Portable Facepalm II

I'm working on a Kaypro II that I recently bought. The poor thing has suffered at the hands of a previous owner. Among other indignities, the brightness control and reset button were relocated from the back panel to the front for easy access. It appears that the brightness control was just a potentiometer in series with the unshielded video cable between the main board and monitor (assuming that the previous owner just moved it, and didn't change the overall design). The original wires weren't long enough, so he soldered a few feet of small-gauge speaker cord onto the potentiometer, and then spliced it to the video cable with wire nuts. Wire nuts. In the video signal path. WIRE. NUTS. Big orange ones. In the video signal path. I'll make a blog post soon with pictures, but I just couldn't wait to share this. There are several poorly-soldered patches on the mainboard that I'll need to look into to determine if they should stay. One of the lifted pins has broken off, so I'll be doing some repairs for sure. The front panel also grew a toggle switch which is connected to a small board plugged into the CPU socket, with a Z80B and a few other chips on it. The board is marked "(C) 1983 ADVENT PRODUCTS, INC.", and I'll want to figure out what it does so I can determine whether it's something that I want to keep in there. Another mod (?) is a ROM chip marked "Kaypro 8 PRO MONITOR (c)1984 Micro Cornucopia". It has a lifted pin and a badly-soldered wire attached. The machine arrived with some of the internal cables disconnected, and I'm not ready to try applying power to it yet. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/