appreciate those links, there's probably a couple of hundred rivets holding my canopy together so worth me going for the lazy tongue one.
[/quote]
Sounds like a good plan then! I'll probably grab one myself at some point to be honest. Especially as there will be quite a few rivets needed when I pull the roof next year to fit the head lining. Quite a few of the things inside the car are riveted to it.
-- -- --
Time for a regularly scheduled wander into the world of electronics.
Not long ago I picked up a rather scruffy Toshiba T1200 laptop, the intention being to make one good machine out of this and the remaining bits of one I had a good few years ago. Yesterday morning I decided it was time to start investigating it while we were waiting for a call back from the vet to go pick up Tesla who had been in for an eye operation.
I'd forgotten how easy to get into these machines are. About a minute in we were at this stage.
Oh if only all modern machines were this easy to get in to!
Nice to see that we do have the additional 384K memory expansion board fitted.
Looking at the power supply board, it was no surprise whatsoever to immediately spot obvious signs of capacitor leakage.
In addition to this, there was one obviously visibly blown transistor.
The only marking on this is 11397 which so far hasn't turned up anything particularly useful on a Google search. That's going to be fun to track down...
*If* I can find the original PSU I might be able to scavenge the transistor in question... though to be fair if I can find it just recapping it and swapping the boards would probably be the way forward as my original one had issues with leaky caps causing it to shut down and go into a fault mode, but it had never gone pop like this clearly has...Time for another rummage in the loft to see what remains of my original machine I can find. I want the keyboard and lower case at least anyway.
8086 processors aren't that unusual, though I think this is the first time I've seen an 80C86 - which I believe is a CMOS based version of the 8086 for low power applications.
While not massively widespread there's definitely some evidence of a little bit of that capacitor goop having made its way to the motherboard.
In addition to the capacitor goop, the motherboard (like everything else on the machine) was filthy so would be wanting to come out for a clean anyway.
Here's the oddball JVC/Ricoh hard drive, it's connector and the interface card. Bet that hybrid module cost a packet back in the day.
The card wasn't fitted to these machines if they didn't have the HD option ticked. Though if I wanted a cleaner donor machine for anything, the non HD equipped ones do seem more plentiful and usually sell cheaper...so it would be easy for me to now upgrade one.
The keyboard isn't the worst one I've ever cleaned, but it's up there in terms of ones that haven't gone swimming in coffee.
Before any further investigation was going on, the motherboard, PSU and the keycaps needed to be cleaned. I would have liked to do the whole upper case moulding, but haven't figured out how to detach the display without tearing off stickers yet. Off they go to the parts washer...
After an hour the keycaps and the vent cover for the hard drive were removed to avoid the heat from the drying cycle.
They look a bit better! Obviously still yellowed and still worn, I can't do anything about that just now...but at least they're clean now.
I'll probably still swap the keyboard for the one from my original T1200 as it's a far lower mileage example...but this was getting cleaned before I even let it near the spares box!
A little later in the day, the boards had finished cooking...Let's take a closer look. Power supply up first.
That's a little bit less disgusting at least. Looking closer however shows that it's in quite a poor way. Quite a few tracks have dissolved.
Quite a lot of these are downright tiny so repairing them will be a pain. So for now I think we will sideline this PCB until I've had a chance to dig out my original PSU and pray it's in a better state.
How about the motherboard?
Here's a closeup of the connector that was looking distinctly green in the original photos.
However I think I've made a discovery which has indeed rendered this a "parts" machine and nothing more.
You know that point on an a car where you drain the oil and see that horrible silvery sheen in it, that you know is metal that used to belong to critical bits of your engine? I think spotting this was the electronic answer to that.
Look more closely at the CPU...
See that little white mark? The thing that I thought was a bit of hair and went to brush away...
Uh oh...
Yep...That looks to be a crack in the package. I have a sneaking suspicion that the magic smoke has escaped from this CPU.
My current theory is that one of two things has happened in the PSU...
1. Due to conductive capacitor goo getting into places it shouldn't on the board, the 12V input has leaked onto the 5V output line (I *think* the only lines this has are 12V and 5V).
2. Due to the dissolving tracks, we've lost a feedback line somewhere and one or both of the output voltages have skyrocketed until something went bang.
It's possible that there was some catastrophic failure on the motherboard and that that caused the transistor we've found popped on the PSU to go...but the PSU going haywire and nuking the motherboard seems rather more likely to me.
The question at this point becomes whether anything useful has survived. As far as I know the motherboard on my old machine was fine, the only issue with it was in the PSU. It had just gone into a protection mode (flashing red light), and I've not been aware of anything going bang...so fingers crossed I'll still be able to make one good machine out of the two. I need to find the box of bits of my old T1200 first so I can find out what parts I'm actually missing.
I'd really like for the hard drive and its interface card to have survived as those drives are really rare, and my one has been sitting since at least 2001 so I've no idea whether it will still be in working order - as due to the proprietary nature of it I've not been able to just plug it in and spin it up as I try to with most of my historic drives on a reasonably regular basis. While I do have a note of the pinout, annoyingly these drives behave in a way (somewhat like some SCSI drives) meaning that they won't actually start the spindle motor until a motor enable signal is sent from the controller...and when I last looked there were three conflicting reports on what voltage that pin wanted to be supplied with...and I'm not about to go and blow up my drive that's made of pure unobtanium by guessing.
Toshiba seemed to like oddball hard drives in the last days of the 1980s, they used a similarly obscure and proprietary drive in the T3200 (NOT the SX/SXC etc versions, those used a standard Connor I'd drive) in the form of a Fujitsu M2227DT. A totally different but equally proprietary drive, in 40Mb form.
One of these.
Here's the interface connector.
This at least doesn't have the same issue as the T1200 drive where it requires a signal to enable the spindle motor...and it has a standard Molex connector for the power supply. So as soon as you hook power up it starts up. This is good because it means that I know this drive hasn't suffered from any of the horrible issues you hear of where spindle motors seize up or where the heads stick to the platters. It's always a nice one to spin up anyway as it has a really unusual sounding spindle motor.
Would have been rude not to dig it out of the hard drive stack and record it for you wouldn't it?
No video as I just stuck my phone on top of the drive to capture the audio. Would really like to get hold of another T3200 one day so I could actually get it doing something more than the start up head seek and home.
I *think* this is quite an early drive to use a voice coil head actuator rather than a stepper motor one...though prepared to be corrected on that.
Hopefully at some point I'll be able to get up into the loft and dig out the remains of my original Toshiba T1200 and then we can have a look at what bits we've got. I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that anything attached to the motherboard is likely to be toast at this point though. Bit of a disappointing result really, but that's how these things go sometimes!
EDIT: Do these steps qualify as having started to sort out the garage?
The socket sets, spanners, allen keys and the box of drill bits now have homes attached to the garage wall in easy reach. So I don't need to drag a heavy tool box all the way out of the far end of the garage or more likely wind putting them somewhere more nearby because I'm lazy...and then forget where they were! The black socket set is by far the most commonly used tool, hence having stuck it right by the door.
