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Any precautions required or advice before powering up a model 80?

I

intabits

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 22, 2019
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148
Location
Melbourne, Australia
I have an 8580 that hasn't seen a volt in maybe 25 years.
I'd like to power it on soon, and wonder if there are any pitfalls to avoid.
If it were an old valve radio, I'd use a variac, and a dim bulb current limiter, but probably not correct procedure fro a switching PS.

Any advice that you may have about turning this unit on safely would be most appreciated.
 
I have a few model 80's, 60's and a 65sx and all I ever did when I received them was take them apart to clean them and see what cards were inside. Basically look for moisture, have a good battery, make sure there are no lose cables and fire it up. Some of the items were snagged from a recycler during a humid summer so I let them sit a bit in the A/C so no water condenses inside.

I would expect the battery to be dead so systems settings are gone, and you will need a reference disk and also files for each MCA card installed. Floppy drives tend to be bad because of leaky capacitors so be prepared to replace them.

When you fire it up and something smokes just turn it off and look for where the smoke came from (never had that issue yet).
 
Unknown_K said:
When you fire it up and something smokes just turn it off and look for where the smoke came from (never had that issue yet).
Click to expand...

People who care about not blowing boards apart test the power supply first with an external load.
Chances are very high if something smokes in the PS it will be the RIFA EMI caps.
If something catches fire on a board, it is probably a tantalum and you want to kill power fast if it doesn't
explode and put itself out because they will burn holes in circuit boards.
 
Thanks for the replies.

So I won't just apply power and hope for the best.
I'll open it up and clean it out, looking for any visible issues. And test the PSU separately, probably with a dummy load as Al suggests. Then watch closely for problems when it's all back together.

I believe this particular unit is somewhat special, so it's worth the extra care.

The likely failed floppy drive was expected, as I've read about that several times. I'm just hoping at the least to see some BIOS stuff on a monitor, and take it from there.

I'll probably have further dumb questions at that point...

Thanks again.
 
Zenith made a lot of the PS/2 power supplies, so the procedure for replacing the Rifa capacitors should be similar to what's shown in this video:

 
Thank you for posting this question. I was wondering the same thing for our original 30-286 that hasn't seen power since the mid-1990s. Still has some data on it too!
 
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