General Stuff(tm)

[stephen_usher]

I do dislike eBay sellers who break up machines and then sell the parts for LoadsAMoney(tm).

Case in point is the bloke I bought the Apricot monitor from. I see where he got it (and the other he was selling) now. The pictures were showing the BIOS screen for a fully working F2...

He's selling two motherboards for what he says is an Apricot F10, not working... That's because he's extracted the ROMs and selling those separately. Actually, the motherboards are for F2s, and he's selling the cases separately, as he is the power supplies. I've not seen him selling the floppy drives yet.

The total is probably four or five times the price of a complete and working machine.

[Steve]

Well I totally understand you, but just to play some devils advocate - these are big and heavy machines & are generally difficult to sell for local pickup. They don't have much of a hobbyist community (if any) and for those reasons I don't think it's too bad (certainly beats him scrapping it all)

[stephen_usher]

Actually, they're dimensionally smaller than an ST and weigh about the same.

[stephen_usher]

I was trying to diagnose why my Win98 PC needed to be reset after the initial power up before it would boot properly today.

I think I found the culprit on the graphics card...

IMG_1681.jpg

A bit bulgy!

Anyway, this afternoon I tried to change the caps.

The Hakko FR-301 desoldering gun (110W power) had a hard time melting the solder but I eventually got the caps off, but clearing the holes was another bit of fun entirely as the ground planes just acted like heat sinks. My normal ANTEX soldering iron wouldn't even melt the surface of the solder, let alone the stuff down the hole to wick it out. My soldering station iron just about managed it with the temperature turned up to 350C! I still had to use a pin drill to open the holes up enough for the legs of the new caps to go through. Then it was "fun" soldering the new caps in as I had to keep the iron at 350C and even then it took about 10 seconds to get the joint up to the solder melting temperature.

I've not tested the card yet as I put a different one in the machine but it looks OK. Phew!

[exxos]

Oh the condensers blown its hat off :lol:

I use 450c iron for stuff and that struggles. I have a hot air station set to 500c to give things a boost. Or a hot bed can help a lot as well.

[Tomswork]

I have the heat problem with alot of pc board and use the iron and hot air to get the parts off


Tom

[rubber_jonnie]

I was going to add that for that sort of stuff I do preheat with hot air and then have my desolder gun set for 450C.

[stephen_usher]

I was working at home today and there was at least some sunshine so i made the most of it and retrobrighted my Panasonic KX-P1081 printer.

IMG_1689.jpg

The front cover over bleached slightly and was a bit mottled, even though it was outside for far less than a quarter of the time of the main cover, knob and switch sliders. It's obviously a different plastic formulation as it hasn't oranged as much as the other plastics.

Anyway, it's a looking a lot better now. This is the "before" picture (taken a couple of years ago).

IMG_1522.jpg

[stephen_usher]

The static RAM for my Apricot RAM board project arrived form Mouser today and I was surprised by the packaging...

IMG_1694.JPG

Has anyone else seen this sort of warning before?

Surely if it's that sensitive to moisture it's not going to last long in service, especially in some parts of the UK.

(The chips are CY62167GE-45ZXI, 16Mb, 1MBx16 asynchronous static RAM, 5.5V compatible.)

[derkom]

Has anyone else seen this sort of warning before?

Surely if it's that sensitive to moisture it's not going to last long in service, especially in some parts of the UK.

Yeah, my CPLDs for the TF536s came with the same warning label, from Mouser.

Notice that the label just says that the warning sensitivity applies prior to reflow soldering, not actual service of the component.

I don't know why these things are moisture sensitive. Perhaps someone else can explain. In my case, I soldered on one of the CPLDs (by hand, though, not reflow) a couple of months after opening the package and it was fine.