SE/30 yoke harness & floppy

[Hatta]

I have an SE/30 with a few problems. One is the jittery screen. I've read that that can be replaced by resoldering the joints on the yoke connector. Since I'm going to have to discharge the CRT for this anyway, should I be proactive and replace C1 on the analog board while I'm in there? Does anyone here sell this capacitor?

This SE/30 also has a floppy drive that won't accept disks. I'm going to pull it out and see if there's anything mechanically obvious that I could fix. Assuming that I can't fix it, what's the best way to source a replacement? Does anyone still sell new old stock of these?

 

[JDW]

C1 on the 1984 Mac 128k's analog board is different than what you will find on an SE/30's analog board. As such, you need to replace C1 on older 128k and 512k Macs but you do not on the SE/30.

As to your drive, you probably just need to clean the heads. If that doesn't work, it could be in need of lubrication. If that doesn't work, check the cable -- a lot of drive problems result from the cable either being bad or not plugged in well. If that doesn't work, then be sure that the logic board and all internal parts are clean. Gunk on electronics causes crazy things to happen. If that doesn't work, then you are likely in need of a new drive. I've purchased one such drive from WeLoveMacs in the past, but they do cost more than EBAY:

http://www.welovemacs.com/6610345.html

 

[Hatta]

That's good news. I'll go ahead and resolder the connector then.

The floppy drive has mechanical problems. It won't accept a disk without some effort on my part. What I have to do is push the disk as far back as it will go with a paper clip, then reach underneath the tray on the right side where there's a metal tab, lift it up and drop it. That will get the disk into the drive, the I can hear it spin and it will mount the disk. But when I read any files, they're full of junk. It may need a head cleaning in addition to whatever is mechanically wrong with it then.

Oddly enough, the eject mechanism works perfectly.

Edit: Wow, that replacement drive is pricy. I think I'll hunt for parts where I found this machine first. What machines have compatible floppies?

 

[phreakout]

Hatta,

I've used internal floppy drives salvaged from other retro Macs that will work on your SE/30. For example, I had a bunch of Power Mac 6100 series that were DOA donations. I stripped them all of their RAM, cache cards, cables, hard drives and floppy drives. Most of them used either Sony or Mitsubishi brand drives and are the manual inject, auto eject type. Those are all compatible with the SE/30.

One thing to note, though. You might have to slightly modify the front opening on the case where you stick the floppy disk in. This is especially true when you do the Mac SE-to Mac SE/30 upgrade; that's where you swap out the dual 800K floppy drives and logic board of an SE and replace with a hard drive, single 1.44MB floppy and an SE/30 logic board. For example, on mine I had to Dremel tool the front opening of the case about a 1/4-inch down for access to the manual eject button and floppy insert opening. You might not have to this if the case is a genuine SE/30 model.

73s de Phreakout. :rambo: