Wife twisted my arm into buying an SE/30

[carguyty]

Just kidding! I'm the luckiest guy in the world when it comes to a wife in support of this hobby. 

I frequent a local recycler. Last Friday, I went to drop off a couple old VGA monitors and my wife spots a 22" Cinema display that caused immediate salivation. I've got no ADC video cards nor any PowerPC desktops, but she insisted that the time would come so it went in the cart. Well the resident Mac guy came out and we proceed to shoot the shit about my current projects. She wanders off in search of an Xbox. We get past the usual Power Mac discussion and he mentions that a lot of "beige stuff" has been coming in.

He mentions this really neat little one (He's not much of a Mac guy if you couldn't tell. He just knows that there is a lot of interest and he could see me coming a mile away.) that has some covers or something. He hadn't even tried to turn on the damn thing! So he wheels out a big cart with huge boxes of floppy disks and manuals all looking pristine and it's an SE/30! 

I'm going over the keyboard and case and making sure nothing smells bad or has sticky goop leaking out of it. He comes back with a power cable and sure enough, the thing blinks to life. No boot chime, though   Oh well. He's surprised to learn it has a hard drive and we both see the light on but no boot disk is found. The Macintosh Tour disk boots, though. That's a blast from the past! We talk turkey and make a fantastic deal on the whole lot of toys, including the original case and keyboard slip covers. I'm ecstatic! The one caveat he makes is that I make some disks that can boot the 68k machines that he's been getting and do some light diagnostics so he can sell them for more than parts. 

The machine isn't on my desk for more than 10 minutes (after carefully cataloging all the software in the kit) before I need to find out how much RAM and how big the HD is. I'm so excited looking up parts I forget what I'm doing and try to re-install the board and go through the disks to see what would boot. This time, there is no sound and an extensive delay before the screen blinks to life. Maybe 20 seconds before anything appears (did I mention how gorgeously burn in free the tube is?!) and I figure this is just because everything is reseated and needs to get remapped or something. What do I know? 

I start to read and get into a story about ROM and ROMinator and figure I should know what I have. Out come the screws! This time I try to reassemble and boot and I get nothing. Nothing for 30 minutes! So now it sits waiting to buy a capacitor kit because I have nowhere better to start. I still got a great deal on what may end up being my only 68k and I couldn't be happier with it!

Why do we love the frustration of these fantastic little machines so much?! ;D

 

[Carboy7]

Yep, thats probably the caps. Recap it or get someone else to do it for you.

 

[techknight]

Yep, first things first. 

STOP everything your doing! (just kidding). 

Seriously though, stop power cycling the machine and get the thing apart, remove the maxell BOMB thats about to blow up and cause a pretty bad day for you. 

Then, you need to wash the board and replace the caps. Also if the HDD is a Quantum you will need to change it out with another solution if you want prolonged usability. And you may need to lube up the floppy drive too!

Then attention needs paid to the Analog Board, I have found though the less hours on the AB, the less likely it needs major attention. 

Other than these "bear necessities", Congrats on the conquest!  

 

[SlateBlue]

I didn't do anything with my SE/30's analog board, but I'm not sure if it's a low-hour machine. What attention should we give the analog board? Just checking for cold solder joints?

 

[techknight]

Yoke connector, and all the other little connectors need resoldering, and so does the flyback. If you have a magnifying lens, you'll see ring-cracks in the solder. 

Then, there is a non polar electrolytic cap that sits right next to the width coil just above the yoke connector, it needs changed occasionally too. it shows signs of stress depending on how many hours are on it. 

I change those out with Film caps. like orange drops, or yellow axials. But they dont fit perfect, but they work! 

Last thing is power supply recapping, I have done a few and only ran into one that had only 1 cap starting to leak. 

 

[carguyty]

remove the maxell BOMB thats about to blow up

Is this a specific component, or are you referring to the general electrolytic pieces? 

 

[EvieSigma]

It's the PRAM battery. There should be a black plastic battery holder on the logic board with a large battery inside of it. 

 

[carguyty]

Oh yeah! I pulled the battery, all the SIMMs and ROM and put those in ASD bags, bagged up the logic board, put the case on the shelf out of the way where I make sure to tell as many people as possible so that I can show off how cool it is...

 

[just.in.time]

Sweet find.  I just recently got my SE/30 up to running condition with some help from Uniserver.  Fantastic little machine that is fun to play around with.  My display is aimed a little low on the tube.  Not by much, but just by enough to be annoying.  i'll have to pop the cover back off soon to bring it up a bit, but the display is bright and sharp with only a small amount of burn in.

 

[techknight]

yeap as long as that battery is out, and you get the logic board cleaned as soon as you can, you should be good to go for a recap. 

 

[carguyty]

What a ride! Talked to trag and ordered the tantalum capacitors and figured I should get some equipment while I was waiting on shipping. After about 90 minuites wandering around Fry's in complete awe, I found some rework tools, flux, solder, and the very last ER14250 (3.6v 1/2 AA) available. Completely overwhelemed by the whole idea that I'm going to be immersing the damn board in the bath, I get everything setup on the counter. Side note, the original battery is stamped with a January 1989 date and a label that identifies it as lithium. Did something change in the way lithium batteries were made or is this original battery a non-leaking varity that should be able to last for some time?

Three hours spent between desoldering, chasing the kids, cleaning the pads, lifting one of the pads, getting the in-laws out of the house, scraping a pad almost completely off the board, feeding the kids, burning my fingers, freaking out about the pads, finally getting the axial caps to release, washing the board, trimming the toothbrush from all the sticky flux, setting fire to all the alcohol on the board (twice...oops!), and scourching one of the precious IC sockets...it's now drying in the sun waiting for the post office to bring my present.

I bought some "no-clean" flux thinking that would be of benefit, but I feel that it left a lot of residue behind after cleaning with soapy water. I chased down plenty of what was smeared on the solder mask using cotton swab and alcohol. There appears to be a few of the ICs that have some sticky gunk between the pins. Should I be able to leave this behind without a lot of problem, or is this one of those things I need to address to prevent future corrosion?

 

[techknight]

the original battery needs to be in a place far far far FAR away from you and that logic board. Trash, recycled, something... 

Also no-clean flux has to be removed with alcohol. 

 

[carguyty]

OK. no arguements with the battery. I already bought the replacement. I only wanted to know if the chemistry was different in '89 that made them more dangerous than they are now.

I'll go attack those little IC legs right now. Does the alcohol dissolve the flux or is it a lot of brushing that gets the goo out of the small spaces?

 

[techknight]

alcohol and toothbrush or some sort of brush to get it out. 

 

[carguyty]

What a day! Just spent 2 hours cleaning and soldering and cleaning again.

First boot, no chime. Only this.



Guess it's time to find a magnifying glass...

 

[techknight]

Probably have quite a number of broken traces. Either by the cap removal, or the IC/Flux rework. 

when working with PCBs you have to be super super careful. 

 

[carguyty]

Tell me about it. I'm not even working with proper tools here. ESD concerns? Those were the least of my problems. I never figured the hardest part of a multi-layer SMD board would be the two through-hole capacitors. Getting those pesky holes cleaned out felt like the darkest hour.

Anyway. I got the chime by plugging in the speaker. Also the rest of the system seems just fine outside of some odd intermitant speaker crackle. Boots to a :?:   The HDD isn't recognized or it's empty. No way of telling.

Anybody have a copy of System 7 they would be willing to share? I'd be happy to make copys of what I expect to be OS 8 on 16 floppy disks or the LaserWriter II disks I got in the aquisition. I'll post the list of everything that came with it shortly. Share and share alike?

 

[just.in.time]

Are you looking for pre-made floppies containing the System 7 installer or the .img files to create your own disks?  If it is the latter, those files are readily available at the garden and many other places on the web (Apple used to host them for free as well, but has since discarded all their legacy software downloads ).

 

[SlateBlue]

This guy will create and send you boot floppies for a fee. Double density 800k disks are relatively expensive which makes me reluctant to give away what few I have.