2 May
2011
2 May
'11
9:29 p.m.
On 2011 May 2, at 12:31 PM, Jos Dreesen wrote:
Having been given, some time ago, 2 8/L core memory
stacks to test and
then sell, I set about and fired up my 8/L. This 8/L was bought some
years ago for around 500 USD, in known working condition. Try this
today....
<snippage>
Which is when disaster struck ... The new magnifying glass setup was
unstable and landed where it could cause maximal damage : the coremat
itself, with around 40 cores broken........
Major major bummer, and really only myself to blame. Not only was the
stack now lost, but I also now cannot produce evidence that the core
repair worked.
So in conclusion : can core memory stacks be repaired ?
Potentially yes, but it is every bit as difficult as you would expect,
and only certains failure modes are repairable. In the 8L stack an
additional difficulty is the way the stack is build up with 128 wires
to be snipped, 128 holes to be cleaned and to be rewired, all without
damaging the cores.
So i now have 2 stacks, one Fabritek, one Dataram, both opened.
Mechanical differences prevent building one good stack from the two
damaged ones.
The Fabritek has two known good coremat-pcb's, the Dataram has two
potentially good coremat PCB's.
I have spent rather too much time on this, and am open to offers on
these stacks, in the condition described above.
If someone wants to sell their known-defective 8L / 8I
Dataram/Fabritek corestacks, I would also be interested.
A valiant effort, really too bad you weren't able to at least check out
the success of your repairs. I guess you could relegate the planes to
wall art now, like so many other core planes.
I too have dropped a tool on an open core plane and broken a block of
cores (it doesn't take much to crush them) but the plane was being
prepared for a wall display and the damage is barely visible so it was
no great consequence.