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Uniserver is almost certainly correct, CRT is gassy, the EHT is arcing. While it can be startling and visually spectacular, it's not particularly dangerous, just don't touch it. Also there is risk of damaging the analog board, especially if it's arcing to the deflection yoke. A CRT that has...

That's easy if you de-yellow the case. I've had the best success by far just mixing a bit of oxy-bright in some drugstore peroxide in a spray bottle and setting the item out in the sun. Mist it with a few squirts every few minutes and it cleans right up, shouldn't take more than 20-30 minutes...

I remember those caddy drives. I think the idea was that you'd have a caddy for each CD you owned. I never knew anyone who did that though, caddies were relatively expensive so we just had one and stuck a CD into it to use it. Silly things.

It's just double sided foam tape. Gently tear it off, usually it will split the foam and you can glue it back together with a dab of superglue. Alternately you can scrape off the remnants and use new foam tape, 3M makes the stuff, you can buy rolls of it in any decent hardware store or home center.

Not particularly, just watch out for high voltage. Even the lead solder isn't a big deal, just wash your hands after handling it.

Most CRT monitors are relatively forgiving when it comes to vertical refresh, it's the horizontal rate that tends to be the most critical. Make sure the pinout is correct through the adapters and actually routing the signals to the right pins. Still it may not be close enough. The monitor is not...

PCI Express is a serial interface clocked at something like 2.5 GHz. I haven't tried, but I would expect NuBus to be far more forgiving as it runs at what, 16 MHz? That's orders of magnitude slower. You might have good luck using cabling similar to SCSI to extend the bus.

The biggest problem is still the sites themselves. It isn't too terribly difficult to get a vintage computer talking to the internet, but my experience has been that very few websites will properly render on an ancient browser and this becomes more and more common all the time. Text based stuff...

There is nothing special about the SCSI drives used in the Quadras, they're just ordinary consumer grade narrow SCSI drives. Do a search on the forum for Seagate Savvio, there has been quite a bit of discussion. I bought a couple some time ago that I run in a couple of my old Macs. I believe...

This has nothing to do with race, it's a matter of economics and culture, the issues being largely our own doing in the eternal quest for cheaper and cheaper goods. It just so happens that China is the current location we as a nation are exploiting for their cheap labor due to low wages and not...

This should probably be moved to the lounge, but I came across an article that does a rather good job IMO of outlining the current problems and some of the underlying causes. http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/alpha-consumer/2009/04/23/explaining-chinas-quality-control-problems There is some...

One of the best cleaners I've found for this sort of stuff is called Oil Eater. It's designed as an automotive/workshop de-greaser but the stuff works great to clean off finger oils and all manner of other crud. For really stubborn stuff, try using it full strength and warm it up in a microwave...

I'm pretty certain Sony was running those factories and imposing their strict quality control on the products. They weren't slapping the Sony label on the lowest bidding outsourced manufacture of the week, which is the current norm for a lot of goods. Companies tend to view a brand as just that...

There is some good quality stuff that comes out of China, no arguing there. The issue I have is that the quality is so variable that you never know what you're getting, and so many established brands with solid reputations have become nothing more than a name and logo slapped on products of...

Measure the voltage at the drive and at the battery as you disconnect the charger. It's possible you have one or more weak cells in the battery causing the voltage to sag rapidly as soon as the charger is disconnected. The battery meter likely won't know how to deal with this, as it expects a...

Have you been to Sears recently? Last time I went was a couple of years ago, but a good number of wrenches were stamped China. A friend of mine noticed recently that even one of the Snapon tools he has was made in China, and the fit & finish is noticeably inferior to the older US-made one.

The only prices that matter on ebay are the final hammer price on completed auctions. There is a huge amount of vintage computer gear listed at fantasy prices that just gets listed over and over with no bids. You can't look at those to determine the value of an item any more than you can go by...

I'm not sure I understand the goal here. Are you trying to learn more about how the original keyboard works, or are you trying to get your own code to run on the microcontroller in the keyboard? If the former, the easiest path is likely watching the interface while interacting with the keyboard...

In theory you can surf the net, a friend and I recently did this on my IIci after getting ethernet working. The problem is that most modern websites use java, flash, and other scripting languages that are not supported by old browsers. Even having a bunch of large (by late 90s standards) photos...

I was disappointed a couple years ago to find that quite a lot of Craftsman hand tools are now made in China. If the name brand stuff is Chinese, I'll just buy the Chinese stuff at Harbor Freight for a fraction the price. I'll pay a premium for quality US made tools, but I won't pay more just to...