I was an Apple Tech back in the day and by far the biggest failure of mice was the cable at the mouse end just outside the grommet. My fix was to remove the cable, force the grommet further up the cable, a couple inches would do. cut the wire just past the bend where the bend caused the break, Strip the wires and reattach.
That is definitely my suggestion. Cut the broken cable near the moulded stress relief that goes into the mouse and test the yellow wire there shortening the cable until you get reliable continuity on the yellow wire. Unfortunately, that stress relief is directly moulded and fused onto the cable and will be very hard to move. Easier to cut the cable just before that and then carefully remove individual wires from the part going thru the stress relief. Then try and cut and pull the cable outer layer thru so you can then push the good part of the cable thru, etc.
Wanted to comment the same. If there is no obvious pinching or damage on the cable, the most likely failure is at the point that endured much stress and that is mostly bendy bit at the mouses end.
@@JanBeta Some cables were harder than others to get the grommet to move, but, I found grasping the jacket with pliers on the side facing the mouse and then getting the grommet to spin made it much easier to twist and slide the grommet away from the mouse end worked pretty good. Keeping in mind you are going to cut off the section of wire that pinched by the pliers.--Good luck!
I'm not even in the same universe as you regarding my repair skills, but I have fixed my fair share of mice in the 90s. The cable was always the fault. Since the break is usually near the mouse, it's worth checking for intermittent contact. I used to check for continuity on each lead until I found the faulty one. Then I would bend the cable around my finger and pull the finger along the cable until I was able to localise the fault. Since it was usually near the mouse, I simply cut off a bit, with a healthy margin and then soldered the wires back onto the mouse. You'd end up with a slightly shorter cable, but your mouse would work. Given that my country was under a UN embargo during much of the 90s, it was nigh-on impossible to get a new mouse, or a replacement cable for that matter so we did what we could.
I fixed the missing teflon on my Mac SE/30 mouse by just buying a cheap sheet of teflon from China and cutting it out and just using double sided tape. One piece has a weird semi-circular arc shape, so I made a paper template and used that to find the right sized hole punches, and cut the straight edges with a hobby knife. That seemed to work pretty well for me.
I had an issue with the glide pads on an Amiga 1000 mouse. The original pad material was thicker so I ended up having to add some double sided tape in the holes to shim it up a bit or the glide pad was too thin and the ball would not make good contact with the rollers due to the ride height on the mouse. This was with the same material you have there and an 11mm leather punch
Interesting! The replacement pads seem to fit perfectly on this particular mouse, feels very good and works perfectly fine. Maybe they changed the design slightly from the initial tank mouse model? I'm going to have to double check on my A1000 mouse.
@@JanBeta I think the original pads were also too thin, so Commodore stuck several on top of each other. That's why you had to remove more than 4 pads at 29:49
Back in the day I found that the metal rollers were prone to collect dust, dirt, & crud (fluff). The first step should be to restore both rollers to clean shiny metal . Once you remove the resistor, I don't know why you didn't measure its resistance against its banding code (BBROYGBVGW). In my experience connectors are the most likely malfunction. (Ohm out them first.) Reseating cables has fixed many malfunctions. I've found Goo Gone works for removing old glue residue.
I cleaned the rollers meticulously in one of the previous videos in the series. Unfortunately, the metal is corroded quite a bit so it still looks like it’s dirty. The rollers work fine though, thankfully. The approach I’ve taken was admittedly quite chaotic. I was very determined that the fault would be the same one I encountered during my 1351 repair so I jumped right into that without taking a methodical approach. That backfired quite a bit but I’m always learning. Thanks for the tips!
The donor mouse looks to be a white one the same color like the A600/1200. They came with later 600's. They seem pretty rare as most tank mice are the original beige ones!
My experience with most mice that lose functions, from retro ones from many years ago to current ones that have stupid-thin wires is, the point at where the cable goes into the strain relief, which I find to be an ironically-named part, is usually the source of much strain on a cable and wires break right there where the worst bending of the cable takes place, needing to cut the cable back and somehow feed it through the strain relief & reconnect inside the mouse, reviving the mouse again, until the next time it breaks... :P
I'm actually going to give that a try with the cable I removed. Maybe it really is that simple. Several people in the comments pointed out that it's a common weak spot in these. Thanks for pointing it out!
@@JanBeta That's the benefit of sharing experience, it wouldn't surprise me if that one wire, you could pull on the copper and it'll just slide right out (also handy for gauging as to where the break is and where to cut it back to), I've done this with so many cables with alleged strain relief at one end and repairing, or at least bodging it 'til I got a replacement, the worst cuplrits being Lenovo PSU plugs, always breaking at the laptop end inside the strain relief itself!!! It's almost like they designed them to break there... :P
I read somewhere that there are adaptors for using a standard serial mouse with a C64. Still, I really should test out my 1351 which I bought a few years back but never got round to writing the driver for it. I did for the NEOS mouse though, for my GUI programs. (Actually, I pinched a chunk of code from other software & modified it to work the way I wanted. I'd be happy to pass this on if you're interested, assuming the disks are still OK).
Jan, thanks for another great video! How good are the button clicks? Those dome switches are prone to wear out easily, I had to replace several like those on Atari joysticks because they had become mushy and unreliable. The replacement dome switches I used were from an ebay seller in Germany called Amiga-Design, however they look slightly different than the ones in your tank mouse.
The buttons work well on this one but I've seen many of those dome switches wear out indeed. Usually you can get them back to work by removing the top of the domes (stuck down with tape) and cleaning the contacts and then sticking them back down with new sticky tape, I found. No need to replace them in most cases. They are very prone to failure though.
Nice fix and ideas what might be wrong in these :) I have one PC PS/2 mouse, which otherwise works, but the wheel rolling feature stopped working at some point. The pressable button in it does work, but the roller, up and down rolling doesn't work. Luckily not a huge problem as there's other means to scroll up and down, so haven't gotten into it very deeply yet. Took the mouse apart once to see if there's just some dirt, but no, didn't work even after cleaning it.
From my experience with Amiga mice, when something breaks, it's always either a wire, or the button itself. in fact we've probably thrown away many Amiga mice just because of broken buttons... however, the ones we had never used blister buttons like that, the ones we had have a microswitch soldered onto the main board. I think it's a later revision.
As soon as I saw no movement in one direction I thought it would be the wire. This was really common back in the day. They usually broke at the point just outside the grommet where they bend a lot.
Jan Thanks for sharing your experience. What you prefer in Europe ? Hakko fr-301 110v with 220-110v transformer? Or Chinese vacuum gun sucker ?. I confuse
Hi @janbeta, I don't know if you read comments on your older videos and I have a really silly question; what type of screws are in the tankmouse housing? I recently acquired an original tankmouse myself but it came without the screws. I tried screenshotting your video, but the resolution is too low to get an accurate impression. Anyway, thank you for your videos, it gives me the courage to repair my own stuff ;)
Please send me an email (contact on my website janbeta.net). I can send you some measurements and pictures if that helps. (Might take a couple of days until I answer though, I have to take a tank mouse apart to check.) :)
@@JanBeta I managed to find perfectly fitting screws; M3x8 1mm pitch, and replaced the switches. Now only retr0brite is needed and it’s all done :) Thanks again!
Yeah, noob mistake. Should have checked the wiring first thing. I was so determined it would be the same fault as in the 1351 mouse I fixed that I forgot to check the simple things first... :D
Would soldering in a pin header on the "broken" mouse circuit board and then using the donor mouse cable intact with it's wired connector (unless it was fixed to the circuit board and non removable) not be a more ideal solution Jan ?
In theory, yes. The pinout is different though so it would not be "plug and play", it would have required rewiring the connector so I went with the more destructive method. If I ever make a new cable for the "wireless" mouse, I can just reuse the connector or crimp some new connections on a pin header connector. :)
I noticed you didn't clean the roller wheels that rub against the ball. Lots of build up on them make the mouse not scroll as smooth. You have to scrape the junk off of the two direction wheels and the tension wheel.
I cleaned them as well as I could in a previous episode. Unfortunately, there is quite some corrosion on the metal that makes it look like it's still dirty. It doesn't interfere with the movement too much, thankfully.
Hey Jan, a good repair but a bad restauration, imo. You made that repair because of saving the original early model of that mouse, right? Why using a period incorrect cable and that ugly black feet? That makes no sense from restauration side of view. But other than that a nice video 😊
I wore out the cable on so many cabled mice, I only work wirelessly now. Buuttttt.... Those rollers... clean those rollers! Dead skin and oil are not good rolling surfaces.
I cleaned them as well as I could in a previous episode. Unfortunately, there is quite some corrosion on the metal that makes it look like it's still dirty. It doesn't interfere with the movement too much, thankfully.
Hmmm. This kind of debug is not really a good demonstration. Why not look at the schematics and measure at the output of the mouse? From there you can go back until you find the bug. Or at the outputs of the LM339? Just connecting some mysterious resistors is not a good example. The 5 digit DMM does not help here . . .
Exactly my thoughts. On the bench there stands a perfectly good digital scope with 4 channels. This mice have 4 signals for detecting the XY movement, why not use the scope to troubleshoot? Connecting 4 channels to the 4 photodiodes and then on the output of the pcb. After that connecting the probes to a D-Sub9 connector connected at the end of the cable. The data encoding in the signals by the are also not so complicated, 15 minutes of reading on the net.
I was on the wrong track but figured it out in the end. Using a scope to troubleshoot a mouse like this is way over the top. I usually try to use the simplest tools first and go to the devices that not many tinkerers have at hand as a last resort.
@@JanBeta That's not the point. Your overall approach is not good. More than often, you just poke around in the circuit in hope for a lucky hit. Trial and error without much thoughts. This works somehow, but it's not a really efficient and skillful way. This can be seen on a lot of your repair videos, e.g. the fix of the C64 with broken traces. This easy defect of the mouse could have been a simple but good example on how to debug hardware the right way. Measure -supply at the mouse -supply at IC -output signals at mouse/IC -measure voltage at LEDs -measure voltage at photo transistors A DMM is enough for this, but not with 0.1mV resolution. The flickering numbers create more irritation than information. 1 or even 10mV resolution is plenty here. With the known good channel (Y axis) you can compare voltages very easy. Even with a known common defect as the bias drift of the photo transistors, the assumed defect should be measured and confirmed first before any modifications. Yes, there are sometimes problems where you can not measure any defect, for whatever reason.Then you have to swap components and test. But this comes in a later stage, when you run out of ideas or measurement options. Bigclivedotcom is a very good example on how such debug and analyzing session should look like!
What a nonsense! Desolder components before you have a good diagnosis and understanding of the circuit! I surgeons would work like this . . .Whats the probability of a broken resistor in THAT kind of circuit?
As I explained in the video, the resistors don't break. The bias of the transistors shifts over the years and the resistors can be replaced with matching values to make up for it. I explained it in more detail in my 1351 repair video (linked in the description). Not nonsense, actually a pretty common fault.
You've already made your feelings clear in your other post so why post this as well? How about pointing us at your channel so we can see a total expert at work? You don't have one? Well STFU then.