Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose

[just.in.time]

Like the title says, some conquest runs are winners, and others not so much.

Saw a Craigslist listing for a Macintosh SE/30 with accessories in a neighboring city. Texted the phone number, they said it powered on. This is where I should have asked for clarification. It doesn't boot, just shows this same display with no chime: https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/28519-another-se30-another-boot-issue/&do=findComment&comment=305061

I had already drove an hour and a half, and the seller was only asking $50 so I bought it anyways.

A really small part of me hoped I would land a sweet upgrade like the micron xceed or a diimo 50mhz card... one can dream, but alas none were there.

At least it looked like it had 4 of the 4MB simms and 4 of the 256k simms. Wrong, the 4MB simms were actually just 1MB simms.

On the good side, it did come with the owners manual, and a LOT of Mac software on 800k disks. The case has very minimal yellowing relatively speaking. The power supply is a Sony unit, and the hard drive has been upgraded to 230MB.

Swapping in my other SE/30's logic board allowed the computer to boot instantly. Display is bright and sharp with no burn-in, hard drive still works, as well as the floppy drive not being jammed/stuck.

I guess the painfully obvious lesson learned here is to make sure you get pictures of the computer powered on BEFORE driving over a hundred miles.

 

[EvilCapitalist]

Even though it's not working right from the jump, for $50 and including the drive that's still a solid conquest.  Finding machines certain machines has gotten hard, finding them in good physical shape with a bunch of accessories AND at a reasonable price has gotten much harder.

 

[olePigeon]

If the battery hasn't leaked all over the motherboard, it's certainly fixable.

 

[just.in.time]

I agree, overall I am happy with the conquest. However, I'm disappointed With myself for not requesting power on photos prior to driving 100 miles one way, if that makes sense.

The battery was one of the green and purple Tardiran (spelling?) batteries with a manufacture date of 11/1988. I have yet to have a single one of those green and purple batteries leak and/or explode. They are built well

All that said, the logic board is almost certainly fixable. Nothing $100 (shipping+parts+labor) and a few weeks at MacCaps can't fix. I was planning on sending over a Portable logic board Monday, may send the SE/30 board with it to save ~$30 from an extra round trip of shipping.

Long term, after this machine is cleaned up and running I may sell it since I already have an SE/30 that just had everything other than the floppy drive recapped and a SCSI2SD installed in the past 8 weeks. Don't really need two of these computers in my 1 bedroom apartment haha

 

[Unknown_K]

So you just purchased it to flip it then?

 

[just.in.time]

Purchased it to pull together all the best parts into my primary machine (including a small hope that I would find some rare parts/upgrades), as well as for the manuals/literature that were listed in the CL ad. Flipping it sounds bad. Like I'm out to make a profit. Definitely not the case, I treat this as a hobby with the expectation that I will lose money (hopefully at a slow rate). If I happen to break even at the end then it's a cool bonus.

When I do eventually go to sell it I will list its starting bid to about $15 below what I have put into it (gas for driving 200miles round trip, the computer itself, and the recap job), since that is the cost of a movie theater ticket and I have gotten enjoyment from working with the machine, usually. From there I'll let the bidders decide what its actual value is. I know some people like to start listings at hundreds of dollars more than they are into the system. Not judging, but that's not my style. And I don't have enough space at my place to sit on a massive amount of inventory like that. I will be keeping the literature and a few other accessories

But yes, I did not intend to keep two SE/30s forever. That said, I'm not going to just drop it. The plan was to have it leave my residence in complete operating condition, not part out. As such, I will be getting its logic board recapped so I can keep to my plan.

Unfortunately this hobby in limited space living situations significantly limits the amount of systems I can hold onto

 

[jsarchibald]

Seems to me like you won, to be honest.  A recap of the board and you have a great machine, just did the same for $50 myself.

And if you do it right, you can end up with a hobby AND be cash positive.  I've bought really well and sold really well, most people have no idea how to sell these things, not even bothering to clean.  I polish them up, get them running and sell them off for a profit, which goes back into buying the stuff I really really want, and I'm about to get some recaps done on some key machines.

I know some people might disagree with my methods, but it is amazing when your hobby owes you nothing but your time.  Even my wife is onboard with the hobby and the collection, not an easy thing to sell if it's money down the tubes!

 

[just.in.time]

Totally true it always impresses me when someone sells something to me and I literally can clean it off with a damp paper towel and it looks a million times better. They could have had a much more premium product.

I just find myself torn. On one hand I want to make money (at least come out cash neutral), but on the other hand I don't want to price anyone out of joining the hobby. I was once that 15 year old scouring eBay and local shops. I was fortunate to find some decent deals from generous people, or in some cases be given something for free.

We definitely need people that make a career out of this (and thus make good money from it) to have people with enough time to develop new tech. BMOW and their rom kits/floppy emu are a great example of new tech. MacCaps another example. Those are awesome and definitely a positive impact for the community. If they weren't cash positive, they couldn't continue and the community as a whole would suffer.

Some of the more rare systems should also stay on the high end to help ensure the purchaser has a sense of investment in the system and will take good care of it so it will stick around for a long time.

That said, if every Color Classic is priced at $600 or above, every SE/30 at $300 or above, it begins to price people out that would otherwise love to get into this tech. A great example of this is the SE/30 greyscale adapter being so expensive next to no one will get to try it. And those that do have it don't want to take it apart to try to reverse engineer it. I don't blame them, one slip up and you are out around $1000US.

With that being said, I try to strike a balance. I've dropped off plenty of functional Apple stuff at Goodwill or given to friends with the hopes that they can enjoy it as much as I did. On that same note I've definitely let eBay's market refill my pocket many times.

If I had more space to where I could maintain a small inventory and my own work bench I may try to push the needle over a bit more to cash positive. Hard to say though

 

[Unknown_K]

I would love having everything I buy come to me smelling and looking brand new, but most sellers would probably break something trying to clean or fix simple things so I rather they just leave it alone.

Most machines I get will end up getting stripped , washed, dried, fixed as needed, and upgraded. Its one thing to do that as a hobby for your own equipment and another thing to do it for money. Most machines being rebuilt like that would not be worth reselling unless you think of your time and skills as being worthless. The plus side is I have snagged machines from a recycler that looked like crap but after some cleaning and fixing look better then new and did it for next to no money just some elbow grease and time.

Most rarities are destined to be sold and locked away, just like any other hobby. High prices just make you think before you buy and keeps hoarding to a minimum unless you are well off. I don't see a different between me hoarding old equipment and Jerry Seinfeld hoarding old Porches except for $$$$ and him having a custom building to store them in.

I have 2 SE/30's with Ethernet, didn't pay much for them and if I found another cheap enough I would probably snag it (which is how I ended up with a bunch of Q950's). Greyscale would be nice to have for one of them, or maybe a Daystar adapter for an 040 would be cool if I ever come across one (oddly enough I have all kinds of IIci type 040 PDS boards but no SE/30 adapter).

I agree we need people out there supporting the hobby. Doing recap services will be needed more and more down the road and will probably be cost effective considering the rising prices for working equipment. People spending time and money making custom upgrade parts is also cool, same with people writing software.

People have been flipping old equipment for as long as I have been collecting. If I wasn't such a major hoarder I could make some coin doing it, but I just don't want to turn into somebody who only looks out for things to sell instead of stuff I need for my collection. Still its nice to raise a couple bucks as needed once in a while. Once a year the last 2 years ebay sends me an offer for bonus money to get me selling. One year I sold a VT-525 terminal for $175 + shipping and ended up spending my $100 Ebay voucher on a thru hole desoldering gun, this year I sold another VT-525 for the same price and spent the $50 voucher on a hot air + soldering gun station. I still have a couple VT-525 terminals left (need one for a MicroVAX 3100)that I paid $2 a piece for at the recycler (plus some keyboards that go with them.

 

[EvieSigma]

Of the 5 computers I bought in the last few months, only one (my Performa 630CD) did not need any work done to be put to use!

Still need to put a hard drive in my Packard Bell, I have two but I just don't have any free time.

Ah well, working on computers is fun.

 

[just.in.time]

Haha yes, having to keep an eye out to avoid hoarding is tough. The constant battle.

The Performa 630CD is a neat machine, glad it's working for you

 

[EvilCapitalist]

That said, if every Color Classic is priced at $600 or above, every SE/30 at $300 or above, it begins to price people out that would otherwise love to get into this tech. 

You can always tell the people who are flippers apart from those who do this sort of thing for fun and if any profit comes from it, so much the better.  The flippers tend to say things like "For Your Consideration at this wonderful auction" in listings and affix "RARE", "STEVE JOBS", or "Makes a great investment" to auction titles.  The people in it for the fun of the hobby tend more towards the dry and technical "just the facts, ma'am".  The unfortunate thing is that once the flippers/investment folks get a whiff of something that could potentially be profitable they tend to ruin it for everyone else, just take a look at classic car collecting and trailer queens that get resold practically every year. 

I've bought and sold my fair share of machines but the intent is always buying to find something new to add to my collection, or upgrade something already in it.  Sometimes I keep things, other times I decide that someone else would enjoy the machine more and it gets sent on, though the machines always leave better than I found them.

 

[Cory5412]

It's interesting to see different thought processes about the hobby. When I started out, these were my main computers, and I have a storage locker, which I use primarily with the intent of not getting rid of anything.

It's interesting to see the processes used by people with less space or who actively want to avoid keeping too many systems around. I probably personally would have just picked somebody to ship the rest of the system to, squirreled it away somewhere, or sold the carcass on as a project, and so I think that when people say "flipping" -- they don't necessarily mean it in a bad way, but there are definitely people whose contribution to the hobby and the scene is to flip the systems in this manner.

Whether or not that's bad, who knows.

In terms of making things expensive, that's kind of interesting because there seems to be scenes that don't care about that, or don't think it's worth trying to actively avert the notion that a hobby is expensive. Or, there will be some people trying to fetch hundreds of dollars for things, and others giving them away free.

Another dichotomy I've seen is scenes where machines, manufactured in the hundreds of thousands, most of which were preserved, go for dirt cheap and connect to normal 1990s small televisions for video output, but where performance upgrades and certain convenience upgrades are very costly.

I think it's for the greater good that someone's out there putting basically ready-to-go vintage Macs on eBay, even if in a basic config. Regardless of how it's spun, that activity is almost certainly going to be viewed as a profit-making venture. I think the reason people have that reaction is because there are definitely dealer types in almost any given scene for whom that is the motivation.

I don't know if there is a way to change that perception, other than, perhaps, just continuing to be a good member of the community while sustaining your "business" activities. 

I agree we need people out there supporting the hobby. Doing recap services will be needed more and more down the road and will probably be cost effective considering the rising prices for working equipment. People spending time and money making custom upgrade parts is also cool, same with people writing software.

Although I don't have the skills to do it, I'd love it if some competition opened up in some of these spaces.

Given that this is a hobby and all of this work should be considered hobby work, there should be more than enough of it to sustain several people in various locations doing this work, and given analyses I've seen of what it actually costs to do, say, a cap job... bring prices down. It would be better for everybody.

 

[CompuNurd]

Although I don't have the skills to do it, I'd love it if some competition opened up in some of these spaces.

Given that this is a hobby and all of this work should be considered hobby work, there should be more than enough of it to sustain several people in various locations doing this work, and given analyses I've seen of what it actually costs to do, say, a cap job... bring prices down. It would be better for everybody.

A set of capacitors is around $10-12, probably less if you bought in wholesale from Mouser.

With the proper tools (air compressor, hot air gun, proper soldering station, etc) it takes me about 30-45 minutes to do a board, maybe less.

I have moderate soldering skills and can usually re-wire lifted pads to their proper locations, but I lack good diagnostic skills if there are issues besides capacitors. I've considered doing a few boards for people, but I am always afraid I will break something that isn't mine.

Just my $0.02, albeit a little off topic.