3 Apr
2011
3 Apr
'11
5:44 a.m.
On Sun, 3 Apr 2011, terry stewart wrote:
I'll try that later today.
Hi Steve,
I've just finished restoring a couple of Lisas. My situation was a little
similar to yours. I bought three untested units. There were two Lisa 2's
(minus the profiles) and one was a Lisa 2/10. I knew that the Lisa 2/10 had
a fault in the I/O board and one of the Lisa 2s had a memory issue. The
stack came with an extra power pack and one of the Lisas was missing a video
card. That's all I knew. The lot cost $500 New Zealand dollars (about $360
US).
That's a steal. The owner of these machines turned down an offer of $500
US for one unit, so we agreed to defer bargaining until such time as the
functionality is better known.
As it was I managed two of them, although not without
a lot of time and some
cost (like new pads for the keyboards and an X/Profile emulator replacement
for the Widget). However, I'm happy with the outcome and felt it was money
and time well spent. I've documented the adventure under the two links
below.
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2011-01-11-salvaging-a-lisa2.htm
http://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2011-03-05-rejuvenating-a-lisa2-10…
I'll have a look.
The Lisa is easy to take apart and work on. Also
I've found people very
generous with their advice both on this forum and the Goggle Lisa List forum.
The community helped a lot.
Google Lisa list? I'll have to check that out. Wasn't aware of it.
Both the Lisa 2s (not the Lisa 2/10) had minor battery
damage. Luckily not
enough to damage the I/O board though. They still seem to work even though
corroded bits and pieces could be seen. However, one of the motherboards
(backplane) also has battery damage (the acid leaked from the battery on the
I/O board above it) and this seems to have destroyed some tracks. At the
moment this motherboard is sitting in the spare-parts Lisa. I may try to
repair this at one stage by jumpering the broken tracks under the board.
The amount of corrosion on these units is just stunning. There's "crust"
growing on almost every metal surface surrounding "ground zero" (battery
mount point). Some of the screws holding the motherboard to the bottom
pan were so grunged up that I had to slice a slot in the head with a
Dremel grinder and use penetrating oil to get them out. The rear panel
RFI shield of one unit has a "bloom" of rust and crust about five inches
in diameter centered on the battery.
Even the card-edge connector in the rear of the CRT cage is full of crud,
and that's over 6" away!
Unlike my Amiga 4000 (a story in its own right), Apple appears to have
used very high-quality and thick solder resist on the boards. So far
(knock wood) I have not found any dissolved traces - which is just short
of incredible given the scope of the disaster.
My immediate concern is how to safely remove the green crust from resistor
leads, vias and, most importantly, the various bus card-edge connectors.
What have folks used to clean the bus connectors without bending contacts?
Caig contact cleaner was laughed off - didn't even touch the green stuff.
From what
people have told me, vinegar is useful for cleaning up acid
damaged areas, then
followed by rinsing with distilled water (and careful and
complete drying of course). I hope these comments help. I've found the Lisas
fun machines to work on,
and doing so has given me a good appreciation of their innovative design (for
the time).
One point I'm curious about: Has anyone figured out how to initialize a
ProFile for use with a Lisa? The documentation implies that a special
procedure is needed to low-level format the unit and write boot blocks.
I am setup for Apple /// based low-level format (special Z8 piggyback CPU
and firmware), but am unclear as to whether this is the same as what the
Lisa expects. No clue how to write boot blocks, though.
Steve
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