Opening a DECserver 90M External PSU

[tony duell]

> > I had another go today, but I fail to see how you managed to pry this
> > thing apart without causing much more damage than appears in your photo.
> > What kind of tool did you use?
> 
> My usual technique to deal with these sort of brick and wall-wart PSUs
> that are glued together is to carefully squeeze their plastic sides in a
> small padded vise to break the glue joint. With practice, you can split

If possible you want to squeeze the 'inner member' of the joint. So what I
do is put the jaws of the vice just to one side of the seam and squeeze, and
if that doesn't help then turn the whole thing over and sqeeze on the other
side of the seam.

> one of these open with little to no damage. Don't be tempted to use a
> mallet as you could with really old linear transformer wall-warts though.
> The g-forces generated by a mallet will break components off of a pc board
> in a switchmode PSU.

Or the other old trick for linear PSU bricks (again, don't try it with SMPSUs)
-- hold the cables about 2' from the unit and swing it round so that it hits
the bench or floor. That often cracks them open with suprisingly little damage.

Oh for the days when we had screws holding such things together!

-tony