Flaky SE/30!

[CJ_Miller]

I couldn't resist. While I am building my first SE with upgrades, I found a guy selling his SE/30. Bought for cheapish with bag and ADB accessories. This way once my accelerated SE is running, I have an official 030 version to compare it to. And it can probably handle more RAM, as well as A/UX. The extra nerd money from my tax returns is finally gone, so I need to scavenge again.

First annoying thing about this SE/30 is that it was held together with one screw only, so I knew that somebody had been messing around in there. It has an internal hard drive, which spins up, but does not mount. So I replaced it with a 1GB drive from an old 7500 and it saw the driuve fine. But when I tried to initialize the new drive, after a long time it failed. So now I am looking around for other suitable small SCSI drives, and see that the SE/30 does not appear to power on anymore. The screen doesn't light, and I hear less activity. Sucks that I have been tinkering with it for only an hour and it is already broken. I will learn how to strip it down and go over it for cleaning, re-seating, re-capping, etc. Too bad, it felt nice for the few minutes I had it running.

 

[CJ_Miller]

I figured out how to remove the board, pulled the SIMMs, gave it a bath. Re-capping this thing was no joke! I have done a fair amount of customization of computers and audio gear, so have done quite a bit of desoldering. I guessed that because they were surface mount, that they would heat and come off easily... They were more difficult to remove than most through-hole parts! The solder pads on the caps are huge and absorb a lot of heat. My iron was as hot as I dared set it at, little chisel tip squarely on the visible portion of the pads. Problem is that half of the pad is under the cap, which makes a challenge to heat sufficiently - especially without lifting traces off of the board. I went over the pads with flux and desoldering braid, heated through and tried to nudge slightly. Only two out of six came off without problems. The other four each lost a solder pad from the board. I took my time, but the results were still sloppy. I replaced caps C3-C7 and C13, then gave up. If it works better I will leave as is.

I had a 1uF cap on hand, and a surprise pile of 47uF which I haven't needed, I used radial electrolytics. Replaced the original 1988 battery with a new one. Gave the ROM and RAM sockets a bit of a scrape. Reseated socketed DIPs. Brushed some of the fuzzier components with isopropyl. Now I am waiting a few hours to make sure it is dry before I try booting it again.

 

[J English Smith]

Looking forward to your next update...hope you can get her working again! I have a Classic II that's hanging in there so far but I suppose it's just a matter of time until the caps go.

 

[CJ_Miller]

Well, there was some improvement. Now I get a startup chime every time, and it doesn't hesitate to boot. Previously I was getting equal thirds of boot, no boot, or simasimac patterns.

What has yet to improve is the SCSI. Some drives it will not detect, others it will detect but fail to initialize. I have tried the drives internally and externally. So it looks like I am going back in there tonight, especially considering that the remaining caps are in the area of the SCSI controller. I am tempted to use a hot glue gun to affix the finished caps in place, but I worry that either the heat might upset a delicate solder connection, or otherwise yield too much of a mess if I need to redo any work on parts in these areas. If replacing the rest of the caps doesn't fix the SCSI, I might desolder the controller and install a PLCC socket for whenever I locate a replacement 53c80 chip.

 

[Osgeld]

I like double sided sticky foam pads (cut to size) rather than hot glue

my glue gun gets wicked hot, but I dont think its enough to melt solder, and your typical craft crap glue guns are usually pretty easy to pick off

I just cant stand having the thing sitting there dripping glue all over my desk until I am ready to use it and all those little spiderweb glue strings