deepspaceandy
New member
Hello!
This is my first post, so forgive me if I'm in the wrong place etc.
Having grown up with the classics - the first computer I ever used was a Plus - I've been keeping half an eye open looking for an old compact Mac for a while now.
I recently talked to a friend of mine in Denmark (i live in Gothenburg, Sweden) who's had the good fortune of befriending a collector of old Macs, and he was looking to part with a few of them. So this weekend I came down to visit, and it was a veritable goldmine! I now have in my possession two SE/30's, one SE and an LC 475.
Both SE/30's had problems booting, but after replacing a few caps on one of them it booted up fine. Turns out it's got an Ethernet board and 68MB of RAM inside. The HDD was busted so I found an old 1GB and managed to get System 7.1 on it. Still needs a few more caps replaced, but it seems pretty stable.
The second SE/30 was in poorer shape, but not beyond rescue. Some of the cap joints on the logic board were completely corroded, and the caps pretty much fell off just from touching them. I spent most of the evening cleaning pads and soldering on a few new caps. The machine now boots, but requires some turning it off and on, sometimes it just gives the black and white stripes. I plan to replace the rest of the caps and double-check all the solder joints on the analog board.
The LC is in pretty good shape as well, it too has an Ethernet board. It only has 8MB of RAM, but I found an old 72-pin module in a drawer at home; I wonder what size it is...
I also wonder if it's possible to replace the LC040 CPU with a regular, full 040 with FPU/MMU for better performance? There's a guy in town who stocks old 68k CPU's (he sells Amiga accelerator boards), and they were pretty cheap.
As an added bonus I got an external CD-ROM drive with the LC, which is great because otherwise I wouldn't have had any way to get new software onto floppy disks. There was an accelerator card in a bin that seemed interesting, but I have no idea if it will fit in an SE/30. Some googling seems to indicate that it's a Fusion Data Tokamac FX, the CPU on it is an LC040 of the same type as in the LC 475, and it's apparently a fairly rare breed of board. I haven't been able to find any drivers or anything of substance related to it, other than people asking the same questions I am.
Besides the 4 Macs I brought home with me my friend also got an SE FDHD, SE/30, Quadra 950 and a beautiful old Plus in great shape, including a HD20. The guy we got them from was a real character, we had a great time and he seemed happy to be rid of all his old stuff. There was one more SE/30 which sadly was completely destroyed from battery leakage, a Mac IIsi with a missing ROM SIMM and what looked like a faulty PSU, and a similarly dead Color Classic. Another pretty cool item he had was a replacement CRT for a compact Mac, still in the original packaging, with protective sheet taped to the screen etc, still wrapped in original plastic. I have no idea if there's any monetary value in it, but the coolness factor was quite high. Needless to say I didn't even ask if I could buy it from him, and he probably wouldn't have parted with it for any amount anyway.
So, my plan for the near future is to order replacement caps and get all the logic boards sorted. What's the recommendation on the PSU's, my guess would be to replace caps on those as well?
I'll probably put new electrolytics on to start with, and once I'm satisfied the Macs are running well I might put tantalums on. Replacing every cap on all four machines with tants would apparently be a rather expensive exercise; I'm not made of money, after all.
And here's a photo I snapped of the beauties!
Cheers!
Andy
This is my first post, so forgive me if I'm in the wrong place etc.
Having grown up with the classics - the first computer I ever used was a Plus - I've been keeping half an eye open looking for an old compact Mac for a while now.
I recently talked to a friend of mine in Denmark (i live in Gothenburg, Sweden) who's had the good fortune of befriending a collector of old Macs, and he was looking to part with a few of them. So this weekend I came down to visit, and it was a veritable goldmine! I now have in my possession two SE/30's, one SE and an LC 475.
Both SE/30's had problems booting, but after replacing a few caps on one of them it booted up fine. Turns out it's got an Ethernet board and 68MB of RAM inside. The HDD was busted so I found an old 1GB and managed to get System 7.1 on it. Still needs a few more caps replaced, but it seems pretty stable.
The second SE/30 was in poorer shape, but not beyond rescue. Some of the cap joints on the logic board were completely corroded, and the caps pretty much fell off just from touching them. I spent most of the evening cleaning pads and soldering on a few new caps. The machine now boots, but requires some turning it off and on, sometimes it just gives the black and white stripes. I plan to replace the rest of the caps and double-check all the solder joints on the analog board.
The LC is in pretty good shape as well, it too has an Ethernet board. It only has 8MB of RAM, but I found an old 72-pin module in a drawer at home; I wonder what size it is...
I also wonder if it's possible to replace the LC040 CPU with a regular, full 040 with FPU/MMU for better performance? There's a guy in town who stocks old 68k CPU's (he sells Amiga accelerator boards), and they were pretty cheap.As an added bonus I got an external CD-ROM drive with the LC, which is great because otherwise I wouldn't have had any way to get new software onto floppy disks.
There was an accelerator card in a bin that seemed interesting, but I have no idea if it will fit in an SE/30. Some googling seems to indicate that it's a Fusion Data Tokamac FX, the CPU on it is an LC040 of the same type as in the LC 475, and it's apparently a fairly rare breed of board. I haven't been able to find any drivers or anything of substance related to it, other than people asking the same questions I am.Besides the 4 Macs I brought home with me my friend also got an SE FDHD, SE/30, Quadra 950 and a beautiful old Plus in great shape, including a HD20. The guy we got them from was a real character, we had a great time and he seemed happy to be rid of all his old stuff. There was one more SE/30 which sadly was completely destroyed from battery leakage, a Mac IIsi with a missing ROM SIMM and what looked like a faulty PSU, and a similarly dead Color Classic. Another pretty cool item he had was a replacement CRT for a compact Mac, still in the original packaging, with protective sheet taped to the screen etc, still wrapped in original plastic. I have no idea if there's any monetary value in it, but the coolness factor was quite high. Needless to say I didn't even ask if I could buy it from him, and he probably wouldn't have parted with it for any amount anyway.
So, my plan for the near future is to order replacement caps and get all the logic boards sorted. What's the recommendation on the PSU's, my guess would be to replace caps on those as well?
I'll probably put new electrolytics on to start with, and once I'm satisfied the Macs are running well I might put tantalums on. Replacing every cap on all four machines with tants would apparently be a rather expensive exercise; I'm not made of money, after all.
And here's a photo I snapped of the beauties!
Cheers!
Andy
