CelGen
Well-known member
This is actually something I got three years ago but it took until today to get it back to an operating state. :lisa2:
Picked it up in pretty bad shape but for $150 after shipping it was a S T E A L.
Aside from the obvious paint job there was a reasonable amount of battery damage (four traces had to be patched and a 2N3904 was repalced) but otherwise all boards were in the end able to be salvaged. One day I would love to rebuild the battery holder to take four rechargeable AA's that I can remove during prolonged storage. The power supply required the line filters to be replaced, the floppy drive needed a regrease and the analog card was suspect. The screen displayed a raster but showed nothing else even though I could confirm a video signal was indeed being generated. This was fixed by simply twisting the contrast and brightness pots which were reading infinite ohms in their "set and glued at the factory" settings.
The keyboard was also repadded.
The paint was stripped off using the brake fluid method I posted last year.
The very last problem to fix was why the parallel port was so funky. The lisa waited for disks but could not detect one. My lisa seems the only one to be fitted with a very weird mod where the lines to the parallel port were cut and resistors were added inline. I was finally to restore the parallel port by removing the resistors and bridging the broken traces.
At first I sourced a Widget drive for my Lisa. Being a 2/5 it lacked the electrical harness so I added one in. I purchased one Widget and a DOA second one from a man that lived about half an hour away. Spent an afternoon trying to get it to work but while it was detecting it it would just reset the drive over and over. This must be part of that limitation in ROM that prevents the 2/5 and 1 from using a Widget. Regardless it's installed in my system anyways but left unpugged.
I secured an untested 10mb ProFile from Volvo242gt which needed the power supply recapped and one side patched up. It managed to break BLU (highest block was 4D00 and it blew past that until the interrupter hit the innermost limit and began blowing errors) but the LOS 3.1 installer formatted and installed to it no problem. I grabbed a generic Mac mouse and threw in an Apple 1200 modem. Aside from an ImageWriter I now have the full Lisa Office Experience.
I have big plans for this Lisa. It will be used in the future for a vintage computing campaign where I will setup on a street corner and spend several hours performing a list of tasks that include printing hard copies and using the modem and a cellular bluetooth phone bridge to connect to a remote system and retrieve a file. The idea is that people will watch, point and take pictures that will trend on social networking groups. That evening I'll upload a video recorded by a friend that explains WHY I was there and what I was doing.
Picked it up in pretty bad shape but for $150 after shipping it was a S T E A L.
Aside from the obvious paint job there was a reasonable amount of battery damage (four traces had to be patched and a 2N3904 was repalced) but otherwise all boards were in the end able to be salvaged. One day I would love to rebuild the battery holder to take four rechargeable AA's that I can remove during prolonged storage. The power supply required the line filters to be replaced, the floppy drive needed a regrease and the analog card was suspect. The screen displayed a raster but showed nothing else even though I could confirm a video signal was indeed being generated. This was fixed by simply twisting the contrast and brightness pots which were reading infinite ohms in their "set and glued at the factory" settings.
The keyboard was also repadded.
The paint was stripped off using the brake fluid method I posted last year.
The very last problem to fix was why the parallel port was so funky. The lisa waited for disks but could not detect one. My lisa seems the only one to be fitted with a very weird mod where the lines to the parallel port were cut and resistors were added inline. I was finally to restore the parallel port by removing the resistors and bridging the broken traces.
At first I sourced a Widget drive for my Lisa. Being a 2/5 it lacked the electrical harness so I added one in. I purchased one Widget and a DOA second one from a man that lived about half an hour away. Spent an afternoon trying to get it to work but while it was detecting it it would just reset the drive over and over. This must be part of that limitation in ROM that prevents the 2/5 and 1 from using a Widget. Regardless it's installed in my system anyways but left unpugged.
I secured an untested 10mb ProFile from Volvo242gt which needed the power supply recapped and one side patched up. It managed to break BLU (highest block was 4D00 and it blew past that until the interrupter hit the innermost limit and began blowing errors) but the LOS 3.1 installer formatted and installed to it no problem. I grabbed a generic Mac mouse and threw in an Apple 1200 modem. Aside from an ImageWriter I now have the full Lisa Office Experience.
I have big plans for this Lisa. It will be used in the future for a vintage computing campaign where I will setup on a street corner and spend several hours performing a list of tasks that include printing hard copies and using the modem and a cellular bluetooth phone bridge to connect to a remote system and retrieve a file. The idea is that people will watch, point and take pictures that will trend on social networking groups. That evening I'll upload a video recorded by a friend that explains WHY I was there and what I was doing.
