone to crashing randomly. eBay sellers were also keen on selling me faulty units and then disappearing. I had several failed soldering jobs, one of which completely broke the 9800. At least it wasn't a huge loss.
All of these reasons made me take a break from collecting, and I told myself to wait until I can find complete Powermac towers to part swap instead of relying on eBay. Well, as it turns out, that's exactly what happened the next year, the beginning of this year.
