!WARNING! The following machine is known to cause feelings of jealousy and rage !WARNING!

I had the fortunate chance to meet a local enthusiast, user @LongAlphabet recently whom after years of owning a few 68k machines finally got the time to revisit the poor buggers he had tucked away.
They brought the motherboards to me for assessment, recap and repairs last week and today I finally got the time to sit down with a rare bird!

*Drum roll* This is not only an SE/30, it's also an extremely FAST SE/30 thanks entirely to this Daystar 68030 50Mhz socketed add-on card.

[Image: PXL_20220309_193731297.jpg]

The best part of this? @LongAlphabet has owned this since college when it was a daily use machine. To quote them "I wondered why it was so fast!"

well, now we know why!
As per usual our beloved 68k machines are all slowly dying horrible deaths thanks to battery bombs, leaking capacitors and Kaiju attacks.
I say "No!" to that. Let's Tinker!

On initial assessment the display says we go straight to jail without collecting $200! Let's dawn our SMC gear and break outta jail!


Sparing the Gory details "Kali-Ma!" was chanted a few times (Remember Indiana Jones?) the board was heated up via [fire]HOT-AIR[fire]
and the crusty old, leaking capacitors were thrown into the nearest envelope addressed to @eric.
There was quite a bit of rotten solder mask and some notable breaks in traces but everything cleaned up well with flux, solder braid and scalpel. (ask an adult before using a scalpel, half of you can't be trusted with safety scissors!)



UE8 is always a treat, don't you think? UV solder mask was applied to any and all exposed traces to ensure no further degradation.



The entire process of recapping this board took longer than usual due to the amount of bad solder mask and traces BUT after channeling the essence of @Kay K.M.Mods it was a thorough repair focused on detail.

Booting the machine it's obvious that the speed is slightly peppier than usual as the chime seems 4x faster. MacBench gives the lowdown on this systems specs and speed to prove it isn't a slouch by any means.

To finish up I kindly offered @LongAlphabet a generous $10 for the motherboard but they have foolishly declined! oh well, they are dime a dozen!




ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM!

Well done @Drake ! Repairing the SE/30 is sometimes very difficult. I also have one unsolved board.
I think it was very lucky to say that the repair was completed with only that workload. Congrats[face-with-party-horn]

Loved the story @Drake :D - a treat to hear about the process. Thank you for restoring this machine - wasn't sure how bad it'd be. (Especially considering the other battery-bombed :cry: logic board.) Man oh man, crazy to see how close the speed is next to a that first gen PowerPC!