• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Restoring a Quadra 700 (warning: photo heavy)

joshc

Well-known member
I recently scored a Quadra 700, a few weeks ago I had some time to give it some love. Here's what I did...

This Q700 really wasn't in bad condition to start with, and already worked, so my main focus was to clean everything up and improve anything I could as I went along.

To start with, I fully disassembled it - the case and logic board had some dust bunnies, nothing awful but it needed a clean.

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The internal case came out well after a quick brush to remove the dust:

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The front switches and clear plastic LED piece for the front power LED were removed and dumped in hot soapy water:

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The black side strips that run along the length of the machine were cleaned, they were rather dirty!

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The rear I/O panels and NuBus slot openings were cleaned out

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Some photos of the case before cleaning:

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The top lid before cleaning:

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Washing up liquid and a scrub is all I'm going to do on this.

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Came out really well...

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Same treatment for the front

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Front vents were cleaned/rinsed out:

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All the other little bits were cleaned and dryed

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The logicboard was brushed down and lightly swabbed with IPA:

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Starting to put things back together, looking quite sparkly and new really:

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The floppy drive was definitely the dirtiest part of the whole machine...

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I already knew it read disks OK, so I thought it worthwhile giving it a full clean - but I also knew it wouldn't eject disks, so there's something going on there.

The drive carrier was a bit dusty, not too bad.

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That was rinsed and dried off, looks great now

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So.... onto the floppy drive.

Before:

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After some initial brushing to remove the worst dust:


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Removing more bits revealed more dust...

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Going further, lets clean it up...

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Yep, broken eject gear. Same old same old. I don't have a spare replacement right now - so will have to return to this another time.

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New grease applied - I was probably a bit liberal with it but I can always remove access afterwards

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Everything back together. Can't fully test just yet because of that missing eject gear but what an improvement!


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Back to finish off the rest of it...



SCSI2SD installed, and the original activity LED hooked up to it:


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Looking rather smart, albeit more yellow than my 6200, but still nice and clean now and ready for BUSINESS:


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And most importantly, the original HD activity LED works great...

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A few days ago, I did a few more things:

Replaced the dirty and noisy original PSU fan with a new one.

Stock fan:

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Replaced with a Noctua NF-A8 PWM:

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I also ordered some new RAM, to bring the total from 20MB to 68MB (including 4MB onboard):

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Things remaining to do:

- Clean out power supply and recap it

- Remove the original oscillator and replace with a DIP socket/new 66Mhz oscillator to crank clock speed from 25Mhz to 33Mhz

- Get a new eject gear for the floppy drive
 

jessenator

Well-known member
Hey look at that! Your FDD wasn't completely eviscerated by a maxell bomb 😆 Good job on the cleanup. Looks nice.

Nice PSU fan replacement. I might do that one day...
 

joshc

Well-known member
Thanks both for the kind words.

I've just done the oscillator swap, replaced 50Mhz oscillator with a socket and 66.66 Mhz oscillator:

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joshc

Well-known member
I think I got the oscillator from eBay. They are sometimes available from parts suppliers as well (RS, Farnell, Digikey, Mouser, etc).
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
@joshc Would you mind sharing how your Noctua fan is wired up? I bought one as well, and I couldn't get it to work in my PSU. It would never spin up. Worked fine with the original fan.
 

davewongillies

Well-known member
I think I got the oscillator from eBay. They are sometimes available from parts suppliers as well (RS, Farnell, Digikey, Mouser, etc).
I looked at Mouser & Digikey for the oscillators and they currently aren't in stock. They have a 38 week lead time from the suppliers and a minimum purchase quantity of 1000, which is a biiiit more than I need.
 

davewongillies

Well-known member
@joshc Would you mind sharing how your Noctua fan is wired up? I bought one as well, and I couldn't get it to work in my PSU. It would never spin up. Worked fine with the original fan.
I did the same mod last night in my Quadra 700 power supply. I need to re-open it back up again to attach the low noise adapter cable to the fan, so I can take a photo for you then.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
I did the same mod last night in my Quadra 700 power supply. I need to re-open it back up again to attach the low noise adapter cable to the fan, so I can take a photo for you then.
I was originally trying to install it in my IIci, but with that out of commission, I want to install a couple of the fans into my IIfx. It sounds like a harrier jet.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
@davewongillies Hmm. That's how I had mine. I wonder if my power supply was dying. :/

Also, are you in NorCal by any chance? If you are, there's a great electronics surplus store that has oscillators of every frequency and package type.
 
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