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It lives: The Mac Portable restoration is complete!▸
It lives: The Mac Portable restoration is complete!
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It lives: The Mac Portable restoration is complete!
http://gallery.mac.com/fourseason7444/100016
After much procrastination, I finally got around to replacing all of the electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard, and that seems to have solved all problems--crackling audio, sudden shutdowns, etc. Where possible, I replaced surface-mount types with same (and hopefully better quality). The surface-mount caps are the little silver aluminum cylinders, and most had leaked. Surface mount parts were actually pretty easy to replace, but it takes a steady hand. The conventional caps were difficult, and if I were to do another restoration, rather than unsolder the caps from the board, I'd try to snip off the old part, leaving a bit of the wire lead sticking up from the board, then solder the new part to the old leads. Much less chance of damaging plated-through holes and lifting foil traces if you do that.
Older restoration jobs include a rebuilt main battery and a 1.3 gigabyte 2.5" IDE hard drive, adapted to SCSI, fitted into a 2.5"->3.5" adapter bracket and connected via home-made 34-pin SCSI cable. The hard drive + IDE/SCSI bridge card was an Apple service part intended for owners of older Powerbooks in need of an out-of-production 2.5" SCSI hard drive, but it works just fine here too.
The restored system seems rock-solid! Cost of capacitors was about $10, because I got them all as surplus.
After much procrastination, I finally got around to replacing all of the electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard, and that seems to have solved all problems--crackling audio, sudden shutdowns, etc. Where possible, I replaced surface-mount types with same (and hopefully better quality). The surface-mount caps are the little silver aluminum cylinders, and most had leaked. Surface mount parts were actually pretty easy to replace, but it takes a steady hand. The conventional caps were difficult, and if I were to do another restoration, rather than unsolder the caps from the board, I'd try to snip off the old part, leaving a bit of the wire lead sticking up from the board, then solder the new part to the old leads. Much less chance of damaging plated-through holes and lifting foil traces if you do that.
Older restoration jobs include a rebuilt main battery and a 1.3 gigabyte 2.5" IDE hard drive, adapted to SCSI, fitted into a 2.5"->3.5" adapter bracket and connected via home-made 34-pin SCSI cable. The hard drive + IDE/SCSI bridge card was an Apple service part intended for owners of older Powerbooks in need of an out-of-production 2.5" SCSI hard drive, but it works just fine here too.
The restored system seems rock-solid! Cost of capacitors was about $10, because I got them all as surplus.
Wow, congrats on getting that done! Looks like it was quite the project.
Nice work, how long is your battery life?
Thanks, folks. Battery life isn't so hot right now, because I rebuilt that battery what, 2 years ago? And they must have sold me old stock, because they never took a full charge even then. With a fresh set, I figure 5+ hours, easily.
sweet dude!
that is one neat looking computer!