 have a new computer. This is a Apple Powerbook 150. It's a fairly early Apple notebook from 1994. This is one of Apple's cheapest and nastiest of the powerbooks. It's missing many important ports. It's not particularly upgradeable but it does work and it's a 68,000 laptop machine and I was wanting one for doing a sort of things with. Unfortunately this one has a few problems and it needs some fairly urgent work so that is what I'm going to do today. So the most obvious of the problems is the broken hinge and case for the screen. Someone has tried to fix it with some kind of nasty yellow glue which seems to have failed over time and it's also shared a number of plastic pieces but the other problem is internal and that is the more urgent one. And if you've ever dealt with vintage computers before you can probably guess what is. So let's use side power tool and open the case up and I shall and I shall show you what it is. So this machine is actually pretty well made. Being an early Apple machine not one of the late ones which means it comes apart with fairly normal screws. They are insecurity bits with a star-shaped profile but luckily the actual the bits to open those are really easy to come by. So there's actually got some plastic clips so I need my spudger which of course I put away and forgotten to get out. Let's try this. Oh no there isn't that one more screw here. This one is a different size. Not sure it is actually. Yeah it's a different size. Oh yes just remembering having dealt with this before I don't have a bit that will fit this one so I need to use an ordinary screwdriver. No I do have a bit that fits but I still need to use an ordinary screwdriver. So this is all going to be horribly out of focus. Here on the back you can see the rather limited set of ports. We have power. We have scuzzy for an external disk. We have serial and there is nothing else. There's no external monitor port. There's no ADB port for an external keyboard. That's all you get. In here there is a space for a modem card which is not fitted in this. This was received rather poorly when this machine was sold. Even back in 1994 people wanted to plug their computer into a real monitor and keyboard. Okay I forgot to take the battery out. This is an enormous NICAD battery that is now completely defunct. The machine doesn't need it to run luckily. There we go. Need to find the clip. This is too flexible. It's the wrong spudger. This one. I might mention I'm not a fan of these plastic clips. There we go. I would so much rather have just ordinary screws in the corners. Okay now you're not going to be able to see what I'm doing next which is unplugging the top board from the bottom board. So this is the motherboard. We've got the processor. We've got the socket to connect it to the rest of the computer. We've got all the ports in the back here. Here is the slot where the modem fits. The socket for the modem is about here. There is nothing wrong with this although at some point I would like to replace the hard drive which is an IDE drive with a compact flash one. So I'm going to put this aside. And here... What's happened to the... Okay the automatic color balance seems to have gone a bit funny there. But here you can see the problem and it is called Vata. There is a internal battery which has gone fluffy and we do not want that on our PCBs. The fluff is highly corrosive and a leaking battery goop can actually eat its way down copper wires and do untold damage to the motherboard. Given that this is actually upside down if this drips onto the motherboard that will cause big problems and I will go and inspect that in a moment. So here we have a RF shield. Oh yeah that's the high voltage generator for the screen fluorescence. So I want to get this board out so I can have a look at it properly and we've got more of the insecurity bolts. But luckily they come out easily enough. Here we've got connectors for... Well this is the keyboard so these will be connecting the keyboard and the trackball. This is the screen connector and the screen also has problems. I'll show you that once this bit's done. So I am actually going to have to undo these. So these are thin film clamps. So you just pull the clamp out to release and the ribbon just lifts out. At least I will do if I can get access. One side, two side. This should just push out with difficulty and fingernails. There we go. Okay it's still fastened down this side. I bet that is this bolt here. There is actually an extra PCB here for the high voltage generator. There we go. You can see the thick white silicone wires here that go to the screen. We've got the two sliders for contrast and brightness and here is a plug-on connector that lets us just lift that board out. So this now goes aside. There's a hole there with a seal of some description. That's the middle of the hinge. I wonder what that is. Investigate that in a moment. Okay so we actually have here a fairly dumb distribution board with the cable that connects to the PCB, the speaker and the dreaded Vata sealed battery. It's a 2.4 volt 60 milliamp power rechargeable. We could just cut it off but it's actually looking in reasonably good conditions. Let's try and unsolder it. Okay the soldering iron is hot. So let's just wet the end a bit. Let's try and apply some heat. I hope this shouldn't be too difficult. There we go. One, two. Okay that wasn't so bad. So looking at the battery, there's fluff oozing from this side, the negative side and there's also some nasty goop here on the positive side. I shall just put the voltmeter across that. I think it's completely dead. They usually are. These Vata batteries are loathsome. This one is nickel metal hydride and they don't normally 200 millivolts. That's supposed to be 2.4 volts. So anyway nickel metal hydride don't normally go as bad as disposables or alkalines but anyway. So let's have a look. Okay focus is going to be a bit tricky with it on like this but here you can see some copper exposed. That could be the battery goop eating at the tracks. So let's get out the IPA and give it a bit of a swab. The battery goop is extremely alkaline and one thing you can do is to apply simple vinegar to neutralize it. I don't think I'll have to for this. I think that's okay. Nothing's coming off. Good. Well I don't intend to run it with a battery. It should be just fine without one. So I suppose we now just reassemble it all. So here we have the board. I know what this hole is for. It's for the loudspeaker and it goes this way around and the high voltage unit plugs in here. This is actually really rather well put together. It comes apart easily. It goes back together easily. How times have changed? So drop that into place and let's see some of the screws up. There's a little bit of space in here and in fact given that I'm not intending to get a modem card it would be possible to put in a couple of full-size double-A nickel metal hydrides like these, possibly triple-A's and at 1.2 volts each there are two cells here to get 2.4 volts and the charging circuit in the computer will happily charge double or triple-A's. It would be vast overkill but would be cheap and really easy. But I'm not going to do that unless I really have to. The purpose of the battery was to preserve the RAM when you're changing the main battery. Presumably so that you can have the computer suspended. Max do have a small amount of non-volatile RAM which might be covered by the same battery. If so that would be a bit problematic because it contained information like you know what drive to boot off and stuff like that. So I can't imagine that that defunct battery was working in any useful fashion and I've had this thing turned on so I know it functions but we'll see. Maybe 200 millivolts was enough to keep the battery alive. Okay so that plugs in. Make sure the clamps are released. Drops in there and goes. Clamps down. Drops in. Is that going all the way down? Let's try that again. Lift the clamp and drop the ribbon in the other clamp. Okay while I have this open is there anything that's worth cleaning? Well there's the trackball mechanism but that's actually alright and that's on the other side of this board so you can actually get out from the outside. This is the keyboard mechanism and I believe that at least some of the bits of plastics that it's shed are the plastic rivets that hold this down. The keyboard's not in great shape it's kind of stiff but I think it's manageable. Okay I'm not going to fiddle with that anymore so let's check the other side. Now the battery was located over here so I want to look at that bit for signs of corrosion and battery. So somewhere around here I you are actually getting a rather better look at this than I am but I think it's okay. I can't see any obvious signs of corrosion. What's this? I have no idea. Yeah I think that will do. Okay let's reassemble that. So putting it back together is the simple process of the reverse of taking it apart. We need to connect this over so there's going to be nothing to see. Balance it like this and I reach it under here and push the connector home and drop this into place and the clips do up. I said clips do up. What's happened? Okay there's another clip and the spine but it doesn't work very well. Okay let's just do these up and then we will go on to the second part of the process which is altogether trickier but also in some ways simpler which is a bit of a paradox and there should be one more of these somewhere. This is the one for the spine so I will actually do that up. Sorry you can't see what I'm doing. Ah this is actually this white stuff that is battery fluff so there it is. So it's actually a fairly nasty alkali which I shouldn't get on my fingers. Right now let's take a look at the second bit. You notice that I have not opened this yet. There's a reason for this which is this part of the screen. The plastic has died and the bushes that the screws fasten into have all come adrift from the plastic done this side so I'm going to have to deal with that somehow. So what I want to do is to dismantle the screen to get access to the hinges. There are two screws that hold the screen in place. Well hold the screen bezel in place which is this one and the one on the other side but the one on the other side is no longer holding anything in place because it broken the part of the bezel that it actually fastens down to. I'll show you that in more detail once this comes off. Okay so you can see here there should be a plastic insert that here is missing completely. That is one problem. The other problem is here's the hinges which when you're not when you don't have the leverage of the screen working on them are immensely stiff. And you notice if I hand this down these brass pieces these brass pieces are supposed to be embedded into the plastic here so that the screw will do up and fasten in place on the back of the screen but they've both pulled out and the bits of plastics that's been shedding are parts of this bush that holds the brass bushing in place which is kind of not good. So I have two things that need fixing. One is that this hinge needs to be firmly fastened into place onto the the back panel and actually while I'm working on it I'm going to do this screw back up again because currently the only thing that was holding this the back of the screen up was this screw and the bush behind it which is that I don't really want that to break. So what am I going to do here? Well fasten the bushers back again essentially. So we undo this screw which releases the bush itself and this bush is supposed to be embedded into the plastic here. So what I'm going to do is to just put this book back in and then glob epoxy around it to hold it in place and given it's quite small this is going to be a little bit tricky. Now I could undo these two screws that would free the back completely but this ribbon cable is a little bit delicate. Tell you what I'm going to take the screen off completely. The screen is faulty too but that is a subtle electrical problem and I don't think I can do anything about it. These machines used traditional passive liquid crystal screens. The earlier machines had some other technology that was really rather nice. This is one reason why the 150s were not very well thought of and there is one faulty scan line right across the middle of the screen. So we've got the screen itself and this cardboard foil shield. So we're going to just put that down. This is fastened in under here it's RF protection. I should be able to get this off once these are run done I hope. Now I need to release the screen which means bending this hinge to the upright position in order to free the back of the hinge and there we go and it just lifts free. So here we've got the cardboard shield here we have the screen the back proper and here we have all the electronics so I need to remove the other bush like so. The first bush has in fact got lost under here and then we put all the electronics aside and now we're left with the plastic. This is a good thing because now this thing is vertically up and down which means we don't have to worry about epoxy dribbling. Now this is interesting there is seems to be a washer around this bolt a rather bent washer so I wonder if this is part of the original attempt to fix the thing. You can see the nasty yellow glue here which I'm going to have to scrape off. So here you can see the two bushes embedded in plastic so essentially all we have to do is to put these back here in the upright position and make sure they stay in place that's not upright. Anyway I'm going to do the bolts up so that the inside of the bush is filled so that we don't need to worry about epoxy getting into the screw thread which would be rather bad. That is the wrong screw and this one that was just a random screw lying on my workbench so this one will go here and this one will go here. I'm not convinced about the verticalness of this but I think it will do. All right so the next step is to mix up the epoxy and apply it. Okay so we have the ubiquitous bottle top. We have my tube of epoxy that is increasingly old and difficult to get open. Great I knew that would happen one day. I have a feeling that this tube of epoxy is reaching the end of it used by. There is a date code on the top of 2019 but I'm sure I've had this for longer. Okay there we go we need a reasonable amount of it because in order to get the mix right now I need to get the top back on. So epoxy if you didn't know is a very strong two-part glue where you have the gel and the catalyst and by themselves they don't really set. Mix them together and they start reacting and you end up with something that sets very quickly and incredibly robustly. So I am now on the clock. The gel does dry out with time. Yeah I'm going to deal with that after I've done this bit. So I think what's happening is the gel has dried and you know catalyst that gets its way into the cap has mixed with a little bit of the gel and started producing and it's just solidified. Okay possibly I might need to chip some of this off after it's set. Okay this is fundamentally kind of messy process sadly. Also I am doing this wrongs. I need to make sure there is some under it as well. Another thing to note about epoxy is it is in fact poisonous. Some people under ridiculous emergency situations like arctic explorers who've had decayed teeth have ended up having to fill their own teeth with epoxy and you really don't want to do that. I mean the whole idea of having to do your own fillings is kind of terrible but you really don't want to do it with epoxy. Okay how's a ridiculous waste of glue but that's all we need just that little glob. So next I'm going to try and get this top back on. Alright day two I have let the epoxy cure at least for a bit. It should get a little bit more solid as time passes but this will do for now. I actually did a bit of work off camera. One part was that I completely forgotten to do anything about this piece so I have attached this metal ring here which is going to hold the screw in. The other was that the bush here wasn't quite straight and I had to do it again. I'm actually wondering slightly whether epoxy is the right kind of glue for this. It's good and hard and pretty strong but it's also quite brittle and there's going to be quite a lot of sideways talk in these bushes so it may all just fall apart on me. Oh yeah on one bit I forgot which is that this bush here had also fallen out so that's being now glued back in place again. So the next thing to do is to deal with some of this nasty yellow glue from the previous attempt to fix it. There is some on both sides so let us liberally apply some IPA with a cotton bud to soften it and then attempt to scrape it off with a knife. I don't know if the IPA will actually help but you can always give it a try. It's kind of rubbery. I don't know what it is but it was clearly not strong enough. On there and we have my trusty back here knife, not a kitchen knife. Okay I think that will do. It's not perfect but none of this is structural so I suppose the next thing to do is to try putting it back together again and see if my glue joints hold up which is going to be moderately exciting to try. Let me just move some of the tools out of the way. Clean up some of the debris. So the first piece that we have to deal with is the back because that's the piece the screen connects to. So this will, oh yeah I didn't, I mustn't forget the shield which will screw down here and you see this bit's actually torn off. Oh there's a couple of spikes so I hadn't noticed. These are either missing or broken off on this side. So this fastens to the hinge using the inner set of screws which I believe are the silver ones so let's do these up and see what happens. One thing I've been worrying slightly about is the epoxy actually sticks up here so I need to be sure that there's enough clearance. So silver bolts, the inside. So this one is a real bush, that's why I'm doing it up first. So now the other one, where did that screw go? It should be more tidy on my workbench because this is actually, there's a couple of different sizes, even this one. And this is the bit where the lid, this is the bit where the lid has to stick vertically upwards. Okay come on, go into the bush. Damn it. Yeah the epoxy broke very suddenly. It's just not strong enough. That's a shame. I'm going to have to think of something else. One thing I could try is gluing it down again and this time leaving it a couple of days to cure a bit more but I honestly don't think that will make much of a difference. Yeah you can see it's just snapped straight out and actually I can probably take a guess as to why which is that everything was fine until the screw reached the bottom of the bush at which point it just came out the bottom and popped the whole thing off. No, looking at the bottom of the bush there is actually a ring of epoxy in the bottom of it so no, I reckon that was just too much sideways talk. Right so I'm going to have to rethink my plans here. What am I going to fasten this in and have it actually strong enough to support the lid? Okay let's try something a little crazy and desperate. So we're going to mix up quite a lot of epoxy. I reckon that this tube will last a few more days without the top on so we might as well use it. I have done the two screws up here. This side has pushed into place. I've chipped off all the epoxy which actually there was a bulge of epoxy that was stopping the hinge from making proper contact so that would never have worked anyway. Let me mix this stuff up. I've put the screws in on the right hand side with the bushes attached and let's see if this works. It will briefly it is sucking up into the dropper and we're just going to attempt to squirt it in there. It hasn't really worked. The epoxy will slowly thicken as it begins to set so this has to be done really quickly. So what I'm attempting to do is to glue the entire hinge including the bushes into place. Come on it's still sucking up into the pipette. Okay let's try that. Oh it's coming into the pipette but it's not coming out again. That's better. So I'm actually going to attempt to stick the entire hinge into place. That should give okay I think that's about as the limit as what we can do with this thing. It's a bit of a shame I was hoping for more. All right let's just use this then because that should provide no that's not going to work. I'll use something smaller. Trying to get as much epoxy into the hinge mechanism as possible to stick the entire hinge to the back panel. I will hopefully provide enough force to make the blaster thing stay in place. The epoxy in my hands this stuff stinks because if I can get the force transferred evenly by the entire hinge across the to the plastic then that's less force on the bushes and generally better. If it doesn't work it then I can chip the epoxy off the metal reasonably easily. Now we're going to leave it 24 hours or possibly even 48 and try it again to see whether it's actually worked or not. It is now too thick. Okay and that's that. All right then let's see if this worked. So quick recap what I have done for the tips back so that you can see is I have attempted to glue this entire hinge mechanism to the back of the case rather than just the bushes. This should give a much stronger bond to the case. Hopefully crossing fingers strong enough so let us try it and see what happens. That seems plausible. That seems to be working. Good well there is one thing I need to do which is to remove the outer screws from both sides. I'll start with this one this will actually probably be bonded in place by the glue so it might be oh no that's not bad. So having glued this on I then won't be able to get it off again without breaking the seal but I don't actually need to take the back of the screen off so hopefully that will do just fine. Okay um I need the next tricky bit is to put the back this panel back on again. This actually screws on underneath the hinge on this side so let me just think how to do this. It's supposed to be grounded it's an RF shield. I think to be honest I'm not going to put that on. It's not really necessary and fiddling with this too much will just cause tears so let's just put the screen on for which we need four silver screws. That's not one. Let me see where I put the screws there they are. Okay so the this wire for the fluorescent light that light up the screen doesn't want to get caught under that boss hook it in under there and there's actually a couple of plastic studs which it hangs on like so. The screen is also faulty. I mentioned it's got this missing scan line down the middle but I don't really think there's anything I can do about that to be honest. There is a strong smell of epoxy which it will fade with time as the plastic cures. It bonds pretty rapidly like a few minutes but then it spends several days gradually getting stronger. It's now about 48 hours since I did that hinge. I screwed that up. Is that supposed to fit in underneath this? First thing I'm going to do is actually turn it on and see if it works because if I've managed to pinch or otherwise damage the ribbon cable to the screen that we'll need dealing with now so try to turn this switch on and it lights up and it boots. Okay the screen works and it's got that stripped down the side and there's just a bit of massaging of the screen to see if anything happens. Okay well let's put the front case on some plastic clips and then the black screws do up and I want to be really careful with this one because that's the one that's bonded in the plastic so it's not doing that too tightly. It's powered down okay and let's just try closing the lid and see if it actually latches. Looks okay. I think that's plausible and there's still a bit of, there's still some marks from glue goop there but it's okay. That side's okay as well. So that's just dirt. That seems quite promising to be honest. I should probably put this away and then not fiddle with it for another couple of days just to let the glue cure but let us open up the track ball and give this a bit of a clean. So let's see you can see you've got these rollers here are the optical encoders as these rotate when the ball turns. It rolls the rollers. There is one for X which is this one and one for Y which is this one. Here we have little metal roller bearings that support the ball in the other two directions. So what we're going to do is just clean off the rollers with IPA because they tend to fill up with other people's sweat which is a bit disgusting trying to stop rotating. It's supposed to clean mouth balls as well which led to all the inevitable jokes that you can imagine. Some of them good most of them not. Yeah this is a manner of filth and that. I should probably take off and clean the keys as well but they actually appear to have been pretty good Nick. Let's just do the other end because what everyone really likes are alcoholic mouth balls. The interesting thing about Mac is that Mac might only have one button and you notice this track ball in fact has two buttons. Well you might you might have noticed that but you would in fact be wrong. These are both the same button. It's to allow you to use any combination of hands or fingers you might wish. A bit of a waste really. Okay one final thing which is to put the one remaining rubber bung over one of these screws. There's supposed to be two like so and I think that is done. Just have a quick look around. Oh yes there is a little plastic cap that goes on this. It's quite useless and I think that's done. The one thing remaining is the battery which is completely defunct. It doesn't charge and I can't remember whether I said so last time. It's been several days. It would be rather nice as this is just a perfectly ordinary Nikad battery pack. To take the lid off remove the old battery cells and replace them with a AA holder. So that way you can replace the batteries with perfectly normal AA Nikads. It will still charge in the computer using the the computer's built-in charging circuitry and if the battery yeah Nikad if the battery module starts to fail again then you can just swap out the double A's easily. Unfortunately these things are usually glued or heat welded together and opening them up is a complete pain in the ass. You're not going to sponge this open. So I'm going to do a bit of research about that to see whether it's possible or not and come back to it. But yes the machine works. I'm not going to demonstrate it now because I want to wait a few days for the glue to harden. Oh yeah here is some glue. Still a little bit sticky but mostly hard. And then I'm going to install an English version of MacOS on it because this is currently running the German version which is just the same. It's just my German is not good enough to actually understand it. So a probably rather disjointed depending on how well I managed to edit this together video on doing some basic maintenance of a old 68k Apple alleged notebook computer. I hope you enjoyed this video. Do let me know what you think in the comments.