The Macintosh LC 630 listing on eBay seemed like a good deal. And a great introduction to vintage Macs. And a good excuse to take part in MARCHintosh 2023. The seller was open to offers and accepted the offer that I made. But what arrived, wrapped – literally – in crumpled sheets of A4 paper and a cardboard fruit packing crate could only generously be described as “some assembly required”. There were bits of shattered plastic everywhere.
I scooped all of the plastic pieces into a pot to deal with later. For now I wanted to look at the computer itself and do some basic restoration. It would need cleaning – there was dirt just dropping from every gap; even the dust bunnies had dust bunnies! This was not the dirt of 30 years in storage, this was the dirt of many years constant use, sucked in through the fan and distributed throughout the case.
The LC 630 range (which included the Performa, Quadra and a DOS compatible variant) were only available for a year, from spring 94 to spring 95. After which they made way for the first generation of PowerPC Macs (in the same case design). Like all early 90s designs they suffer from the malady of leaky caps and a leaky PRAM battery. So the first priority was to remove the battery and recap the board.
Getting to the main board on the LC is simplicity itself: two screws on the back of the machine, and it just slides out. There’s even a fold-out handle to help. And you don’t have to open up the case! Modern Apple: you could easily learn something from the repairability of these old machines! Fortunately, neither battery nor capacitors seemed to have leaked…
For the rest you’ll have to watch the video (I’m not ‘spoiling’ everything here, lol)
Thanks to PCBWay for sponsoring the video. They make excellent PCBs and a whole lot more. Check them out at https://www.pcbway.com/