Trash 80 to Treasure | TRS-80 Restoration | Ep3. 

Good tips and a fun added bonus thank you. "Hearted" so others may learn also

I was wondering about the UV resistance, nice one!

Agreed, as a pro painter from childhood, Your "overspray" is dry specks of paint landing on top of wet paint. When the mist is too far, you dry the paint in mid air. Reduce your distance to 6 - 8 (15cm - 20cm) inches max. Start your stream away from the surface (Left to right) and don't stop until your at the end of the thing your painting. When your spraying, don't point direct at the item, pitch it to the right so the overspray will get buried by the wet paint. Remember the cloud of mist is common dry paint, avoid it landing on the painted surface you are passing.

Thank you I wasn't aware of this!

It's dyed blue for the same reason that 'red' diesel is red. Gotta know what has tax paid on it ;0) PS If you heat-gunned the case until warm to the touch the paint would finish much flatter. I actually like the look you got, a sage tinted laquer would suit it =]8¬_D

It's not just dyed - it's also mixed with a flavorant designed to make the liquid unpalatable and actively nauseating, so that people who power through the flavor still won't be able to keep it down. This is a refinement on the previous methods of denaturing ethanol - which were "we'll add methanol, which is hard to distill out of ethanol, in order to make it toxic, so people won't want to drink this low-tax liquid as a substitute for high-tax drinkin' alcohol" - which obviously didn't work well and left a lot of inveterate meths drinkers blind and/or dead. As far as I can tell, "denatured alcohol" in the US is not required to be mixed with that flavorant, nor is it always colored - I have a tin of it here that's clear. Worse, many people refer to isopropyl alcohol as denatured alcohol here, so it's really very very confusing and if you're picking solvents (for non-drinking purposes) you should look up the MSDS of the exact brand-name product you intend to buy, to check what's really in it before you go rubbing it on your old valuable plastics. I have destroyed more than one vintage component by picking something based on its generic name and later finding out it had, say, acetone (no bueno!!) mixed in.

Aka the blueberry bone broth.

In Poland it's sometimes called "piszczelówa" which could roughly translate to "boney booze" because many varieties of it sport a nice jolly roger with crossed bones on the label, indicating that it's toxic.

It was certainly tempting, I loved how that looked too

Thats exactly what I was about to comment! I'm not really a fan of the silver look to these machines :D

Exactly! Got to wonder why Radio Shack bothered to spend out originally on painting it when it looks great unpainted!

My only guess is that silver felt futuristic in late 70's/early 80's! Not really the case any more.

I liked it better unpainted.

The Amiga 1500 was in tandem and finished yesterday. TRS80 will be wrapped up before any more start. Thanks for watching

@@RMCRetro 🤗

@@RMCRetro I seem to be unable to find Ep4, is it just me or has the episode been removed or not public anymore for some reason?

The aesthetic is up to you. If you're going for a more pack-rat/cyberpunk look, leave it as is. If you want a clean machine that celebrates the computer at the best of times then you hit the ball out of the park.

patina is for people who like old cars unrestored not retro computers! Keep up the amazing work my friend, you nailed it.

That's very nice to hear thank you asgerms. I do the same with my favourites, wait until I have a beer and my shoes off to enjoy them

I agree. And the problem is even bigger than "the machine stops working". You could argue that you can replace the caps when they become an issue and no sooner, but that doesn't work, because when they actually do break they can destroy stuff: Electrolytic capacitors can go all leaky and destroy the board with massive corrosion and stuff Tantalum capacitors tend to fail short circuit, and can send massive currents to different parts of the circuit breaking chips and burning traces While I also understand the appeal of going as close to original as possible, not replacing caps in a timely manner is just a ticking time bomb until it gets damaged so bad it's in an irrecoverable state. There's only a finite amount of these old computers out there, and I'd rather see them not corroded or burnt by bad-but-original capacitors, instead of working with good-but-replaced-capacitors.

Mrs RMC switched to this bamboo brush because it's eco friendly apparently. So I stole it.

Hehe thank you! Who knows how long it will run but I'm certainly enjoying it

I was going to say the same thing.

Painting cars or parts same thing. Spray past the piece and only stop once past and start the gun also just before hitting the material again. People sometimes think this is a waste, but the results are so much more consistent and fewer coats might even be the result.

Agree! Really wanted one of these for that reason when I was growing up!

hehe you should stick to animal facts and not safety tips :D

I've probably got some not so safe tips for animals as well.... LOL

The Big Clive method.

It is a method that is quite gentle on the capacitor, as the current is orders of magnitude lower than when shorting it out. So the method has its merit.

Using a small 12v lightbulb is better.

Thank you. I certainly don't claim to be a pro at painting but hopefully others can take from my experiments and go further with them. I certainly enjoyed doing it, glad you liked the result 🖒

Thanks! Apparantly Dettol (original brown coloured one) can also be used in plastics. White Spirit can strip paint but will melt your plastic so avoid that. Glad you enjoyed it.

I heard hip to be square

Same here

Displacement! What a great idea thank you for that tip

Is that the little bit of silver that's missing? Sure I can touch that up

Great! Very silly nitpick I know but I spotted it right at the beginning. Great channel, keep up the good work m8. :)

Its a good idea to replace any tantalum capacitors as well, since they usually short when they fail which can cause all kinds of catastrophic damage.

+Jeremy Levi As the 8-Bit Guy discovered on that Compaq Portable that he was restoring. When he jerry rigged an external power supply, a tantalum capacitor on the CGA card released its magic smoke... and took part of the 5V rail with it, rendering two of the expansion slots useless. Somehow he lucked across the exact same model of motherboard at a friend's house. +Ichinin It wouldn't be the first time industrial espionage resulted in a batch of crap capacitors. Some models of Dell fell victim to that. An engineer left Rubycon Corporation Japan to go and work for the Luminous Town Electric company in China. At LTE, the scientist made a copy of the formula for the electrolyte, and his staff defected to Taiwan so they could set up their own company selling this electrolyte to capacitor manufacturers. But the defectors miscopied the formula. After a few hours of operation, the electrolyte would leak hydrogen gas, before bursting the metal body of the capacitor. So instead of lasting for 4,000 hours of operation, they were failing after as little as 250 hours. At least five (and as many as 11) capacitor-making companies bought the defective electrolyte. Between 2003 and 2005, Dell, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM sold millions of computers with the faulty capacitors. Unlike IBM, however, Dell tried to downplay the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines. Finally, in 2005, they admitted to the problem and spent $300 million to cover the cost of repairing or replacing the defective machines. For more than a year, I was replacing an average of eight motherboards a week that had the bad caps. By the way, even ceramic capacitors need to be "re-flowed" every couple decades. They lose about 5% of their capacitance per decade, but subjecting them to a "thermal stress event" over 130C resets the capacitance, effectively 'de-aging' them.

Fascinating stuff! I'd love to see a documentary about all this.

Thank you! Beer and snacks are mandatory in The Cave

The Cave seems like the only place to be. You simply can't go wrong with beer, snacks and retro computers.

Thanks! This is the 3D Printing video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-JtsMRttIdbQ.html

Thank you James I'm glad you enjoyed it

I had thought of that too, but the pads are on the back side of the board, and it would have been near impossible to get a good solder contact. there's probably some very-specialized alternative header pin part available for such situations, but unless you're designing control board assemblies as a daily job, you're not likely to find them.

Sorry to hear about your day Smitten, I'm glad it helped you

Thanks you :D

I didn't leave that clip in did I!??