Quadra 605 chime of death.

[olePigeon]

I have a Quadra 605. Used to work perfectly. I tucked it away in the closet for a few months until I got my 5.25" floppy drive. Took it back out to use ADT with the IIe card and I got the chime of death.

I took the IIe card, RAM, and VRAM out, plus disconnected the floppy and HDD, and it still chimes.

Fortunately, no sad Mac, just the chimes.

Any thoughts? I can't zap PRAM, it chimes before I can do that.

 

[applefreak]

first : clean the ram (clean the contacts of the ram with a clean pencil eraser) and reseat a minimum of ram

 

[olePigeon]

Well, I think I found the problem. I lifted the Quadra up for a better angle in the light to see if there was any dirt in the RAM slot, and one of the capacitors just fell off. The pad was completely corroded. :O When I had it plugged in, I smelled the unmistakable sweet stench of frying electrolytic goop, I figured it might be a bad capacitor. At least this saves me time figuring out which one.

Fortunately I happen to have quite a few of the same kind, the 4uf 16v surface can from when I was attempting to recap a bad LC board. Unfortunately, I have the worst luck with trying to solder surface mount resistors and capacitors.

I'll give it my best shot. :I

 

[CJ_Miller]

What is the "chime of death"? Is it the broken-glass sound?

Same thing happens with me. I can use a bit of gear every day and it is fine. But after it is not used for a few days, weeks, months it has a problem. It seems counter-intuitive because I always imagine that use would take a harder toll on anything than just sitting there!

I have an LC475 on the way, hopefully it will run without problems. I also got mine for the ][ card.

 

[CJ_Miller]

edit

I lifted the Quadra up for a better angle in the light to see if there was any dirt in the RAM slot, and one of the capacitors just fell off. The pad was completely corroded. :O When I had it plugged in, I smelled the unmistakable sweet stench of frying electrolytic goop, I figured it might be a bad capacitor. At least this saves me time figuring out which one.
Fortunately I happen to have quite a few of the same kind, the 4uf 16v surface can from when I was attempting to recap a bad LC board. Unfortunately, I have the worst luck with trying to solder surface mount resistors and capacitors.

Sounds like you found the cause of the problem. Same thing happened with an 8100 I found - it worked fine when I found it. It started to flake and when I took it apart for troubleshooting, parts, caps mostly, started falling off of the video card. I suspect that some of these things can pick up a lot of moisture which causes them to corrode and fail. Bad solder could be an issue also.

At least these older things use much bigger SMT than is out there today. On my bench for board reworking I keep tweezers, jeweler's screwdrivers, desoldering bulb, and 30 AWG wire for jumpering. Also a bright directional lamp. As I am getting older I should probably get a positionable magnifier also. Also I avoid jitter, like caffeine and stress, before tackling fiddly bits.

 

[johnklos]

Yah - I just had a similar problem with a VAXstation 4000/90. Sometimes just looking over everything carefully can make all the difference.

 

[olePigeon]

Argh!

The pads were completely corroded off. Nothing but PCB board. I couldn't find any sort of metal to stick any amount of solder on.

 

[olePigeon]

Tried my darndest to no avail.

Sigh. Guess I'll keep my eyes out for a 605 mobo now.

 

[johnklos]

You could follow the traces back a bit and use an X-acto knife to expose them, then solder to them.

 

[CJ_Miller]

The pads were completely corroded off. Nothing but PCB board. I couldn't find any sort of metal to stick any amount of solder on.

I suspected that the pads might have lifted off. That's what the moisture does, lifts the copper laminate off of the fiberglass. Cool thing is that the circuit can still work just fine even if it is lifted up a bit, but since SMT caps are top-heavy they can eventually fall off.

I second what John said, just follow the traces and tack a cap on there. Easier to use one with wire leads than surface-mount for this. If it works you can always use a cyanoacrylate adhesive to keep other large components from moving around. I know it seems disheartening, but these old PCBs can endure a lot and still tick on.

 

[CJ_Miller]

Yah - I just had a similar problem with a VAXstation 4000/90. Sometimes just looking over everything carefully can make all the difference.

[homer]Mmm... VAXstation![/homer] I used them as a kid, and the workstation geek in me still drools over those. I loved loading some CAD system (MicroStation maybe?) and making structures, rotating them around, zooming through them - all without knowing much about what I was doing. My dad working at DEC probably had a lot to do with my early love of these kinds of systems.

Motorola were developing multi-core ECL processors for VAXen around 1990, imagine Macs with those!