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Noooo....a PET Mouse!

K

KevinO

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 13, 2012
Messages
380
Location
Des Moines, IA USA
Found a mouse nest in my best 8032 yesterday. I have TWO that are non-working and awaiting repairs. Why did it have to be the GOOD one? I have terrible shame for keeping my precious Commodore collection in a barn for 10 months as it is, and how this happens!

So, in my defense...we had half of our basement foundation replaced last year in April, and I had to temporarily move all my retro computer collection and work area to our pole barn. It was only supposed to be for two weeks, but the contractor took MONTHS to get the job done, and we ended up firing him after we still got water in the basement. Now we're out of luck and not enough money to fix it right. So half of my basement sits empty while my collection sits in a place that is not rodent proof. Nearly everything that would fit into totes got put in one, but the PETs...well, they're just so bulky! So they got put on a high shelf, and I was foolishly thinking that the height would help keep them safe. It doesn't.

I was digging through my shelves looking for a part, and noticed that the towel I use to cover the keyboard on this particular PET was all chewed up. With a feeling of dread, I dragged it down off the shelf and lifted the hood. Inside was a huge ball of who-knows-what, and within a few seconds, a little head popped out. I missed him, but he jumped down and Molly, my excellent mouser, caught and ate him. So there IS justice in the world.

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Cleanup is still in progress, but you can see the board looks pretty good afterwards. I get the beep but no video. Further examination shows the wires going up to the monitor are chewed in several places, so that will have to be fixed first. Anyone have that cable available? I'd like it to be original if I could....

EDIT: Sorry all the pics are rotated. They were the right way up when I uploaded them!
 
Cute dog you got there. Sorry about your PET. Thought you had a computer mouse for your PET. I forgot that mice can fit through a pencil-sized hole, had one that got inside my old job twice (baited out the first one, and put the other one in the trap, thankfully). I have a pet mouse that was my sister's and he's freaking adorable. My Treeing Walker Coonhound Basset Hound mix did find our hamster that escaped his cage after chewing the top end off of the house that has a tube in it in our crawl space (that was the first placed I looked, but didn't see the little guy).
 
Mice can really wreck a system. Looks like you got to this one pretty quickly though. Having to move stuff to a barn due to emergency work is one thing, but yeah, this is why I try and convince people not to store stuff essentially outdoors! I'm going through a hoard of stuff from a former Bell Labs engineer that has been largely stored essentially under cover outside, and a lot of the repair is mouse damage and corrosion.
 
I have some of my systems in my crawl space in boxes (dumb, I know, but no mice in any of my systems) since I didn't have room in my back room/laundry room for anything until now.
 
I can relate, I drive a 30 year old car (my first car, i've had many since but will never get rid of it) Anyway 20 something years ago I rented a place in the country and parked my car on an old barn foundation. No long after I started getting eletrical issues, field mice were nesting in my car and chewing my wires! I used glue traps and poison and caught and killed 20 mice while living there. They burrowed into the seat foam and the air vents. Anyway, I guess the smell as much as I clean and try my best still attracts other mice. I killed a couple in the past year (the car is usually garaged but sometimes I need the garage for tools and the like. Guess I need to put in new seat covers and carpet. Damn rodents!

Glad your dog vindicated your PET!
 
What kind of car do you have? A fellow YouTuber, uxwbill, had his 88 Plymouth Reliant Wagon at his farm, parked on the lawn, and mice (as well as wasps) made nests in that car, and luckily, the car did run, but the brake lines went out (maybe mice chewed through, but I digress). My family and I have a Rockwood Freedom pop-up from 1998 that has a semi-bad connection for the back left brake/turn signal light with the headlights on, it's dim, and when I hit the brake, the light goes out, except the turn signal still works (sort of). Without the headlights on, it's still dim, but illuminates with either the turn signal on or the brakes on.

We also had a possum that lived in the garage at our house as well when we had the hole the size of a softball on the side, and it's patched up. For my camper, I'd say it's a corroded wire or end connector for the back lights.
 
retro-pc_user said:
What kind of car do you have? A fellow YouTuber, uxwbill, had his 88 Plymouth Reliant Wagon at his farm, parked on the lawn, and mice (as well as wasps) made nests in that car, and luckily, the car did run, but the brake lines went out (maybe mice chewed through, but I digress). My family and I have a Rockwood Freedom pop-up from 1998 that has a semi-bad connection for the back left brake/turn signal light with the headlights on, it's dim, and when I hit the brake, the light goes out, except the turn signal still works (sort of). Without the headlights on, it's still dim, but illuminates with either the turn signal on or the brakes on.

We also had a possum that lived in the garage at our house as well when we had the hole the size of a softball on the side, and it's patched up. For my camper, I'd say it's a corroded wire or end connector for the back lights.
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I have an 89 acura legend (made in japan in 88) nearly a third of a million miles on it. I used to get lots of compliments on her up until the early 2000's but time has a way with inferior badly refined japanese sheet metal. Either way, shes still a joy to drive. I took her out for a 350 mile drive to buy an apple IIc saturday.

Ill tell you that she still impresses me, MOST of her components are factory stainless, yet EVERYTHING on my 2004 GMC pickup truck is rotting away and needed second or third replacements. They knew what they were doing when they engineered that car.
I've watched UXwbills videos too
 
Amazing that a Japanese manufactured car looks better than a US made car. My 2001 Oldsmobile Intrigue has rust spots in some spots: a rust hole under the back right door between the door and the plastic fender(?), rust on the back right door, and rust on the bottom left side under the door and above the plastic fender. It's got 110K miles on it right now, it needs a heck of a lot of parts or maintenance.
 
retro-pc_user said:
Amazing that a Japanese manufactured car looks better than a US made car. My 2001 Oldsmobile Intrigue has rust spots in some spots: a rust hole under the back right door between the door and the plastic fender(?), rust on the back right door, and rust on the bottom left side under the door and above the plastic fender. It's got 110K miles on it right now, it needs a heck of a lot of parts or maintenance.
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I mean there are issues with my acura, like a jaguar its over engineered in some ways. The completely convoluted vacuum system for one. Right now the idle is too high because of this sensor I had to deal with years ago. It sits above the throttle body, it has a coolant line running through it. It contains a sealed resevoir of wax. Obviously the wax will melt when the coolant gets hot enough and this triggers the sensor to adjust the rpms of the engine. Its running about 1K rpms too high right now on the highway, I need to take the sensor apart and maybe a cleaning will fix it... as they dont make it anymore.

The other issue was it didnt take much to kill the automatic transmission, After the 4th tranny died I converted it to 5 speed stick.
 
Just as I was thinking "wow! 30 years old, that's worse than me!" I suddenly realised that I have one that's 38, the one I drive on the weekends is 31. Where did all the time go?

Oh well, my daily driver is only 28. The only newer car I've owned was the same model one year newer.
 
KC9UDX said:
Just as I was thinking "wow! 30 years old, that's worse than me!" I suddenly realised that I have one that's 38, the one I drive on the weekends is 31. Where did all the time go?

Oh well, my daily driver is only 28. The only newer car I've owned was the same model one year newer.
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ARGH! Getting old...
So here is a kicker too. I have been a long time member of the acura legend forums. 10 or 20 years ago they were bustling. Now whenever I post something there are pretty much no replies.. Im one of the last it seems.. Thats sad.
 
VERAULT said:
ARGH! Getting old...
So here is a kicker too. I have been a long time member of the acura legend forums. 10 or 20 years ago they were bustling. Now whenever I post something there are pretty much no replies.. Im one of the last it seems.. Thats sad.
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I expect activity for AMC Eagles has increased. The value sure has, unfortunately for those of us who prefer to drive them rather than store then in climate controlled barns.
 
Did you guys just turn my tragedy into a Car Talk thread? I don't think you have a proper appreciation for my trauma! LOL!

Living out in the country, we've had rodents chew through wires in our vehicles too. I have a lawn tractor that I've had to clean mouse nests out of 4 or more times. Once, I blew the engine because I didn't know that the cooling fins were packed full of mouse nesting. Someone already said, once the smell gets into something, they keep coming back again and again, the little bastards.

I put traps around the remaining equipment on that shelf and caught another one last night. Then I brought 3 of my remaining 4 PETs down and looked inside each one, and no mice!

This is a terrible place to store vintage computers!
 
Same with crawl spaces and back rooms. I found a nest in an old jewelry box (I had gloves on), but no mouse in my back room. I had an old 486 stored in the same spot like it was 1996 and it didn't have any rodents in there whatsoever. Garages are the worst as there's no climate control whatsoever, and anything wood is easy for them to climb onto.
 
KevinO said:
Did you guys just turn my tragedy into a Car Talk thread? I don't think you have a proper appreciation for my trauma! LOL!

Living out in the country, we've had rodents chew through wires in our vehicles too. I have a lawn tractor that I've had to clean mouse nests out of 4 or more times. Once, I blew the engine because I didn't know that the cooling fins were packed full of mouse nesting. Someone already said, once the smell gets into something, they keep coming back again and again, the little bastards.

I put traps around the remaining equipment on that shelf and caught another one last night. Then I brought 3 of my remaining 4 PET's down and looked inside each one, and no mice!

This is a terrible place to store vintage computers!
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No just a general Vermin hating, wire chewing talk. We all have love for the PET and dont like to see any person or animal defecate all over them!
 
Update....FIXED! I had hoped for original cables, because I didn't want it to looked hacked when opening the hood, but I really needed ONE working PET in order to do some troubleshooting on the other TWO I'm working on. So I cut the ends off and replaced the middle section where it had been chewed, and we're back in business!

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Now I can use this one to run the "SUMcheck" program I used some years back to check the ROMs on the other two....

Apparently, this forum software assumes all pictures must be landscape, because it always rotates my pics! Sorry if anyone gets a kink in their neck.
 
KevinO said:
Update....FIXED! I had hoped for original cables, because I didn't want it to looked hacked when opening the hood, but I really needed ONE working PET in order to do some troubleshooting on the other TWO I'm working on. So I cut the ends off and replaced the middle section where it had been chewed, and we're back in business!

View attachment 43994View attachment 43995

Now I can use this one to run the "SUMcheck" program I used some years back to check the ROMs on the other two....

Apparently, this forum software assumes all pictures must be landscape, because it always rotates my pics! Sorry if anyone gets a kink in their neck.
Click to expand...

thats probably what I would have done as well, good job.
 
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