$15 Apple Mac IIci Recap and Fix 

Oh! One of my favorite Mac systems ever! Had one running FTP in my dorm room, to communicate with my Sun 350. Oh the memories!

Adrian, the most important thing is not necessarily how you did the repair, but that you are actually doing it. It's easy for me or anyone to sit here and critique. Chances are we haven't repaired a darn thing. Well done.

We had a IIci in the family growing up and I loved that computer so much. It worked up until the last day I saw it and then it vanished and I never found out where it went. I was really hoping we'd keep it as it was the first computer (aside from the Apple II machines at school) that I got to spend a lot of time with and I really would love to still have it.

Awesome find and awesome fix! I grew up with this machine and it was cool to see it come back to life. I'm looking forward to more coverage on this machine!

I'm a simple man, I see a Motorola 68k based system, I upvote.

Great repair guide! Clearly explained troubleshooting and soldering advice. Definitely a great reference for working on any old computer.

The sad thing is that in 30 years my kids won't be able to repair any of the old technology we have today. It's all just glued together and not serviceable.

Adrian, I also rework some test equipment that has leaky SM caps and I have found a much quicker and easier way to remove the leaky caps. Simply take wire cutters and grab the collar on the cap and cut off the top. This cuts off the cap top and the connection to the plates. Now grab the remaining piece of cap that's on the plastic base and pull it up gently, it will come off along with the rubber seal. At this point you will have left two remaining pieces of the cap legs soldered to the pads. Very easy to removed with just a regular soldering iron. This removal process takes about 10 seconds and has the advantage of placing very little heat stress on the possibly damaged pads.

I had one of these too! Back when we started our home design business. Loved it. Many fond memories, thanks for the video!

That's a very nice repair there, Adrian! I like your little 'bodge' wires. Looks really neat.

I have an E-machines monitor on a Mac 640. I bought the monitor in '93, I think. It's fixed resolution at 800 by 600. About three months later they came out with the multi-synch version. I had some color video card as well, so I had a dual screen set up. And it was on a ci. So you are bringing back memories. I sold it when I went back to college for my PH. D. I bought a 7500 for the intensive number crunching I needed to do. Kept the monitor, but had to Hotwire it to get the synch off the green. Still worked fine. The e-machines monitor weighs a ton, and still runs. The reds have faded a bit, otherwise fine.

I have a IIci with the exact same problem, no sound and horrbile gunk leaking out of the audio caps. Apart from that the computer works fine. You have given me the inspiration to actually try and fix this :)

Tantalums would be OK as power decoupling capacitors, however in the audio circuit they are probably being used for AC coupling. Tants are not really recommended for that task. Still, if it works, go with it. Modern SMD electrolytics arent really prone to leakage like the early ones were. A lot of them had problems with the rubber seals being degraded by the oven reflow process. Not a problem if you fit them by hand with a soldering iron.

I’m from the future to say the improvement from Adrian in multiple dimensions (quality of work, video, explanation) has improved a lot in two years!

Love your enthusiasm. You seemed genuinely excited you got it working. Great job 😎

Liked the video and your honesty the most. Sometimes things work and other times not. The learning experience is worth the time spent. Thanks for keeping things real.

What for a beautiful early 90's machine, love the design

I have also wanted one of these. I used work for a computer rental company around 1988-89 and saw them go out. I have seen a few for sale in various conditions. I think if I can get one to fix, cheap enough I will give it a try.

Thanks, useful to me restoring an Acorn Risc PC - it is a surprisingly similar machine, similar layout, sockets, lots of VLSI chips, similar caps and similar corrosion issues!

The soft power issues are due to the big axial capacitors on the mainboard. They were on my IIci.

"Kind of explode a little bit." One of my favourite lines.

Watching Adrian's videos cured me of wanting to collect any more vintage computers (I have just one - which does run). Eventually they'll all wide up like this computer and only those with the skills and equipment like Adrian will be able to keep them running.

Great job on the recap, glad it works so well now!!! I owned an Mac IIci around 99ish sadly was lost with other systems in the flood (honorable mention next station). Kinda wanna pick up some 68k macs again so an 840av fairly cheap on our version of craigslist recently.

Another great video, Adrian! Honestly, I enjoy those early to mid 90s Macs. No one really collects them or gives them much love. The iMacs, sure. Macbooks? Everyone loves the Clamshell. The compact line? They look neat and most collectors seem to have at least one. But the beige and uninspired squares of the early to mid 90s? Really don't get much love. They must never have played Marathon on one! I had these bad boys in school, and loved them.

A peregrine and funny thought entered my mind listening your explanation about the floppy drive woes and the... particular director choice of having the camera record only your dancing hands. :) My thought was that you must have Italian blood. Don't be offended. It so happens I am Italian, and I'm aware that as stereotypes go we are supposed to have the habit to speak moving our hands a lot (not going to comment any further on it, it's merely a stereotype), and your show of hand dexterity in illustrating and underscoring your commentary made me chuckle. :D

I have this exact system with the same problems. Sadly my soldering skills are basically non-existent. Great video to show others who may be able to help me though!

I live in Portland too :) - the way I usually do these aluminum electrolytics is soldering iron, braid, then back and forth real quick and they usually fall off - it seems to work well even if there is corrosion. Maybe a bit of flux/solder if they are being stubborn.

That brought back memories. The sound of that old HDD spinning up. I used to manage a NAS which was configured for RAID5 that had hundreds of those drives in racks. We had to power them up in banks to avoid tripping the breakers.

I had an e-machines monitor and card in my SE. Grayscale, 16" AFAIR, 1024 x something. They normally shipped together, so you bought a 2-page gray scale monitor and the card in one packet. Others were Radius, Rasterops, Megagraphics and Laserview. Z21 was a 21"- monitor, so the card is likely one for that monitor. Costed around $2200-3500...

I bought a IIci when they were new. I bought a 4/0 model, 4 MBs of RAM and no HD. I added a 16 MB RAM kit and a 200 MB HD (the techy guys I work with at the time all thought I was nuts buying so much memory and drive space). I was doing desktop publishing at the time and paid for it with a big project that took me a month of working 50 hours a week AFTER my full time job.

I used the Mac IIci to do desktop publishing for Auto Trader back in the early '90s. It was a great work machine even though there was better Apple computers available at the time.

Woot. Good fix. I got my IIci for cheap too because it wasn’t booting. Turned out to be a dead battery. Looks like I’ll need revisit it soon to make sure the capacitors haven’t leaked. SCSI drives for these things are getting hard to find cheap. You were lucky to have a spare.

Nicely done. Your mods are great on the power supply. Requires more skill than just buying a working one. ;-)

Cool Find.......I used to have a IIVX in the 90s and it was a tank. payed around $250..........You could search on The Macintosh Garden fourms or ask on there to find the needed control panels and such....

Noice! That's the first computer I used professionally after College. It was for a hybrid magazine / new technology (testing and workflow management) group of Pulitzer Publishing (high-end DTP was just getting started so figuring out how to 'make it work' was a big unknown). Mine had a Radius married to a Pivot display (which worked 'ok' but were actually wonky as hell and had a high-failure rate). The system actually retailed for around 6200 in the fall of 1989 - but ya - they were pricey as hell. My (first) personal workstation - a NeXTstation - was about half the price (with 040 goodness instead of the 030s Apple was selling at the time).

I did a lot of illustration and design work on a IIci during art college, way more power than the huge Mac II series they had @ school / saw very few monitors with that connector, but they were vertical full page displays that I lusted over .. until I got one made by Pinnacle (?!) in late 1995 - let you rotate from landscape to portrait. incredible. I transitioned to the flat cells myself, seemed pointless to source way more expensive barrel cells for such an old box (batteries cost more than I bought the old macs for in .. 2006) but .. I still ponder how to invent a nice solution to removing the old holder (or finding an adapter clip) using alligator clips like you have is a bit too kludgy for my taste, but does work in many systems of that era / what I finally figured out in 2019 or 2020 .. when the motherboard battery is dead, there are weird intermittent timing issues that happen, I guess the system keeps trying on occasion to check, and this gives a hiccup to whatever is running. I would have figured that ya don’t really need a battery (for clock), if you are fine setting it each time, or no bothering .. but .. u do (need one). I don’t recall them being that pricey new, but everything was bux back then. definitely appreciated that system vs any others I used.

when it comes to removing surface caps with corrosion I snip the tops off and us a soldering iron to pliers for the pins that are left over, this has been the most successful way of doing the cleaning the board off with Alcohol.

What I lusted over back in '90 was the Mac IIfx! My father worked in broadcasting and I would always go into work with him on the weekends just to play with that beast! It sucks though because often there was a note attached that read " DO NOT TOUCH, rendering! "

I learned something tonight. Cheers buddy. Oh, I’ve got about a dozen old Macs from this period. I may try fixing them at some point, after I rebuild my Marysville built Honda F750F Interceptor. These old Macs aren’t really worth anything sadly. But one day - when they’re 50 years old, maybe someone will find them interesting.

Hi Adrian. Really enjoy your honest and laid-back style videos. I like hearing your train of thought during your repairs and that you include some of the oops moments. Definitely draws me in more. Was nice to see you get the old Mac spinning again. And it's really nice that you finally got to have your dad's Mac! Just curious, what ever happened to his? Is it in an attic somewhere? Cheers!

Hoping you or someone can give me some tips. I’m in the process of repairing a iicx. Took the power supply apart and when I force the relay to click with external 5v I have power but i current. When I try to power the fan or the relay fro then 5v line on the power supply the voltage drops to 1v and neither the fan or the relay click. Same goes for the 18v on the power supply. Any idea what causes a power supply to have voltage but no current? Also to just test the logic board, do I only need to provide it with 5v?

I bought one in 1992 for around three or four grand canadian... awesome machine. Did c++ programming in MPW and made images with the Infini-D raytracing modeler. The only large monitor I could afford was a grayscale one, but with 256 shades of gray it looked nice and was fine for most DTP work I was also doing. Pity I had to sell the Mac to pay for a big car repair during a move to Vancouver. But computers were evolving so fast and PCs were taking market share so much, I guess I would've wound up a faster Win95 PC in a few more years anyway. I cherish the memories though, a truly fine piece of hardware.

Great video! Just some advice on tantalums in general: be careful about their voltage rating! My rule of thumb is: avoid tantalums if possible, otherwise get them with at least twice the voltage rating you would usually use for electrolytics. I think Avx has some great app notes on that topic... if you want to go down that rabbit hole :-)

Thanks for the video! Any idea where I can get a replacement set of caps for a Mac II FX? Trying to recap for the first time

As for that video Card, you may be able to use it if the frequency is compatible with a current standard and you find out the Po out. If I recall, some mac resolutions were compatible with VGA and some were not. A scan converter might also work with it and adapt it to VGA. If it is monochrome you can connect it to a color monitor assuming the output frequency and resolution are compatible by connecting the monochrome output to the red, green, and blue inputs of the color monitor and you will get a monochrome display on the color monitor.

What would be great for the IIcx, IIci, and Quadra 700 is a second story addon like was made for the PCjr. A plastic frame to fit between the case and lid, with an open 5.25" bay and a couple of 3.5" bays for hard drives. Perhaps have one 3.5" bay open for a Magneto Optical, Zip or other. Could be 3D printed in sections then glued together. prime and smooth the surface then paint to match. Back when I had a IIci with a 60Mhz PPC upgrade, I simply set a second 3.5" half height hard drive on top of the one mounted to the bracket. Was nice of Apple to design these early Macs for full height hard drives. In a IIsi it was possible to use longer NuBus cards in the top slot of a IIci CPU upgrade adapter by installing a half height hard drive so the card could extend forward over the drive.

I am still holding on to my Mac llci sys 7+, bought in 1992-93 (with my hard earned $ 7000++). Used it until 1996-97. Its to explain my nostalgic-euphoric attatchment with this machine. I still remember installing Applications like Aldus Freehand, Adobe Photoshop v2 ( no layers ) Kai Power Tools, Fontographer etc etc. ( I took 5 to 18 3.5" floppy diskettes to install any major app ) Its been in storage since 1997. After watching your video, I am going to pullout this lovable fossil and try to jump start for good old time sake. I wonder if you would like to know what happens next.....if so, kindly keep me posted. Thanks

Always give u thumbs up excellent job.... V informative.. Thanks v much Sir ✌️🇧🇭

I just recapped one of these suckers myself, a couple of weeks ago. I got it working for a few hours before a Rifa cap blew up in the power supply and stunk up my whole house. I swapped out all the Rifas, but in doing so, I somehow ended up killing the PSU. Fortunately, I have a Performa 600 lying around, and its power supply is compatible with the IIci. I was able to make sure I at least didn't fry the IIci's mainboard, so now I'm waiting for an eBay seller to ship me another Performa 600 PSU. I was lucky I found one for cheap.

I loved my old IIci. It was loaded with games, Marathon, Sim city 2000, Sim tower, Sim ant. Etc... I was so sad when the battery leaked all over everything inside. (It had been stored on the side for a long time) and all the good games died with the failed harddrive. They really are great machines to fool around with.

Is there a "go too" tip you use on your soldering iron? I am very much a novice and don't know which tip to choose when soldering.

Off topic but I love that trs badge you stuck on your bench monitor

How did you connect your TFT? I've also got a IIci but it will only output on a CRT. I've got one of those adapters (with DIP switches; called UniMacFly). It works when I connect a CRT or when I use my PowerMac and a TFT... Any ideas?

I have a colour eMachines colour card and the control panel does not do much. It adds the ability to do some colour/brightness settings options and you can create virtual displays which are larger than the monitor can display.

I had to search for 68EC040. I was familiar with the 68LC040 (my Performa 630CD had that one). According to wikipedia, the EC lacks both the FPU and MMU, while the LC lacks only the FPU. Thanks!

The iici was my favorite mac. I have a really nice one now.

It makes sense this would show up in my recommended feed right after watching Digital Underground videos.

I have two IIci and two IIcx as well as a Quadra 700. I'd love to see a detailed video on how you did that ATX power supply as I only have one fully working PSU. I'll be saving this video for reference when I go to recap my machines.

I had a Mac ii si when I was growing up. I ended up getting the coprocessor for it. Got it in 1990. Was a good machine but outstayed it’s welcome as we didn’t get another computer until 1997! I was desperate for a powermac but ended up getting a pc instead

In the early 90's I worked in a publishing company (for scientific journals and books), they were using exactly the same computers together with Quadras, running Framemaker and i don't remember what for photo/image editing. In 1995 we switched to PCs with Windows 95...

When I re-capped my Macintosh Classic, one of the caps on the motherboard exploded on me when I heated it. Now it's working fine, but the gears in the floppy drive are broken, so I have to eject floppies with a pin in the hole next to the drive.

the switchmode supply is going into protection mode, that's what the clicking is... check the feedback and HF oscillator chopping circuits!

Thanks for this excellent video! I recently rescued a Mac IIci from an e-waste recycler and tested it last night, but after powering on a couple times, it is now dead as a doornail. Looking closely at the motherboard reveals that some of the tiny SMD capacitors have leaked, so I'm hoping to use your video as a guide / reference and attempt a DIY repair, though I've never done this before. Could you possibly share the specific part-numbers for the capacitors you used in this restoration, and where you purchased them from? I'd like to follow your process as closely as I'm able. Thanks again for this video - it's really well done!

My Mac IIci and matching Apple monitor still ran like new till April 2024 except for the sound. All original motherboard parts except the battery. I think the caps go bad because the computers are left off for too long. I turn my Mac IIci on many times a year to keep the caps from going bad. If I turned it on more times and longer maybe the sound would have worked too and it could have run with no problems for many more years?

Back in the day with IDE HDD's you could put them in a Ziploc bag and put them in the freezer for a few hours. They would sometimes boot up for a while so you could backup your files.

Can you tell me what you are using to get proper video from the old iici please?

Nice to see, you brought the Mac back to life! :) And no complaints about your crappy recapping. ;) For 15$ you can't do anything wrong.

Hi Adrian , my old IIci just stopped working. When I press the power button all the LEDs (keyboard and case) flash once but nothing else happens. If I hold it down they blink and eventually the fan turns on. The caps in the power supply look fine. Do you happen to have any advice for me? :D

I had a IIcX back in the late 90's, fun machine, Math processor... basically nothing really used it on the mac outside of excel and a few other dull programs, I installed one on my LC2 it does absolutely nothing unless I am working on the budget, which I don't edit: the bucket mac's do not all have a self shutdown, and just a mains ac switch, so its normal if the machine does the shutdown sequence after the power off signal to show the shutdown screen

Fascinating! Great job!

I jus got the same computer, the drive is not working at all. I expect to get a new one, or maybe a flash card with an adapter. My question is where can I download the OS? and how to install it? Thanks!

I did that to get an old Mac LCII to boot up but since it's PSU is simple I'll probably rebuild the original. I might try converting my IIfx to a coin cells since it's barrel batteries are dead again though I'll make an adapter vs hot melt glue it in.

The preheating of the capacitors have very little sense, it works only with ones which are still sealed. Just add some flux, and use your hot air gun to desolder them. You may also use the soldering iron to lift one side first, and then another. Good idea is to add fresh solder before desoldering a part. When you break the capacitor, you may remove the plastic "tray" before further desoldering of the "legs", there's no point in melting this plastic and inhaling fumes coming out of it.

We had one of these running a digital audio editing workstation around 1991-92. Running a simple digital EQ on a 5-6 minute clip would literally take a couple hours of post-processing. Insane. I think our CPU was clock rated at 16 MHZ.

Ooh, I used to have one of those E-Machines "Big Picture" grayscale cards in my Macintosh II. I got it dirt cheap from a liquidation sale. The monitor had a somewhat slow phosphor, as I recall, but it was big (17" I think), the picture was beautiful, great contrast and very sharp, and something like 1024x1024 with 8 bpp which was awesome at the time.

Where can I get those capacitor but bigger ones that could be used to fix a Xbox?

10:00 with a hot air station, there's usually no need to pull the cap itself off the board like that first. If you use the hot air to heat one leg/pad then the other, the whole cap (plus legs) should easily lift off the board, too. With many of the pads already corroded, it's even more important to not put any extra stress on them by wiggling the caps. Another method would be to use "soldering tweezers", so you can quickly heat both pads at once without dwelling heat on them for too long. It also helps sometimes to add a bit of flux or even a small amount of new solder before desoldering. ;)

It´s allways fun to look those:)

I got a IIcx here, but the last time I tried starting it up (~15 years ago), I got the power-on sound and the green light, but no video (unless the monitor needed an adaptor I didn't have). I do not have the technical expertise to recap anything. I'm sure the mobo needs it. It might need new PRAM too, or maybe a new battery. I wish I knew someone in the Phoenix area who could look this thing over with me and diagnose its state. I'd also like to find out if there's a way to test that HD and see if it still works. Would a modern Mac even be able to "see" it?

i like the new way that mac is started up, similar to the Mac LC and the compact aio macs (Mac 128k, 512k, Plus, SE, Classic)

I had 2 of those years ago. When people was chucking out older macs all around. I ended up finally with a quadra 650 so if comes with a nice 040 processor. I then added a powerpc 601 card. Plus the model I have did not have the cd-rom kick. No issue on that. Just put another hard drive in it. Then use a external drive. I do admit I wish at that time the drives was ide and not scsi. Since the adapters are still a little pricey. Still trying to figure out if I want to hunt down a nubus video card though. But it plays sim city classic for mac. So I'm good with it.

HI there. Picked one of these up recently cheap. Do you know anyone in the Apple community who can replace the caps on the motherboard and floppy drive(s) on the Mac II or IIx, or IIci? thanks

"Shit, that's a mess." Truer words were never spoken.

I've got the same Emachines video card somewhere. Been digging into my vintage computer collection lately and selling off the stuff I don't want lately.

the iici was Apple's flagship mac for a good couple years till the Quadras came around. the "better" iiFX came out the next year but that was an expensive mess with massive compatibility issues due to it's complicated proprietary design and basically was impossible to expand (you were stuck with what it was forever) where as the iici could be upgraded and was respectably usable for over decade thanks to plenty of expandability even up to 604 power PC by the late 90s.

I think you are fun to watch great job!!

Beautiful machine.

Cool.. I had a Mac IIci too but it didnt have any sound out so I passed it on... But then I got a Quadra 700 and it's cool, same form factor.

I got one for ya... An Apple PowerMac 7200 w/ a upgraded CPU Card. It's been sitting on my desk for 10+ years..... last time I messed with it, it did power up and work.

Just got a chance to view this video. I own a MacIIci (bought new in 1990) - mine has 32MB of RAM with an 8*24 video card. (ci has built in graphics whereas the cx didn't). As for e-machines - I worked with a lot of their video products and while I don't recall that particular card, they were big on both full page and portrait displays. And yes, the greyscale version would have been for a hires DTP FP display. I'm not positive, but I think e-machines also made a pivot display, but I could be wrong. Still, the IIci is an awesome machine. Mine still works (or did, last I tried it)

I believe what video card was made for the portrait display . Looks like same connector.

IIci was my second machine, after a accelerated MacPlus. I put a 50Mhz Daystar in it, an 8*24 GC card, and did photoshop work.

I have a friend at work that has a old Macintosh he originally had problems getting it working but he said he got it working by leaving it pluged in. I told him its probably the caps and he needs to replace them ASAP. Then he said he didn't want to do that because I think he said he wanted it to be period correct or along the lines of that. I then told him if he doesn't he's just going to destroy the motherboard and if he ever decides to sell it people will probably buy it for parts as the board will be probably be destroyed due to leaky caps. On second thought his problem is probably the power supply which could possibly start a fire if the cap ever explodes.

OH WOW! This is one awesome machine!

What was required to run that modern monitor?

Yeah. Not a fan of bursting the caps but to be fair to you it won't do much more damage since you're cleaning the site up right away. Instead of "scraping" away the old stuff I'd try to flood it with good solder and maybe use a solder sucker or the wick to pick it up like you did. Definitely some projects for the future like enabling the proper soft-on switch but if you don't care, that's your business! Still nice that you preserved this old machine. Are you going to keep the spinning magneto-rust drive or put a CF card device in there?

My first Mac. Turned out to be a decent computer and I got a lot of mileage out of it. Lasted for a while.

finetip soldering iron add solder to the pads they come off in 2 seconds, cleanup with de-soldering wick, use copper tape to fix traces, heat the pads up then slide the capacitors into it, dont need a hot-air gun mate

Great stuff. The IIci was probably their best 030 machine. Doesn't the trace damage unfortunately continue however even after removing the leak source?

I have a IIcx that had a crystal rattling around in it, and I'm not sure where it goes...