Restoring three Commodore PC-compatibles

[Music] hello and welcome back so as you probably know I've already been doing this series of episodes on come for history and I've been quite a few already but I have at least three more episodes of that to finish and one of the episodes I wanted to create was a series on the Commodore PC compatible or ms-dos compatible computers that made a lot of people don't even realize Commodore made ms-dos compatible computers but they did quite a few models actually in fact I already had a couple of them that have been donated me but there were a few of them that I was just not able to find and so I started reaching out or one of the places I reached out was to the Rhode Island computer museum last year I had an opportunity to visit a convention in Rhode Island called the neon retro fest in one of the rooms they had a selection of computers set up which were provided by the Rhode Island computer museum one of the guys from the museum offered to drive me to their warehouse to see everything that they had it was really an amazing sight to see I mean there were just shelves and shelves piled with vintage technology and not just personal computers either but big mainframes and mini-computers too now obviously the organization was not perfect and to be honest if they had all these machines exhibited in a proper museum layout the amount of square footage they would need would be staggering so this place actually rents out to vintage electronics to movie studios who need props for example this next Cube they had on display was the exact one used in the intro sequences of the TV show halt and catch fire anyway one of the things they mentioned was that if I was ever in need of anything I couldn't find to let them know and they would ship me whatever it was and so I reached out to them and they did have a PC 10 which they have shipped me and that's great but I was still not able to find a PC one so in the last video I kind of reached out to the public and and I nonchalantly asked if you know anybody had a PC one and I did receive several offers but they were all out of the country and the closest offer I actually had was from bos Zimmerman and he actually lives down close to Austin Texas well I recently traded in my Chevy Volt for a Tesla Model 3 and I've been looking for an excuse to take it on a road trip and try out the supercharger network it's about a three and a half hour drive something I'm terribly bad so I drove down there hard to pick it up and both had quite an impressive collection of common equipment so let's take a closer look at some of these computers I'm really picky that the computers look original especially when it comes to my historical document reason the metal here is the original color so you can see the front bezel plastic has yellowed some and the keyboard has yellow even worse so that's one thing we'll need to take care of but also unfortunately this computer suffered some minor shipping damage which you can see here I'm not even entirely sure how this would have occurred since it's not crushed in but rather bowing out but after taking a picture of it I was told this image was not there before shipping so I'm hopeful I can repair this as well haven't even opened this thing up yet but looking at the back and appears some of the expansion cards were jolted out of their sockets I hope there's no damage to the motherboard but we'll have to look into that too so let's take a closer look at the PC one I know shipping damaged since high drove this home myself it looks like the main issue here is just yellowed plastic and it's hard to say for sure because the color is fairly uniform but this follows the same design language as this old 1571 disk drive so I'm guessing the color should be the same as that so I'm gonna make an attempt to retro break this and moving on I have this 386 which I also borrowed from BOE and it actually looks pretty good except for this corner hopefully you can see that the corner here is yellowed for some reason so I think this will probably be the easiest one to do and yes I do have permission from both owners to do the restoration attempt so I'm gonna start with the P seat in here this computer was in unknown condition even before they shipped it so there's no telling what I'll find here it has screws at the front like this and um and then some on the rear and something just doesn't seem right about these screws heck this one just pulled right out now this one I had to unscrew but I just don't think these are the screws that came with from the factory okay now I'm gonna open this thing up and see what sort of damage we got during shipping ok I think I see what happened here for all the video card wasn't screwed down but that's not a big deal no real harm done there but this hard card has a different story and this thing is a lot of mass to it and knowing how shipping companies hit throw these boxes around this sucker was almost guaranteed to come out of its socket so it appears this thing rammed into some other parts including this Ram card here which I'll need to deal with in a minute it also looks like the little plastic brackets at the other side which hold the really long cards in place have been knocked off I'll move this one back into place and then this one was completely knocked off so I'll try to put it back on I think it'll be okay and notice that something doesn't look right about this Ram card I don't even think it's in a socket so I'm gonna unscrew it from the case interesting so this was made in 1986 anyway um I can't get it to go back down on the pins and taking a closer look I realized it a few of the pins were bent so I took a screwdriver and started to bend them all back then I was able to get the card back into place and of course screw it back down just an interesting observation the motherboard was made in 1985 so the RAM card might have been an upgrade later I also noticed this transistor I believe that the hard car had knocked it over like this and I think the leads on it may actually be touching each other so I'm going to attempt to pry it back up some this is easier said than done because I could easily damage something if I use too much force okay I think that'll suffice okay let's take a look at this video card now this is an ATI CGA card which actually has some pretty cool features but I'll wait until the documentary to tell you about them however it is missing a nut which is one of my pet peeves for these sort of computers that fortunately I have a stash of extra one so I'll go and put one on there and then tighten it up properly so that it won't come out next time now I'll put this card back in the computer and actually tighten it down append them this card can run at different frequencies for a monochrome or color monitor so I'll need to set it for monochrome that's because I have an official Commodore 1901 monochrome monitor to try it on okay so I'm gonna try the first power on and see if any magic smoke comes out now fortunately it appears to actually work is I have a picture so this is a good first sign it also does appear to detect all 640k of RAM so the RAM card is still working okay so I'll put a Das Boot disc in there and I guess I'd better plug in the keyboard to it looks like the bottom drive lights up so I guess that's the a drive which is weird so I'll move the disc over unfortunately we still get a boot disk failure message I discovered the top drive wasn't even plugged in so uh let me fix that so I tried the top drive again and well it's horrible sound and of course still failed to boot I pulled the discount and noticed it had left this ring of damage on the disk surface well that's irritating my first guess was that there was some debris or something stuck to the head so I used some alcohol to clean them and then rather than risk a good disc I grabbed a blank disc and you can see there's no damage here so I'll stick this one in and give it a try now since it's blank the drive only spun for like one second however looking at the disk you can already see a faint scratch on it so I decided to take the drive apart I mean I know that if I unscrew the heads and take them off there's a good chance the drive will be out of alignment and thus still won't work but at this point I just want to see what's causing the scratching because I figure I can't make things any worse with the heads attached I can only see the bottom head you really want to get a look at the top well here we are and the sad part is I can't see anything wrong nor can I feel anything abrasive with my fingers so I'm at a total loss on this however I need to move along and get this machine ready to retro bright I have a limited time with all three of these borrowed machines and I'm up against another deadline which is the weather according to the forecast I have exactly one day of sunny weather with maybe two days of with a little Sun here and there so I'm gonna have to move quickly to get all three of these computers done so the very next morning I went outside with my usual crate however had my usual spot was in the shade so I had to put my crate in the driveway in fact that it was a little bit cold this morning since it's still spring here in Texas syndrome I could tell this water might be too cold so I checked the temperature and sure enough it was 67 degrees so that's way too cold for retro writing so to warm it up a little light boiled and pot of water on the stove and then then pour that in checking the temperature now it's at 100 degrees which is a good start so I'll let that continue to warm up outside while I disassemble the computer well it looks pretty clean I figured I should clean it anyway just to be sure I would also need to remove the bezels on these floppy drives now these are usually pretty easy to do which is a couple of screws and then popping off the lever although this was one of the most stubborn levers I've ever had to remove but it did eventually come off and then the bezel came off easily the second drive was a little bit more cooperative fortunately enough time has passed that I can move my crate over to the usual spot now as you can probably see the height of the walls on the crate I'm using casts a shadow during this part of the day so in the morning it isn't getting much sunlight and then during the middle of the day it gets a lot of sunlight and then by evening it's back to having a shadow again on the bright side apparently heat plays as much role in this process as UV like this so by covering the top like this it does create a greenhouse effect to help amplify the heat of the Sun so even if the Sun isn't directly above it's still heating the crate ideally if I could find a shorter crate that might work out better anyway I'll set my stopwatch and come back in a few hours and check on it well that's going I need to get this keyboard ready to go as soon as the other parts are done now surprisingly the keys look fine so I won't need to pull them all off I can just remove the bezel and hopefully that's all I need it's a pretty standard keyboard design for the time period and there's just some screws on the back to remove and there we go looks like there's an RF shield on the bottom interestingly the keyboard was made by Cherry apparently on the other side there's another interesting thing apparently it was not only made by cherry but it was made in West Germany okay so it's been about two and a half hours the clean ramp is fogged up which just means there's a temperature variation obviously it's hotter on the inside than on the outside I'll pull the items out since these weren't terribly yellow to begin with it's kind of hard to see any change out here anyway um I'll go ahead and put the keyboard parts in instead I'll go ahead and reassemble everything [Music] [Music] now I need to turn my attention to this bent metal this is definitely an area I'm not an expert in I came up with this method hoping it would work without causing further damage to the metal [Music] [Music] and actually it worked pretty well so the real test will be to put the cover back on and see if it fits right and I think it does but I'll need to screw it back together and that brings us back to these screws I seriously think these are screws somebody just bought at the hardware store so I'm gonna replace them with traditional computer case screws like these and the only thing left to clean are these vents in the rear there we go and here's how it looks the difference is only slight but I can tell the front is now the correct color anyway back outside as several more hours have passed and you can see the shadow is now on the other side so I think this has run its course and the water inside is still nice and warm at 102 degrees and even out here I can already tell significant improvement in the color of the keyboard parts let me draw these pieces off and we'll see what the colors like the color now perfectly matches the front bezel of the computer but it doesn't match the paint of the case however I don't necessarily think that they work exactly the same color for the factory and at this point it would be hard to be sure one way or the other and being that the inside of the keyboard is the same color which shouldn't be faded any that reinforces my belief that we are back at the correct color so let's put it back together and see how it all looks overall I'm happy with the outcome of this one it's definitely good enough for the documentary video that I'm going to be working on next week okay time to move along to the little PC one is pretty clean but I'll go ahead and give it a wipe down now this case is made entirely from plastic which is unusual for a PC of this era anyway um there are just two screws on the bottom and take it apart in your shower comes apart the inside lid has some weird dust patterns which I've seen before now go ahead and clean this off I've wondered if static electricity is the cause for these patterns on the back there's a leftover warranty sticker which I'll go ahead and peel off I think it's safe to say commodore won't be doing any warranty repairs on this some alcohol will take off the residual adhesive so a little concern that this may actually be the original color because it's not significantly different color on the outside than it is in the inside I think maybe it's like maybe like 10% wider on the inside so I don't know what the retro Bratz can do but well no cure shop so again I'm starting early in the morning this is actually the same water that was in there yesterday but notice it has cooled down to 59 degrees overnight if this were summer I'd probably still be pretty warm anyway I guess I'll give it a little head start on one and here's the first piece and the biggest problem I have by using this method is that sometimes this stuff forms bubbles and then floats to the top so I do have to still check on it every hour to also regrettably I lost some footage here somehow but I took this top piece back inside after a few hours and you paired it to the bottom and I could clearly see a contrast proving that it was definitely yellowed some so of course I have to do the bottom half as well so I'll start taking things apart here now believe it or not they're only like three screws holding the power supply in and everything else in this computer is held down by plastic snaps so to remove the floppy drive you just have to use a flat tip screwdriver and pry some snaps loose and there you go the motherboard is held in much the same way and you just have to be careful that once you've freed it from one snap that it doesn't Reese tap while trying to free the remaining snaps this thing uses the same floppy drive mechanism as a PC ten we just finished so I already know the drill here and here's some more warranty stickers to remove once removed I could clearly see the contrast where the original color of the plastic is shown same with this one in the rear after some alcohol it comes right off and you can see the original color anyway fast-forwarding a bit the bottom piece is now finished retro writing and I'll just compare the two pieces I think it looks good so I'll start to reassembling it [Music] [Music] I noticed these rubber feet do not look like the originals and dump dissin sticky stuff on and around them so I just decided to pull them off and replace them with peat that seemed to fit better in these space provided and there we go I think these will work much better and here's the PC one all finished thick it looks a lot better and the last machine we're gonna work on today is this commodore 386 computer the first order of business is to clean these rubber feet marks off the table case alcohol seemed to work well for this okay so there are just two screws on the rear to take this one apart and there we go the front bezel on this computer is held in by snaps instead of screws let's not forget the power switch which is just this long plastic rod going straight to the power supply the floppy drive is also slightly yellowed in places so I'll be removing its bezel as well and so these little pieces here are the only things we need to retro bite today okay fast-forward to the next day and I have attempted to retro bright there's a but you can still see yellowing there and even the floppy drive bezel is still slightly yellowed and so is the end of that button so I don't know why it didn't work maybe this is a different sort of plastic but I'm going to try it again I was lucky enough that the weather held up a little longer than originally forecast but this was it because as you can see with the forecast now there's like two hours of sunlight left and the entire next week will be thunderstorms so let's open this thing up urgh guess what can you believe this thing is actually upside down the only thing that could have caused that was the formation of bubbles so no telling how long it's been this way because I had some errands to run while this was going however drying it off now I do think there is some improvement over before but but it isn't a huge improvement I mean you can still see that it's yellowed in the corner but I think it's maybe 50% better now well I'm out of time I have to get this reassembled so I can start shooting the documentary videos because I'm headed back to Austin in a matter of days and then we'll be any more sunlight hopefully it won't be too noticeable anyway here is the finished result and of course here are all three of these units finished I have a few other cover or pcs I'll be showing in the documentary but these are the only three that needed restoration work so stay tuned for the next episode of common history and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: The 8-Bit Guy

Views: 620,151

Keywords: retrobrite, peroxide, UV light, sunlight, restore, repair, vintage, retro, computer, white, yellow, plastics, damage

Id: o6_topBnqPQ

Length: 19min 39sec (1179 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019