Amiga 500 - My story of Cleaning and Retr0briting

[lovebus5]

Hi!

Thought I´d share my experiences of cleaning and retr0briting an Amiga 500 of mine. It´s the first time I did this on an Amiga, but I´ve made multiple other machines before (mostly C64s).

Amigas pose some additional challenges, compared to stuff I´ve done before. The main one is of course the sheer size of the thing Especially since I also wanted to try out the Sous-vide method (my other hobby is cooking )

This particular Amiga 500 Is a good test subject for me, since it´s in quite bad condition. Apart from yellowing, there are damages in the plastic chassi, as you´ll see in the pictures later. Also, the warranty seal was already broken on this machine, so I didnt feel so bad screwing it apart...

So I thought it´s a good test subject to learn on. As you´ll see, Im glad I did...

Now, here´s the Amiga 500 in question! It looks OK, its a bit more yellow in real life, but not at all as yellow as my other amiga. As you can see, the keys are more yellow than the case itself.

[lovebus5]

So I opened it up to check out the insides, and clean it properly. Here´s the mainboard and it doesnt look to bad. Some dust and dirt but nothing too bad.

[lovebus5]

If you look closely in the upper right corner of above image, you see there´s a hole in the chassi, right where the rubber pad sits on the bottom of the case. I actually heard something rattling about inside the Amiga before I opened it up, not a good sign

But it turned out it was the little round plastic piece that had come off the hole. You can see the plastic piece to the right of the hole in the chassis.

It looked like it still fit pretty good in the hole, so I decided to just glue it in place

[lovebus5]

Once glued, it looks like this from the inside of the chassis. I used thin polymer cement, the kind of glue used for plastic model kits (another hobby of mine, currently stagnant )

It works great for jobs like this, since you put the piece you want to glue in place first, then "paint" the thin glue on. It will suck the glue in by capillary action, and all glue that´s outside of the actual glue area will simply vaporize and dissappear.

[lovebus5]

Here are all chassis pieces dissassembled and ready for cleaning. The keyboard was more dusty than this originally, I wasnt sure If I´d dissassemble the keys or not (when starting out), so I cleaned most dust off using a normal house paintbrush. It gets between the rows of keys and gets most visible dust off easily

The RF shield looks good, no rust that I can see!

[lovebus5]

Now, someone may have noticed the expansion memory card, and that it has a battery. These will as you know eventually start leaking, and if left too long they will just eat the motherboard rendering the Amiga broken and useless.

(Its the blue battery in the lower right area, labeled "Varta")



So I used the soldering iron, it comes out easily by just heating two throughhole solder pads and pulling it straight out with my other hand. I dont have a PCB-holder but this is easy enough without one.

[lovebus5]

Here´s the battery once removed. It has started to produce some acid guck coming out of it. Some more years left unchecked, this would have started tearing away at the expansion RAM, and later onto the mainboard itself.

[Mark sealey]

Awesome work....nice one mate

[deimos]

+1 for the tip about polymer cement.

[lovebus5]

Thx! This is the cement I´m using, Tamiya Extra Thin Cement:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Tamiya-8703...RQQAvD_BwE:G:s

[lovebus5]

Next, another damage needs fixing on the chassis. There´s a piece of plastics that had been chipped away close to the RGB port:



Luckily, also this plastic piece was still fluttering about inside the chassis, so I glued in back on as well. Result looks like this:



And like this, looking from the outside:

[lovebus5]

Next I cleaned the motherboard. Being used to cleaning C64 motherboards, I was kindof struck by how nice the amiga board looks! A beauty!

First I used a quite large paintbrush to wipe off dust from the thing.

Next I used q-tips/cotton buds and Isoprop alcohol. Also for hard to reach places, a retired toothbrush dipped in isoprop.

After this, it looked like this:

[lovebus5]

Next all plastics went into the sink with warm water and dishing soap. Im glad our sink JUST accomodates an amiga 500!

I cleaned it with the same brush i use for dishes, taking care with especially the top chassis piece, since its kindof weak structurally with the keyboard cutouts.

[lovebus5]

All pieces cleaned and excess water shaken off. I put them on the floor to dry. Note the difference in yellowing on the top vs bottom piece of chassis.



(I see I got the order wrong, in this picture the chipped off plastic pieces by the RGB-port, and the one under the rubber pad, are not yet glued )

[lovebus5]

On the bottom chassic piece there´s a stubborn residue of glue from the warranty seal (remember I wasn´t the one who broke the seal, , it hurts me to break warranty seals, even though I´ve had to do it in the past)

I figured I needed to remove this residue in order to get an even result later from the retrobriting process. Usually Isoprop alcohol doesn´t really work on this kind of stuff. So i use white spirits, also called mineral spirits. It comes off in like 3 seconds, and I have yet to experience it damaging the plastics in any way.

If you dont have mineral spirits, its easy to come by, its pretty cheap and available in all arts stores, as its used as paint thinner and a medium for oil paints

[lovebus5]

It´s also what I use to remove marker text (why did people write with permanent markers on their computers??)

Here´s an example of that from the last C64 I did. The "F" in the upper right is made with a permanent marker, for some reason:

[lovebus5]

And here´s after. To my eye there´s no trace of it. I did a bunch of other stuff on this one as well of course (removed stickers, replaced keys, cleaned, retrobrighted it etc.), but I was positively surprised it´s definately possible to completely remove marker writings.

[torsti76]

Orange peel oil also works very well when removing sticker residue. And it smells good as well... ;-)

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[lovebus5]

Originally Posted by torsti76

Orange peel oil also works very well when removing sticker residue. And it smells good as well... ;-)

Gesendet von meinem SM-G930F mit Tapatalk

That´s something I never heard of, had to look it up Do you make your own?

[lovebus5]

Back to the Amiga, I start with the keyboard next. Here´s most keys removed (I use my fingers, and a regular utensil knife for prying if needed). This is the kind of process that´s almost meditative to me