Smoke in the Basement

On 5/30/06, Gerhard Lenerz <mail at g-lenerz.de> wrote: Well... my other "big smoke" incident was nearly 20 years ago, working for a one-man-show kind of company. I worked for him for a summer, helping out with RK05 and LP05 refurbishment (he would buy clearance stuff by the pallet and get working what he could and resell it in known-good condition), assembling XT clones for CompuServe (one of our larger customers), etc. I plugged in an RK07 one day and it was like a smoke bomb went off. I was right there and hit the breaker, confining the emission to about a cubic meter of thick black smoke. Inspection of the PSU revealed a (one!) 1A rectifier diode had given up the ghost. The cause was a nearby electrolytic that was shorted. The repair was literally a $0.06 diode and the dead cap. That's it. It took us a few minutes searching around the shop to find a spare cap - this one was almost the size of a golf ball and screwed down to the PSU - not impossible to find, but not exactly overflowing on our parts shelves. After that - one happy RK07. I'm pretty happy overall with the quality of the mid-80s DEC hardware. I'm sure someone can come up with something that could have been made more robust, but in general, I always like worked on that type of gear (I must - I have a house full of it ;-) -ethan