A2386SX woes

[Paisley_Pirate]

Been working on various bits I've got, a lot of old Varta battery removal... anyway, the latest one is a sad one... I got this A2000 that had an A2386 bridgeboard in it. I don't recall if it was working when I got it or not, but it sat in storage for several years. Got them out a little while ago, started working on them, have a few things broken, like power issues on a SCSI card, these batteries, etc, and so I went to work on the bridgeboard today to repair the corrosion damage.
Sadly, didn't go well so far. The corrosion went under the adjoining cap (ceramic, so nothing from it) and on under the WDC floppy controller chip, and really chewed into some of the traces.

When I went to pull it off today with my new smd rework station, over half the lands are shot and a lot of the copper traces are gone.

I'm not sure, but I'm not confident in being able to repair that many lands. So I ordered a socket and will attempt to bodge wire it to the closest clean points on the board.

I honestly think I did some of the damage myself, but not nearly all. As you can see the board is eaten up very badly in this area, and it goes clear through.

[Paisley_Pirate]

So I got to looking at the pix I took, and saw there was probably some more going on.

More 'good' news... (and by good, I mean bad). U601 socket is showing a lot of corrosion, and on the other side of the chip, C505 and several resistors are also not looking good.

More corrosion damage spotted. Also, bottom board pix.

[Wizzy_Protogen]

Originally Posted by Paisley_Pirate

So I got to looking at the pix I took, and saw there was probably some more going on.

More 'good' news... (and by good, I mean bad). U601 socket is showing a lot of corrosion, and on the other side of the chip, C505 and several resistors are also not looking good.

More corrosion damage spotted. Also, bottom board pix.



Sent from my BBB100-1 using Tapatalk

Oh yikes that's really bad! I've got an A2386SX as well, but thankfully it didn't corrode with that dumb battery!

(BTW sorry if this reply looks weird, this is my first message on here so IDK if this will turnout right :P)

[Paisley_Pirate]

Welcome! Post looks fine and makes sense to me.

Glad to know someone still has a live one. I may have questions if/when I get this poor thing ready to go back into my machine, since I was dumb and forgot to document how all everything was connected... of course since the original hard drive also has crashed, I may just start from scratch.

[Wizzy_Protogen]

If you need any photos or help installing it shoot me a PM about it. I just got mine going again properly, though I'm now stuck on getting it to boot into DOS! I would most certainly pop a VGA card in it once you get it up and running. The emulated graphics on them are horrible and you'll want a dedicated VGA display if you want to do anything useful with it. Also the MakeAB hard drive sharing system on the Amiga's hard disk is incredibly slow, so I recommend trying to mount a dedicated hard drive in the machine, either in the form of a Quantum Hardcard, or through using a dedicated controller and drive, either mounted where one of the floppy drives are or using some other type of mount!

As for your sorry board, I recommend probably just leaving it to soak in vinegar for a few hours considering a lot of the corrosion is under sockets and whatnot. Ideally you SHOULD replace those sockets with new ones, but if the corrosion isn't too bad you can usually get away with just a vinegar bath and a brush. Those pads look pretty bad, sO really good luck with fixing it. If you need any photos or anything let me know because there was only a tiny section on my board that was damaged. All traces are ok though and you should be able to follow them if yours are too far gone to track their locations. Best of luck!