Not so much a conquest but a rediscovery

[MattB]

I took a long weekend to visit my family up in Massachusetts this weekend, and decided to pull out my old vintage Macs tonight. They have been in my parents' basement (with a dehumidifier, they have never gotten wet) for the past six years or so. I achieved the following results.

512K: will not boot, screen displays a white line and the system constantly tries to eject a disk even when nothing is in the drive.

Plus (beige): boots fine, 100% functional

LC w/13" monitor: boots fine, 100% functional

LCII w/13" monitor: boots fine, 100% functional

Performa 575: 100% functional

For having been stored this long, I'm happy with this result. I'm going to tinker with the 512 a bit to see if I can get it to function.

 

[Scott Baret]

It's always great to rediscover an old Mac! I just got my 512Ke out of storage after almost 4 years (still works fine!) and it was almost like finding something brand new. Good luck with your 512K, make sure to check those caps. Glad to hear the others were fully functional after so long!

 

[MattB]

Is that kind of screen/FDD behavior indicative of bad caps? The Plus working was really the biggest surprise to me after the 512 failed to boot. Now I need to find some of my old floppies with programs that will run on it.

 

[iMac600]

The 512K sounds like it has a dry joint. If you don't hear a chime, a constant repeated ejecting sound from the FDD and a white line on the display (or nothing at all) then i'd suspect the solder joints on the analog board before replacing the caps. When I opened my machine up, I saw this in a number of places:

Repairing those resolved the problem. After discharging, inspect the analog board for any suspicious looking solder joints and resolder them. Also go over all the solder joints holding the flyback transformer in place as this is a high tension and high voltage area that has been known to fail, producing some interesting anomalies including the one you've described.

I'll bet that after some small, cheap repairs that 512k will work along with the rest of them.

 

[MattB]

Thanks for posting that. The next time I visit my parents (Thanksgiving) I'll have to crack open the 512 and see how it looks inside. Hopefully I can bring it back to a working state.