Build Log: Macintosh Classic

Summary

Continuing the retro computer series, I've recently completed the first part of a restoration of my Aunt's old Macintosh Classic. This Classic was handed to me alongside my Uncle Mark's Apple II, which I'll probably cover later (we've played a game of whack-a-mole with issues on that machine! Well worth it but I haven't hit a point where enough things are working to cover it well, heh). The Classic is a strange Mac—it was introduced in 1990 as a budget version of the 1986 Macintosh Plus, with a 68000 CPU in an era when the 68030 was the new hotness. It started under $1,000, but was a slightly more modern take on the Plus, including a cooling fan, a new motherboard design, and options for up to 4MB of RAM and an internal SCSI hard drive connection. My aunt's Classic was the $1,499 model which comes with a Memory Expansion Card (which boosted the RAM to 2 MB, with slots for up to 4MB), and an internal 40 MB SCSI drive. Evaluating the Condition, Restoring a Classic I've recorded the entire process of restoring the Classic, which is embedded above. But I'll summarize the process here, starting with the most important part: "don't turn it on, take it apart!" That line is familiar to EEVBlog viewers, of course—and in that context it's more about tearing into a new product to see how it's constructed prior to testing it out. But in the case of retro computers, with 40 year old power supplies, RIFA capacitors, and leaky batteries and electrolytic caps... you could just save yourself a lot of trouble by tearing into it before plugging it it in. And in the case of a Macintosh Classic, there are two primary killers: leaky batteries and leaky capacitors. This blog post isn't an exhaustive look at all that could go wrong. For that, I'll direct your attention to videos from the likes of Adrian's Digital Basement, Mac84, Branchus Creations, Action Retro, This Does Not Compute, et all. But in my case, I quickly checked for the common culprits: Leaky battery: Different old Mac model...