davidg5678

It does reasonably well, but there have been a few instances where I have found the paint to begin flaking off after the treatment. This hasn't happened to me every time, but I had a IIsi that lost about half its silver paint. Overall, the compact macs have done okay. I'm personally happy to lose a bit of paint if I can lower the risk of "marbling" the computer with a failed cream retrobrite. I have also noticed that metal shielding tends to corrode, so I always remove it first. This often means I have to cut the melted plastic holding it in place and glue it back down afterwards.

What a nice Apple II! Someday, I hope to find one like this for myself. I think the smoke is likely related to a common issue with the PSU. Inside of the PSU, there are a few capacitors labeled RIFA that fail over time. They eventually crack and let out bad-smelling smoke. You should be able to just replace them with new filter capacitors, and everything will in theory work again. Something else that commonly goes bad are the RAM chips. I've heard that people often need to replace several chips before the computer works correctly.

Welcome to the forum! That bin looks perfect--there's almost no wasted water! For what it's worth, I have had good luck with the technique you are using. I prefer immersing everything I retrobrite, because it seems go slower and more evenly. This method provides much more control than creme in the sunlight does. If you google "retrobrite failure", unfortunately, I'm the second thing that comes up (#1 on DuckDuckGo!), so as you can imagine, I have had some experience with retrobrite going poorly. I ruined a Macintosh SE a few years ago with peroxide creme, and I've never used it aga

Excellent work!

I believe I experienced a similar issue once with my Mac Classic. I was able to get more accurate information by using a newer version of TattleTech. I think that the program misidentified my computer as a Macintosh Plus, so it wasn't sure how to provide the correct date of manufacturing.

It looks like you've replaced several of the original SE/30 (video?) chips with modern Atmel Microcontrollers! This project is so amazing -keep up the good work!

I think I've observed the same issue with the chart as well on some of my boards. I'm not certain of this, but I think this is okay as long as the continuity beep is not permanent. I think that since the voltages at the floppy connector are good, this means that the ground isn't shorted to the voltage rails. You may wish to continue checking the continuity of the address and data buses on the logic board. I would still guess that there is a break somewhere. The schematics I've linked above include a handy matrix of all of the pins to help make this easier. It is good

Welcome to the forum! Hopefully this Macintosh can be brought back to life! It looks like you have done all of the right troubleshooting steps so far. Your recapping work looks pretty clean and professional. For troubleshooting purposes, I would only use the original ROM and RAM at first, as aftermarket chips sometimes cause errors similar to what your computer is showing. Because the computer is not chiming after the power switch is flipped, I believe this means that the ROM is not being accessed correctly. From what I remember, a bad connection to the ROM, or when no ROM is insta

Has the Mac SE/30 been recapped yet? If not, I would confine further troubleshooting only to your Mac SE, as this should make things simpler. An un-recapped SE/30 is likely to have SCSI problems (among many others) and so it is a difficult machine to use before restoration work at this point. Just making sure: You haven't been plugging in and unplugging SCSI cables while the computer is running, right? This would probably kill the SCSI controller chip in both the Mac SE and the SE/30. I would recommend using the SCSI2SD with your Macintosh SE and following the instructi

The component you have circled is the flyback transformer. The glue looks to be in very poor condition. It is the brownish stuff around the edge. When these machines come from the factory, it starts off as a tan color. Computers that were used for a very long time and been very hot have transformers that look like yours. I would probably not recommend touching this part of the analog board when it is energized, at least not without some further research about analog board operation. This part likely had thousands of volts running through it when you poked it. I think you'll need to find a repl

As far as I understand, I think there was just some small company who went through the effort to reverse engineer these computers by hand. They drew up schematics for them by hand as well. Considering this, I think it is pretty impressive how accurate the BOMARC schematics are -for the most part. The diagrams are very useful for troubleshooting, and it is nice to have something to rely on when the scan quality of Apple ones is unusable. ----I am looking forward to the day when all of the vintage computer schematics have been recreated digitally. It would make troubleshooting things so much eas

+1 Recommending @JDW's YouTube videos. They are extremely thorough, and they should contain all the information you'll need to disassemble your Mac. There are videos about the floppy drive lubrication process, removing the analog board, and removing the PSU. I'd once again recommend using an ice cube tray to organize your screws. I really like iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit. It has the tools to repair tons of household electronics. The tools are really high quality, and iFixit has a nice lifetime warranty too. Once, they replaced a single bent screwdriver bit for me free of charge! https:

I think the idea of resin is to stop the irregularly-shaped logic board from wobbling around, or from being anything but perfectly level as the milling machine slowly removes each layer. Honestly, with every component removed from the board (thus making it flat), this may not be necessary. As far as I know, somehow, milling machines should be able to clamp to a thin rectangle pretty well. They should also be precise enough to remove thousandths of an inch from the PCB, too.

What looks exciting to me is that you can use the Catalina Patcher on this model of iMac to install Mac OS Catalina. Big Sur might also be possible with a bit more work. In terms of maxing the computer out, I think you should opt for an SSD drive over anything else, even if its an $18 256GB drive. The computer will be considerably more usable and faster this way. I still regularly use a 2010 27" iMac. I have installed an i7 870, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, and an AMD RX560. My computer is still completely usable, and if I wanted to, I could even install Big Sur onto it. Unfortunately, I

The good news is that you can practice this procedure on a really cheap thrift store monitor before trying it on a nice Apple ADC one. I have considered trying to replace the CCFL backlight inside my iBook Clamshell with an LED one, but I am holding out until it becomes absolutely unusable, just in case I accidentally break something. Then again, if I do, I guess I could just upgrade the panel to an XGA one.