andrea wrote on 2022-10-29, 08:50:
[snip]
For opening plastic welded power bricks, try rubbing a few drops of petrol where the weld is. It softens the plastic just enough that with a little massaging the brick will pop open with no damage bar, depending on the type of plastic it uses, a slight discoloration where the petrol was.
Once dry glue it shut with cyanoacrilate.
Oh that won't be a big problem for me, I'm not too worried if it looks ugly, so as long it works..
BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-29, 13:24:
I missed how you got it going with a DC adapter, but it probably drops between 1 and 1.5V going through it's internal reg still, so if you can find a 13.5 or 14V DC it will put the voltage just high enough that it shouldn't brown out at higher loads on the device. If you suspect it has another voltage derived from AC for another function, then that may be absent.
Also doorbell transformers from the hardware store used to be a low voltage AC thing you could get hold of. Not sure they handle more than half an amp though.
No worries :) from a cursory look to the board, it doesn't look like anything that requires AC on the board, so I guess we're good on that point, if push comes to shove, I could probably remove the rectifier from the board itself, but given how scarce and expensive these SCSI Ethernet interfaces are, I'm a little bit hesitant to do so. For now it seems to be powering up okay, I'll keep that suggestion in mind.
----
Another thing I completely forgot to mention I bought (but recently received) was a SCSI enclosure, this time it's not for a PC or Mac, but rather this is for a Akai MPC sampler that belongs to one of my friends, it came in with a Toshiba XM-5701B drive but I was only interested in the enclosure itself (in which a Microtech PCD-47B is going in). And, oh boy what a mess it arrived in...
I regrettably forgot to take pictures (I'm not home at the moment) but the least I can do is describe the situation as well as I can:
The box where the enclosure was in had a huge dent on the side (uh-oh), which already didn't bode well, but upon opening it, I found it was rattling loose (with the sole padding material used a flattened egg carton and some magazines scraps) in the box (uh-oh #2) and the bezel instead of being flush, was now sitting at an angle (uh-oh #3).
Fearing the worst, I pulled the enclosure, and sure enough, it was held shut. The cover was bent at the bottom, the screws were missing.. Had to pry the thing open like an oyster with a big flathead screwdriver, and that's when I saw that the bezel was intact, no clips broke or anything, putting it back where it should be was just a matter of popping off the clips and clipping it back in. Good as new! Sort of...
But the cover, ugh... It's like an AT case cover except it's more of an elongated C-shape (versus an AT case cover being more U-shaped), with the screws holding the case being on the bottom.
And yes, the cover is bent to hell and back but at least I managed to bend it enough so it slides... I'll have to hammer that back in place and find some screws, I figured, I'd probably repaint the whole enclosure anyways.
The problem though... It didn't come with any screws (though the seller sold the case as for parts) whatsoever, and while I thought it would come empty, and about the Toshiba XM-5701B CD drive that came with, it seems to be still working despite having taken a helluva beating (unlike the Yamaha CD drive I bought and turned out to be DOA...), so there's that.
Now another surprising thing, the enclosure lacked the RCA audio thingy on the back for the CD drive, but I'm going to repurpose that and rig up a switch to toggle termination on the Microtech card reader.. Those holes on the back where the RCA jacks would normally come are going to come in handy.
As I said, I forgot to take pictures, so the only pics I'd be able to take will be most likely "after" pics after I'm done patching up that thing..
Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]