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Bezel for a CD-ROM drive on a Mac Performa?

Chuck(G)

Chuck(G)

Gone, but never forgotten.
Joined
Jan 11, 2007
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Pacific Northwest, USA
I've finally got around to installing a CD-ROM drive on my Performa 6100. I've got the drive sled, but apparently the front bezel is specific to a particular make of drive. Has there ever been a project to make one such for a generic CD-ROM drive?
 
There were two bezels, one for the tray-loading drive and one for the caddy-loading drive. I may have a spare one of the tray-loading drive bezel. Let me check my spare parts later today.
 
Thanks, given the high quality of the plastic on the Performas (/s) it may not mean much in the long run. One of few lines of Apple products with self-destructing parts.
 
Seems like I only have spare ones for the Centris/Quadra 650, 840av and 7500. None of these will fit I'm afraid.
 
It's okay--I've decided to convert my Beige G3 over to dual-boot so I can run both OS 9.2 and 7.5. (MFS support is important to me in some situations). The 6100/60 is a bit fragile (I've been gluing bits and pieces back together right and left) and probably best left on the shelf. On the other hand, G3's still seem to be plentiful.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Thanks, given the high quality of the plastic on the Performas (/s) it may not mean much in the long run. One of few lines of Apple products with self-destructing parts.
Click to expand...

Why do you think it's a problem with the plastic "quality"? These machines are 30+ years old and plastic has a finite lifetime.

Is it a Performa 611xCD or a Power Macintosh 6100/60? They should be fundamentally the same machine, but branding was different.
 
Istarian said:
Why do you think it's a problem with the plastic "quality"? These machines are 30+ years old and plastic has a finite lifetime.
Click to expand...

Chuck won't be able to answer this question, unfortunately. But the 6100's plastic is especially poor in my experience. At about the 30 year mark the CD-ROM bezel on my machine had become about as weak and brittle as a cracker: you could crumble pieces of it with one hand. I think this poor quality is exceptional even for plastics of the time.
 
stepleton said:
Chuck won't be able to answer this question, unfortunately. But the 6100's plastic is especially poor in my experience. At about the 30 year mark the CD-ROM bezel on my machine had become about as weak and brittle as a cracker: you could crumble pieces of it with one hand. I think this poor quality is exceptional even for plastics of the time.
Click to expand...

Right. :cry:

I forgot about that and probably wouldn't have immediately connected the dots anyway.

Just wondering because a lot of people (esp. younger folks?) don't seem to have figured out (yet!) that the degradation of plastics is inevitable. It's just a matter of time and circumstances.

My 6100/66 (acquired secondhand circa 2006) seemed to be okay the last time I tinkered with it (at least 5-6 years ago). Still I've always treated the case latches (top, rear) very gingerly given how many pictures there are of systems where those have snapped off...
 
Istarian said:
These machines are 30+ years old and plastic has a finite lifetime.
Click to expand...

Some plastic is better than others, and Apple machines from the mid-90's are well known for having particularly brittle plastic. In my experience the 6100 actually was on the less bad end of the spectrum; the absolute worst were the cases they used for the Centris/Quadra 650, Quadra 800, and Power Macintosh 7100/8100/8500; those things were crumbling to pieces when they were five years old. Second place might be the case they used on the 7200/300/500/600, and in slightly modified form for the Beige G3 desktop. I tore down a lemon 7200 around 2003 and it was trivial to just snap it into little pieces to fit in the garbage with my bare hands.

FWIW, this problem didn't end with the Beige era. Every G3 iMac I've seen has broken plastic components; the slot-load ones in particular are notorious for the internal structural supports falling apart, possibly because they ran so hot. (The tray-load CD-ROM ones had a fan, so the crumbling polycarbonate problem was mostly restricted to visible cracks and broken-off port door flaps.) The G3/G4 desktop's handles are easily broken off, the "Cube" was famous for cracks in the polycarb stand (it isn't even really structural, it just holds the little metal cage with the innards off the table)... etc. I'm not going to say that the plastics Apple used for these were necessarily worse than any other company's, but the fact that Apple relied on plastic so heavily for large desktop cases inevitably meant that any inherent flaws with the material are going to be a bigger problem.
 
Istarian said:
Why do you think it's a problem with the plastic "quality"? These machines are 30+ years old and plastic has a finite lifetime.
Click to expand...

Certain types of plastic degrade more rapidly than others. Polymatt on Youtube made a video on re-creating the chassis of a rare laptop destroyed by plastic rot and did a deep dive into why it happened.

Apparently the VOCs and plasticizers offgas over time. Since they have nowhere to go, they build up in voids inside the plastic until the structure of the plastic can no longer contain them and they cause fissures and cracks in the plastic to escape.
He shows the SEM images around 8:35 in the video showing the damage on a microscopic level. Once the structure of the plastic is sufficiently compromised, it just turns to dust.
 
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