Macintosh Plus with toasted power supply...worth saving?

[glitch]

I picked up a Macintosh Plus at the state auction this past weekend, and got a chance to open it up today. It looks like it has suffered an actual fire on the power/video board! I assumed it was a failed capacitor (it was near the HF filter in the flyback section), but that capacitor seems to have been damaged by something below it igniting or smoking. It sort of looks like the connector to the deflection yoke caught fire, but I'm not sure why that would happen.

Anyhow, the board is heavily charred. I tried to clean it up with a fiberglass brush, and several layers of the board's FR-4 have come off...it looks like carbon fiber underneath. Usually, we don't even bother to save boards this charred at work, since the boards can become conductive. That leaves me with the option of finding a replacement power/video board, or gutting the unit for parts.

The case is in fair condition; as usual, the programmer's switch is damaged. There's a few minor pry marks around the edges where the people at the state auction went trying to find a hard drive (of course, the Plus has no internal hard drive!). The motherboard looks unaffected by the power/video board failure, just very dusty. The picture tube has some slight burn-in, but not enough to make it unusable. It doesn't have a keyboard or mouse.

I'm not sure whether I should put the effort into fixing the unit up, or just sell it for parts. Does anyone have a need for the aforementioned components, and/or does anyone have a spare power/video board, keyboard, and/or mouse?

 

[tezza]

I would say not worth saving, but then that is me. Maybe the case is in very good condition, in which case it might be worth trying to get a working board (or a grubby almost free machine you can swap from). Mac Plus machines are readily available in the US, yes?

I have a similar situation with an SE. The video board and power board are damaged but the case is in good condition. I already have a working SE/30 so I'm not prepared to spend anything much on the SE. Certainly not shipping. At the moment it's sitting in the corner waiting for a grubby but working SE to appear locally for $1-$10 (NZ). If one doesn't appear it will probably eventually be stripped for parts.

Everytime I look at it it seems to glare at me accusingly as if to say "fix me!"

Tez

 

[Unknown_K]

Seems like the plus model is in demand lately. I would put it aside for a while and see if I could get a junker to part out for parts. if you can't get another parts machine then sell the motherboard and other parts, junk the rest.

 

[QuantumII]

I would say, keep it and fix it. If it had been mine, I would have

 

[mark66j]

There is also a market out there for the cases, both for Macquarium use and because they have signatures molded inside the case.

Personally I would be slow to junk anything of that vintage -- despite the recession I've seen some real price jumps on some hardware from that era recently. But then again, I'm not good at throwing things out