Recent content by SpocksBeer

Yeah I'm in the same boat. I just finished off two SE/30 recaps, so 22 caps, with push/twist. Zero pad damage. Conversely, may years ago I decided my very first recapping attempt would be with hot air on an Amiga A600. How hard can it be right? Yeah, I still haven't gone back to fix the...

Check Adrian's Digital Basement videos, eg this one from about 6 minutes in. Actually he's way more...er...vigorous than I would be, but you can see the board takes it fine. I respect Bruce's work immensely, but I've never been able to replicate it with my equipment. Plus I think there's...

Don't get me wrong, hot air stations are great, but exercise extreme caution using them. Very easy to melt something you didn't mean to, very easy to overheat the old caps and have them pop in your face and very easy to overheat the board and lift a pad. I've tried most methods, and I've done...

Thanks, always nice to get another one back. Maybe this thread will help someone else one day, although this seems to be a pretty unique failure mode even though it had a pretty common solution.

It lives....again! Turns out the fault was with the C13 cap, near the flyback. Completely dried out/not capacitoring. It's meant to be part of a circuit that boosts the 12v from the PSU to 20v for pins 1-4 on the flyback, but the actual voltage was 32v, throwing out all the other outputs...

Update for the interested. I pulled the AB out and removed the protective sheet, to reveal this: That's a short and almost full thickness burn between one leg of the sub brightness control pot and the 30v rail that goes to the neck board. Cleaning out the burnt material has dropped the high...

Narrator: it wasn't Q1. Started another thread :)

Hello all, I have an SE/30 that's a bit sad right now. First the good. Logic board boots (in another machine), 5v, 12v disk and sweep rails are OK. Nothing has been recapped yet, but the core stuff seems stable enough to at least get a bong (well, logic board isn't bonging, but I'll deal...

Nice one @obsolete I've just landed another odd one, an SE/30 where the R1 resistor on the neckboard (big 3w 1kOhm guy) gets super hot when powered on. Symptoms of this one are a very dim image, messed up possibly with retrace lines (I don't run it long enough to really get a good look)...

And winner winner chicken dinner, it was the 2n3904 transistor on the neckboard. Now have a nice usable image (please ignore the tilt). Thanks so much for the tip, zigzagjoe

Thanks, I'll check that first. Would make sense that something on the neckboard got damaged due to the arcing.

Thanks, forgot to mention that it responds normally to brightness controls (in that the image gets brighter and darker as it should), both via the front pot, and the sub-brightness adjustment on the AB, but the retrace lines do not change.

Hi everyone, I have an SE that came to me with a destroyed tube - the end of the neck had snapped off. It spent a little time powered on and arcing spectacularly before I'd realised what was wrong with the tube. After sourcing a replacement tube, it's now looking like this: The machine...

How clean did you get the board after the recap? Cap juice is both corrosive and conductive, so any left on the board can give variable results.

I do and I can, though I'm no expert. Looks like lots of potential for melty bits, so I'll have a think about this. Real pain of a board to diagnose since it has to be fully installed in the case to run.