Scott Small on Nostr: (🧵 4/7) The #Amiga 500 I brought my Amiga 500 to my dad's workbench over the ...
(🧵 4/7) The #Amiga 500
I brought my Amiga 500 to my dad's workbench over the holidays, and finally recapped the thing. It's by far the most difficult recapping job I've done yet - not because there's a lot of capacitors (there isn't), but they're really hard to get out. You have to use a ton of heat, and the holes are so tiny that you have to make sure every bead of solder's gone from the area or you're never going to get the replacement cap back in. It was painful.
And to make matters worse, Dad noticed that the serial port (the male DB-25 connector) was looking pretty rough. Some pins were bent, others were missing entirely, and it was pretty rusted on top of that. So we replaced it, and while that soldering job was even more troublesome than the recapping, we got it done. Only damaged one trace, which was fixed with a quick bodge wire.
I've got a loopback adapter coming in the mail so that we can double-check that the replacement serial port works correctly, by using the test kit software. Ordered a diagnostic ROM as well (though, silly me forgot to order the EEPROM adapter so I'll need to bodge it to get it to work with my Rev 5 board). Shout out to Retro Rewind, it's great to have an Amiga parts supplier in Canada so that I can get parts at a reasonable price 😁
The keyboard's mostly been serviced, the membrane has been replaced with a PCB that I got from eBay, and I ordered some new plungers from Retro Rewind to replace a couple that had broken as well. Fingers crossed that it'll all work again when I put it back together!
I also picked up an external Gotek drive a few months back from eBay (not sure if I posted about it already) - it works great. I didn't bother with a DF0/DF1 switch since I plan to get an ACA500plus in the future, which can do it in software. But before that, I want to make sure that everything is working stock. Almost there!
I brought my Amiga 500 to my dad's workbench over the holidays, and finally recapped the thing. It's by far the most difficult recapping job I've done yet - not because there's a lot of capacitors (there isn't), but they're really hard to get out. You have to use a ton of heat, and the holes are so tiny that you have to make sure every bead of solder's gone from the area or you're never going to get the replacement cap back in. It was painful.
And to make matters worse, Dad noticed that the serial port (the male DB-25 connector) was looking pretty rough. Some pins were bent, others were missing entirely, and it was pretty rusted on top of that. So we replaced it, and while that soldering job was even more troublesome than the recapping, we got it done. Only damaged one trace, which was fixed with a quick bodge wire.
I've got a loopback adapter coming in the mail so that we can double-check that the replacement serial port works correctly, by using the test kit software. Ordered a diagnostic ROM as well (though, silly me forgot to order the EEPROM adapter so I'll need to bodge it to get it to work with my Rev 5 board). Shout out to Retro Rewind, it's great to have an Amiga parts supplier in Canada so that I can get parts at a reasonable price 😁
The keyboard's mostly been serviced, the membrane has been replaced with a PCB that I got from eBay, and I ordered some new plungers from Retro Rewind to replace a couple that had broken as well. Fingers crossed that it'll all work again when I put it back together!
I also picked up an external Gotek drive a few months back from eBay (not sure if I posted about it already) - it works great. I didn't bother with a DF0/DF1 switch since I plan to get an ACA500plus in the future, which can do it in software. But before that, I want to make sure that everything is working stock. Almost there!