UNIBUS backplane finger contact repair

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed May 13 09:24:15 CDT 2015


I have a very strong suspicion that the answer to this is going to be 'no',
but I figured I'd do due diligence and ask...

I have a backplane (one of the rodent barn group) which has a couple of finger
contacts in the backplane missing. (Two came out while I was cleaning it - and
I wasn't being hard on them, they must have been eaten away by the same kind
of chemical action that lifted traces off the boards.)

Is there any way to replace broken/missing finger contacts? I would _guess_
'no', since it looks like the backplane blocks (the things cast out of dark
green plastic, which looks like Bakelite - anyone know exactly what it is,
BTW?) are cast around them (since there's a wire-wrap pin on one side, and a
finger contact on the other).

If the answer _is_ 'no', no biggie - all except one are on one SPC slot, and
it's a 9-slot backplane, so we'd lose one SPC slot - not the end of the world.
The other pin is in the UNIBUS in/out area (1/9AB), _but_ the antique hardware
gods are smiling on us, it's a ground pin (of which the UNIBUS connector
pinout has multiple, so we can probably withstand the loss of one).

Thanks in advance for any help!


       Noel


More information about the cctech mailing list