Sad day today :(

[Amiga_Nut]

I have had to consign THREE Amigas to the trashcan

I did what I could and removed all socketed chips, and various bits like non-yellowed bottom half of cases and Kickstart switchers etc but the rest had to be sent off to the great recycler to the sky.

Sad day indeed when you can't rescue them.

(battery leakage on two A1500s and an A500 who's parts to repair cost more than the sale price of the machine due to horribly yellowed top case before anyone accuses me of murder)

[Amiga_Nut]

I thought about the yellowing, but the A500 needed the case and keyboard un-yellowed too (used a keycap to fix one of the A2000 keyboards with a missing key on the numerical keypad though) but also it was only 512k and needed a new internal drive. I have an A1000, an A600 and an A1200 all pretty high spec (2mb A600 and A1000 for example).

None of the A1500/2000 drives had mounting holes that even lined up with the A500 mounting brackets and I didn't want to dismantle any external drives for 1 machine. I have 3 and that works great for some games being the max allowed.

The Kickstart 2.04 chips will be useful for many people though from the big box machines. I've kept all the cards like GVP HC+8 with 2mb of GVP compatible SIMMs etc and the other ram card has chips suitable for replacing the ones on A500/2000 main boards as well as A1000 side expansion 2mb ram modules. Modulators, manual set, boxes.

Did the best I could with time/money to spare, but it's never enough.

Might be a lot easier to buy other 500/1500/2000 models with faults and fix those if they go cheap enough.

[Amiga_Nut]

A cure has been found to the yellowing of the cases, by the way:

http://hackaday.com/2009/03/02/restoring-yellowed-computer-plastics/

http://retr0bright.wikispaces.com/Retr0Bright+Gel

To do the entire A500 casing and keycaps would need a huge vat of hydrogen peroxide solution, making up a 12% solution large enough to cover the whole case at once would still cost between 20-15 with postage from ebay so I thought it was time to give up sadly.

[Amiga_Nut]

My comments about ebay were

To buy parts to repair the machines vs going rates.

I'm not in it to sell Amigas at all, and personally ebay is only ever used by me if there is no alternative to sell things. For example here I doubt anyone would pay shipping to USA for an A2000 that needs a new motherboard.

The reason I didn't rebuild them is simple, cash. I don't have any to spare, and when was the last time you saw a suitable A1500/A2000 with a custom chip fault and no other faults? The only working PSU was already on its way out too for the big box machine, the other caused a fault probably as it was blown.

As for A500s, well they go for silly money like a few quid....more than the price of an internal drive, and as the case was seriously yellowed it wasn't worth it. A500 KS 1.3 machines are very plentiful worldwide. I've kept all the chips just in case anything non-working or 1.3 KS based turns up. I'm not experienced enough to start repairing motherboards below IC level ie capacitors/resistors etc. Anyway on a 1mb A500 using up a huge chunk to load KS 2 into RAM still doesn't help most people, so the KS 2 chips are the next best thing to have available.

What I do is get, or am given, various retro machines from all manufacturers and I try to get 2 or 3 working from 1 broken donor. For example just 1 C64 keyboard was used to fix 5 broken C64 keyboards, which are then distributed to a network of people who need them. I don't agree with ebay policies for sellers so have no time for selling things on there. But as you can imagine with just about every machine ever sold in the EU, space is at a premium...it's not like I have jay Leno style warehouses for my collections to expand with working machines, working parts and probably never work again type parts indefinitely sadly. I wish I did but unless I win the lottery....not gonna happen