Macintosh Classic
Capacitor replacement 💾🔧🐥
Hello Flock!
Here is my latest project I have been working on.
A little background:
I've been a big fan of the 8-Bit Guy on YouTube and had seen some of his retro computer videos, so I was inspired to buy my own.
Jason's Macintosh Museum 's videos were also inspirational, as were many other YouTube channels.I ordered a Macintosh Classic from Etsy in 2015. It was listed as working condition complete with a mouse, keyboard, and power cable.
In the listing description, the seller mentioned:
"He's not ready to become a fish tank."
Here is a picture from the page:
This was touching! I promised myself I would not make this machine into a fish tank.
So I went ahead and ordered it.
I received the Macintosh Classic in a well packed box and it powered on and did the thing!
It was so wonderful comparing the differences and similarities with modern operating systems.
Playing with it, the OS kept throwing a few errors regarding the Motorola processor not being the correct one, but that's the one it had installed! A simple reboot would get rid of the message for the meanwhile.
I opened it up to look at the parts and put it back together.
Fast forward to early 2018:
The Thomas Fire happened in December 2017, I was evacuated and did not return home for 10 days.
Unfortunately, the Mac could not be evacuated. It stayed at home, where the wildfires got threateningly close.
The house survived the fire but the inside had water damage, with smoke and ash covering everything. Several of my electronics' batteries burst, such as my GameBoy Advance SP and several remote control batteries.
During the next few months, I check to see if my devices worked.
Powering on the Mac now displayed this:
There was some occasional flickering/warping and clicking sounds. Scary!
I read articles online regarding Macintosh checkerboard-ing, and found that many others have had to replace the capacitors on the logic board.
Luckily, I already had a cap kit from the local electronics store, because I wanted to replace them a while back. The task seemed intimidating, but I found help from my friends.
Here are the replaced capacitors.
In several articles and YouTube videos, people mentioned that washing the board will sometimes get the Logic Board to work without having to remove the capacitors.
The capacitors were already replaced but there had been some leakage from the old capacitors.
So we washed the board and cleaned it with 99% alcohol.
The board was dried properly and replaced, but unfortunately the checker-boarding still happened.
The Mac was opened back up.
The Analog board had not been checked, so it was taken out. A friend helped me to discharge the CRT monitor, as not doing so can be extremely dangerous.
Upon inspecting the Analog Board, I found that the capacitors on this board were leaking onto the board.
All capacitors were removed, except I missed one. I got to that one towards the end of the project though. During the process, the whole room smelled of rotten capacitors.
I took note of the specs of each capacitor and it's location.
I cleaned the board with some Q-Tips and 99% alcohol.
I ordered the parts from Digi-Key and made sure it matched the correct values. When the parts arrived I tested each capacitor to see if they worked and they all were.
Here is the finished re-cap of the Analog Board:
Unfortunately the capacitor I missed, happened to be very stubborn. I accidentally ripped off a pad with the de-soldering gun. A patch had to be made.
Putting the Mac back together:
Moment of truth, powering on the newly re-capped Macintosh Classic!
Tada! Success!
It's great to have it boot up again!
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Although it boots up, it still needs some work.
The floppy disk drive doesn't quite read the disks anymore. Pushing the floppy down once inside helps, but it still wants to format it each time
Future Projects
- Fixing floppy disk drive ✅ Floppy Drive Clean-Up
- Refreshing/reinstalling System 7
Pico
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