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Rats... MacPlus just died

Dookie

6502
Wife called to say that she turned on the MacPlus for my daughter to use and she smelled smoke and burning. Analog board probably cooked. Rats. Time to find another one on eBay.

 
whole machines are much cheaper (and plentiful) on eBay than the analog boards. I may check the local stores first. So sad the Mac Plus got roasted.

 
Well, at least keep the old one. If you still have no use for it, I'm positive someone on this forum will eagerly agree to buy it from you, even in its broken state. :)

-Apostrophe

 
whole machines are much cheaper (and plentiful) on eBay than the analog boards.
Yes, but it is unlikely you need a whole analogue board. There is probably one or two components on the board that can be easily replaced. Better than become yet another disposable "consumer" in the world, invest a bit of time in learning to repair the Mac Plus if you are going to be part of the vintage Mac community. Eventually, all of these old compacts will "get roasted" which means even eBay will not help you keep your interest in old Macs going. By all means pick up another one so you don't have to miss a day without using an old Mac! But don't throw the old one away, or shove it into a box in the back of the garage where it will only fall into further disrepair, or even gut it into a Macquarium.

What exactly do you plan to do with the old Mac Plus?

 
I'll echo what Mac128 said. Recapping the analog board would most likely bring life back into that machine. Not so hard to do, if you have balls of steel. :D

 
No plans to trash it yet (I mean recycle). I just put it in the basement and will crack it open to see what got smoked. You guys will hear from me to see if the analog board can be repaired. Sits next to my 512k that also needs a working analog board. Ugh.

Time to break out the Quadra 650...

 
Once you get around to opening it up and taking a look around, post back with your findings. It may be fairly simple to put the magic smoke back where it came from.

A bad solder joint at the deflection yoke connector can often cause things to heat up to the point of smoking. It's readily fixable, as are many other common analog(ue) board problems.

 
This may well be the class X2 filter capacitors on the analogue board. These explode and produce smoke quite easily when they're old, but 1) they're not an essential part of the power supply, so the unit will continue to function perfectly in that condition, and 2) it's perfectly safe to do so.

I've had loads of BBC Model Bs, a couple of Mac Pluses, and Apple IIe, and some others had this happen to them. The parts probably cost something like $2 in the US, and anybody who can fix TVs could probably do the repair for beer money.

 
Thanks all. I opened it up and didn't observe anything obviously wrong. However, when I try to power it up, I just get a faint rapid "clicking" sound and nothing happens. Ironically, this is the same problem with my Mac 512k. Any suggestions on which component(s) of the analog board failed?

 
The clicking sound can be many things, ranging from a floppy disk mechanism attempting to do something, to a power supply in self-protection mode.

For some general compact-Mac troubleshooting hints, you might want to take a look at http://68kmla.org/files/classicmac2.pdf. It might not help at all, but at least the price is right. :)

 
It is definitely not the floppy drive as the Mac doesn't power up at all. just a faint "tick tick tick" at about 3-4x per second in speed. Pretty certain it's the analog board. Any suggestion what to look for?

 
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