This is exactly what I did, just multiplied by about 40 since I had so many connections to fix.
Sigh... the pain we must endure for our hobby!
Wow! That's expensive and definitely a bit out of my price range! I am going to just buy one of the $20 dead CPU boards off of eBay and see if I can get it working again. Are you sure that they have other faults or are they just missing a CPU and the ROMs?
So not sure if this is an option, but under teh $350 price tag he does sell extra gold and nickel dust and the leads separately, I think the gold is $100 don't recall the other prices, but maybe if you buy the refill items and attach it to your own $10 radio shack power supply or whatever, it will be good enough to use it? Still the dead CPU boards are much cheaper.
I wonder if there's some way to cut a few fingers off an edge connector, perhaps from another board and epoxy glue it onto the rotten ones on your CPU board, then use jumper wires to fix the connection?
I have no idea how to go about doing that, but if it's possible to lift the pads with aggressive high temperature desoldering, it might work on edge connector fingers too? Maybe if you have old PC ISA card that has no resale or personal value, that you don't care about? like an old modem or some other junk card?
Maybe use a very fine tip drill bit and drill in the middle of the card (vertically into the PCB itself) to get some of the fiberglass split, and once split use a file to remove the fiberglass material from the bottom of the finger? Or maybe a very fine blade handsaw?
No idea what's broken with the CPU boards, you can ask John and see what he says. Maybe he remembers what other issues those boards had. I think he harvested the CPU and ROMs off them because they were faulty and sold those separately, so for sure those CPU boards are going to be broken. Not sure how much effort you'll need to put in to debug/fix them, but at least you'll have spare parts from your other CPU board that you can transplant.
I have ordered parts to build the Cameo/Aphid ProFile emulator that you suggested a few posts ago and I am hoping that I can actually get the Lisa working again so that I can test it!
Awesome! Let Tom know once you've got it built.