aysel
Experienced Member
After completing my A3000 restoration a few weeks ago I found myself without a project when I stumbled upon a baby poo yellow A4000 on the other bay. Listed as ‘’Commodore Amiga Selection’’ and described as ‘’everything in the picture, selling for dad’’
With no internal photos I bid on the basis it was badged 030and probably cardless with an exploded battery... I was surprised to win it, a SIX hour round trip from Mansfield to Preston and this is what I came home with.
The really nice nice lady had found boxes of extras, a Power Computing external SCSI CD, AT bridgeboard, CD32 games, an A2090, Oktagon, CD drives, HD’s, lovely Sony CRT covered in super hero stickers, full Aminet collection, then I turned it on.... dun... dun.... duuuuuun.... it worked!
Popped the top off, 16mb ram, the original 80mb IDE HD, a GVPHC8+ II Rev 2 with 4gb drive and 8mb ram, a Toccata with a Batman sticker on(eh?!?) and hello missus, what’s this... the CPU card is a 3640!
Then I pull the cards to see what’s at the bottom of the stack and its!!!!!
Upon seeing this I became uncontrollably excited and to my wife’s horror, put pencils up my nose and did a little robot dance in just my underpants singing Dr Hooks ‘’When you’re in love with a beautiful woman’’ by way of celebration before starting the restoration.
Everything dismantled; battery snipped off, I could see a very little leak which had caused no physical damage. Lots of contact cleaner and swabbing, dismantled and cleaned the PSU then removed all the plastics, YELLOW!
The black drive is a Syquest 555, a removable hard drive cartridge job... not really any use to me (and the colour clash was triggering my OCD) so I removed it and dug out a blanking plate.
What followed was a 12 hour retr0brite extravaganza-thon-otron, 20+ cycles of apply, sun, wash, dry, re-apply... laborious but worked really well. The keys had no yellowing at all so I was saved the tedium of the QWERTY jigsaw! Finished off late that evening with a light misting of matt lacquer which once dry was invisible to the eye and will hopefully prevent re-yellowing.
I want the machine for WHDload games, demos, disk mags etc sothe Picasso IV is a bit overkill. Removed the Picasso IV and also the 3640 040 and installed them in myother A4000, then installed an 030 CPU card and a GVP Impact Vision 24 which has a perfect flicker fixer function for OCS/AGA video. Added a 16GB CF card and reader mounted to a rear slot so it’s accessible externally.
With that it was just a case of cleaning up the external SCSI CD Rom, fresh install of Classic WB 3.1, copy the WHD load stuff across and.....
With no internal photos I bid on the basis it was badged 030and probably cardless with an exploded battery... I was surprised to win it, a SIX hour round trip from Mansfield to Preston and this is what I came home with.
The really nice nice lady had found boxes of extras, a Power Computing external SCSI CD, AT bridgeboard, CD32 games, an A2090, Oktagon, CD drives, HD’s, lovely Sony CRT covered in super hero stickers, full Aminet collection, then I turned it on.... dun... dun.... duuuuuun.... it worked!
Popped the top off, 16mb ram, the original 80mb IDE HD, a GVPHC8+ II Rev 2 with 4gb drive and 8mb ram, a Toccata with a Batman sticker on(eh?!?) and hello missus, what’s this... the CPU card is a 3640!
Then I pull the cards to see what’s at the bottom of the stack and its!!!!!
Upon seeing this I became uncontrollably excited and to my wife’s horror, put pencils up my nose and did a little robot dance in just my underpants singing Dr Hooks ‘’When you’re in love with a beautiful woman’’ by way of celebration before starting the restoration.
Everything dismantled; battery snipped off, I could see a very little leak which had caused no physical damage. Lots of contact cleaner and swabbing, dismantled and cleaned the PSU then removed all the plastics, YELLOW!
The black drive is a Syquest 555, a removable hard drive cartridge job... not really any use to me (and the colour clash was triggering my OCD) so I removed it and dug out a blanking plate.
What followed was a 12 hour retr0brite extravaganza-thon-otron, 20+ cycles of apply, sun, wash, dry, re-apply... laborious but worked really well. The keys had no yellowing at all so I was saved the tedium of the QWERTY jigsaw! Finished off late that evening with a light misting of matt lacquer which once dry was invisible to the eye and will hopefully prevent re-yellowing.
I want the machine for WHDload games, demos, disk mags etc sothe Picasso IV is a bit overkill. Removed the Picasso IV and also the 3640 040 and installed them in myother A4000, then installed an 030 CPU card and a GVP Impact Vision 24 which has a perfect flicker fixer function for OCS/AGA video. Added a 16GB CF card and reader mounted to a rear slot so it’s accessible externally.
With that it was just a case of cleaning up the external SCSI CD Rom, fresh install of Classic WB 3.1, copy the WHD load stuff across and.....
