General Category > Lisa Troubleshooting and Repair

Recent Lisa acquisition and repair - really bad NiCad leak.

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jamesdenton:
Good luck in your resurrection attempts. Thanks for sharing!

mactjaap:
Long time ago this post, but I would like to know if you succeded in restoring this Lisa?

rayarachelian:

--- Quote from: mactjaap on April 22, 2020, 11:51:28 am ---Long time ago this post, but I would like to know if you succeded in restoring this Lisa?

--- End quote ---

Sort of, but I've cheated.

I did clean up the boards with baking soda and RO filter water - I didn't have distilled but RO water should be close enough, and then gave them a good spraying on both sides with 3M Electronics cleaner which is mostly alcohol and likely a bit of hexane and other things, I've been meaning to reflow the solder but haven't done so.

The motherboard has corroded CPU or I/O board connectors, I bought new edge connectors but haven't resoldered them.

Haven't been able to fix the corroded boards, but I've had a set of spares from a Lisa that died a long time ago, and it now works with the spare cards and motherboard from that, until the display starts bleeding, so I've got to either clean/replace the video board trim pots and/or possibly replace a cap or two there.

Also it seems the 30MB SunRem drive stopped working completely the last time I've checked. I don't know if it's the drive or the controller, but I'd like to get this one working as well. It never worked, but now it stopped displaying the "LOADING" banner.

(I've also got a 2nd Widget to repair, I managed to get one of the two working), and I've got two dead power supplies to recap as well - one is a spare, but the other is preventing one of the other Lisas from working.

These are all on my to-repair-list after I release 1.2.7, so plenty of hardware work to have fun with.

mactjaap:
Thank you for the nice round up. These kind of stories are really interesting to read. I learn a lot from it and it shows that restoring a Lisa is not a job for the faint of heart!

I did similar job at a friend of mine. He never ever started his Lisa. And finally we got it working.

rayarachelian:
I suspect this Lisa was bought from SunRem as an XL and likely never used. It came with the original boxes, so likely it just sat for 30 years somewhere unused, not sure why. Maybe it was bought by a business or as a gift for someone who didn't want to use computers and then just stored.
Not sure why the floppy cable was in backwards, but it kind of fits in. For whatever reason instead of repairing it or sending it back to SunRem the owner saw it wasn't working right and stored it for a very long time not realizing the battery time bomb that over the years would corrode it.

I can't say it was "new in box" by any stretch, but I'm pretty sure the corrosion happened after it was stored as there was some cruft on the CRT, likely the alkaline stuff evaporated and precipitated back inside the bagged Lisa. This makes sense as some of the corrosion was on the back of the CPU and I/O boards above where the batteries sit.
I suppose the photos can serve as documentation of what happens. I just hope the traces on the boards aren't corroded on the inside, but damage this bad is likely going to mean it's going to have lots of bad traces.
I hope the hard drive didn't get hit by the corrosion, and likely the metal around it would have caught some of the gas, and having looked at it with a flash light back then, I didn't notice any so likely it's fine. I suspect it'll just be a bunch of bad capacitors on there, or at least hope.

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