A good friend came over yesterday to spend some time checking a couple of Amiga A500s for damage.

There's probably at least one battery that needs dealing with here.

The first one is an A500+ and as it has an internal battery it's best we get it open and have a look.

Not looking bad overall but it's bit fluffy around that battery and some of the legs on the chips are pretty green.

Looking at the expansion card, that could also do with some preventative care even if we're not going to do anything else with it right now. There's been quite a bit of at least surface attack here as almost every chip now has green legs.

We're going to need a few tools. Mostly some vinegar to help neutralise that alkaline leakage and then some isopropyl alcohol to clean things up a bit. But a soldering iron will also be handy along with some cutters and a few other helpful things. Most essential of all being the flapjacks.

After removing the batteries and a whole bunch of scrubbing with the vinegar and the IPA, using an old toothbrush, we get back to something a lot cleaner and that should help prevent any further immediate degradation from occurring.

Before we put this all back together it's going to be a good idea to give it a lot of forced warm air to get rid of any remaining moisture under the chips and luckily I have a hot air solder reflow tool which we can use on a low temperature setting with a fairly directional nozzle to help that along.

This is just the beginning of the journey for these recovered machines. They'll need some testing and possibly some minor repairs such as the one done on this expansion card to fix up a couple of tracks.

But once they're back in good working condition he has a new case for one of them to go in and some more new cases on the way.

It's been quite a while since we last got to catch up so we spent a lot of time chatting and not as much time as we maybe hoped actually doing things with Amigas but the important thing was to prevent any further rot of the circuits in these.

#RetroComputing #Amiga #Amiga500 #ComputingRepair

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