Hello and welcome back to another 8-Bit restoration project!
So, what we have this time is the Bell & Howell.
For those who don’t know, this is actually an Apple II plus, and it was actually made
by Apple and was rebranded under the name Bell and Howell mostly to sell under the education
market, there’s a long story about that, kind of interesting.
The Apple II community lovingly refers to this as the Darth Vader machine.
Now, this particular one was donated to me 13 months ago by Ken Hargy, and I’m just
now getting around to messing with it.
And, unfortunately, somebody, long ago in the past, has done this hideous modification
where they cut a giant hole in the case and put this ugly fan here.
And not only is this modification particularly ugly, but it also makes it impossible to sit
a monitor on top of the computer.
The Bell and Howell units are actually pretty rare these days.
So it’s probably worth while to get this thing restored back to as new as possible.
So, let’s dig in.
So, the first thing I need to do I guess is try powering this thing on and see if it works.
I’m a little concerned because some of these Apple II units have filter caps in the power
supply that will explode after years of sitting.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
But I still didn’t get any video.
However, I realized that if I wiggled the composite video connection it would try to
show something.
Eventually I managed to get a stable picture, but we’ll need to come back and fix that
later.
In the mean time, I’m more concerned about the fact that all I see is garbage on the
screen when I turn it on.
Let’s pop the cover off and see what we can find here.
I’ll start by removing some of these things that we just don’t need.
Or, at least things we don’t need just to see it boot to BASIC.
This card, for example, is some sort of printer card.
Definitely don’t need that just to boot.
This is some sort of RAM expansion card.
It appears to have possibly 256K on board and room for a lot more, but again, this is
not something we need just to boot.
So, let’s fire it up again.
Still no luck.
I also noticed there is what appears to be an RF modulator shoved down in here.
This was for connecting to a television, which would essentially make the computer broadcast
on Channel 33 so that you could tune your TV into that.
And it appears this little 4 pin connector is designed to connect right there by the
video jack.
Well, I’ll come back to the motherboard later.
For the moment let’s look at this ugly fan and see what we can do about that.
I’m not sure why they put this rubber band here, which has now become old and crusty.
I guess I’ll start by unscrewing these bolts that are holding it on.
That dried up rubber band was holding the fan on almost like glue.
OK, next I’ll unscrew these bolts holding the power cord on.
And there we go.
I have no use for this stuff, so in the garbage it goes.
OK, well, that’s an improvement already.
There’s a lot of adhesive gunk on this lid, so I’ll get out the alcohol and see what
I can do with that.
And that worked really well.
OK, so it’s all cleaned up.
And other than these scratches, it looks pretty good.
But I wonder what I can do about that big hole.
Well, it just so happens I was invited to attend Maker Faire in Orlando.
This place was really awesome with all kinds of cool contraptions there.
I got to sit in a replica of the DeLorean from Back to the Future.
This was a really impressive piece of work both inside and out.
Here’s the time circuits, and the flux capacitor, and even has the right license plate, except
it is for Florida.
And there were plenty of other cool things to be seen!
And I brought the lid to the Bell and Howell machine along with me on the plane.
I met up with a very talented guy named Stefan who works for Disney building props.
He was going to take a shot at repairing my lid for me with some resin.
The first thing he did was just cut up some pieces of foam board and made a little rectangular
wall out of it.
He used hot glue to stick it to the case temporarily.
Now, the idea here is that he wanted to make a mold of the texture of the case, which hopefully
will all make sense here shortly.
So, once he had the little wall made, he tried to get it as level as possible.
He used some sort of silicone but it came in a two-part solution that required being
mixed together.
I kept being reminded of playing with Nickelodian Gak.
I think he was letting it spread out from the center like this so it wouldn’t have
any air bubbles in it.
After this was poured, it needed to cure for several hours.
So, skipping ahead a few hours, the silicone had finished curing, so it was time to remove
it.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my camera to focus on the texture of this, but you can
take my word for it, it did capture the texture of the Bell and Howell plastic.
The hot glue was less cooperative than we expected, but we managed to get it all off
eventually.
The next thing he did was bevel out all of the holes just a little bit.
The idea being the holes would be slightly cone shaped instead of straight through, this
adding additional mechanical stability.
That way if you sat something heavy on top of this, it wouldn’t be as likely to pop
out.
And then it was time for the resin.
Now, beyond just mixing the two parts together, he also added some dye.
We talked about this for a while and he warned me that an exact color match would not be
likely given the time constraints we had and the equipment that was on hand at the faire.
Most likely the only way to get it perfect would have been to make possibly dozens of
test pieces with different combinations of dye and let them all cure and pick the best
one.
We just did a single test piece and the color seemed pretty close.
So we went with it.
The next challenge was to clamp this silicone down on the computer.
Now there’s a perfect amount of pressure that you need.
If you have too much, the silicone will push through the hole slightly, thus preventing
the resin from being flush.
But if not enough pressure, it could spill out on the other side too.
Unfortunately, there was no way to really get a good clamp on one side of this mould.
Anyway, here comes the resin.
I was expecting it to be thicker than this, but this poured out almost like water.
And time was also of the essence because this stuff was fast curing resin, taking only a
few minutes to solidify.
Most of the stuff I’ve messed with takes hours, if not days to fully cure.
After about 10 minutes, it was time for the moment of truth.
What was it going to look like on the other side?
Would the texture match?
And would the color match?
Well, the good news is, the texture matched perfectly.
The bad news is, the color isn’t as close as we were hoping.
So, when I got back home, I went to the local hardware store and decided to get some spray
paint.
I noticed they even had this little display for “test spray paint here.”
I brought the lid with me and tried to compare it to all of the colors available.
I even tried a test spray, but it was hard to do while holding the camera and the reality
is, it’s never going to look right when sprayed on paper.
I ended up getting two different colors that I felt were close, and then what I did was
spray the edge of these two floppy disks to see how it looks on plastic.
I wrote on the back of the disks which color I used.
So here we go, let’s see how these compare with the plastic.
Irritatingly, one is too light and the other is too dark, but there were no in-between
colors available.
I’m also not thrilled with the metallic flakes in there.
I’ll have to think about this for a bit.
In the meantime, I wanted to tackle the motherboard problem.
I took the computer over to Raymond’s place because he had a spare Apple II Plus motherboard
we could use for testing.
But first he wanted to use his fancy RAM tester and see if any of the RAM chips were bad.
And they all tested good.
He also has a little CPU tester that is compatible with the 6502, so we tested that, and it tested
good as well.
So, then we took the spare Apple II board and started swapping chips around starting
with the ROMs to see if any were bad.
We put chips from my board into his and tested each one.
Eventually we found the culprit and it ended up being this 74LS257 chip.
When I got back home, I figured it was time to turn it over and take it apart.
Fortunately, Apple II systems are pretty easy to take apart.
There are just a few screws on the bottom.
And then the case will come right off.
I do need to unplug the keyboard, though.
This thing is a little bit dusty inside, but not too bad.
I’ve seen way worse.
Still, I’ll remove this trash out of here.
And then I want to take a look at this video jack.
This is a common issue that affects almost every apple product from the era due to the
type of RCA connector they used.
As you can see, what happens is that the jack becomes loose from the base and no longer
makes a good grounding contact.
My friend Raymond actually has some new old-stock jacks and he gave me one.
But the trouble is, the same problem will eventually happen to this one as well.
So I think it’s better to fix it.
What I’ve always done in the past is to just heat this area up and solder it together.
This will solve the problem once and for all.
I’ll give it a test now, and yep, it is nice an firm.
I’ll just power it up to verify it is still working.
And yes, it is.
I think I’ll also give the board a good spray with some compressed air and then I’ll
use a brush to get any dust that was too stubborn to come off that way.
Also there is this crud on one of the ROM chips.
I’m not sure what it is, but it sort of looks like white-out.
I tried some alcohol on it to no avail.
So next I’ll try some WD-40.
I’ll just spray some on a paper towel because I don’t want to risk getting it all over
the board.
I’ll just apply little on there and let it sit for 10 minutes or so.
Even after 10 minutes it didn’t want to wipe off, but I found that I could use a screwdriver
and gently scrape it off.
And that ended up working out pretty well.
At least you can read the numbers on there now.
Looking at this case now, I knew the keyboard needed some help on the outside, but I also
noticed it is bent on the inside.
This is most likely due to a hard impact or something heavy being sat down on top of the
keyboard.
Fortunately, there are just 4 screws to remove and the keyboard will come right out.
And there we go.
I also found this ugly left-over double-sided tape inside the case.
I suspect this was holding the RF modulator on at some point.
But that’s got to go.
The way I deal with this is to use a screwdriver to scrape away the left over foam.
And then, I can use some WD-40 on the adhesive layer and let that sit for a bit.
Then I can scrape away the adhesive with a screwdriver.
By the way, I always use a little bit of a dull screwdriver for this.
If it is really sharp it will scratch the plastic.
With a dull screw driver you’re sort of pushing the stuff away rather than scraping
it.
Anyway, that worked out really well.
I followed up with some alcohol to clear up any remaining residue.
That looks great now!
So, now it is time to paint.
I’ve masked off just the center area there, so I won’t be painting the whole lid.
And I decided to mask off and paint part of the main case, so I’m just going to paint
these two side pieces as well, so that hopefully it will match all the way across in that recessed
area.
I decided not to use either of those metallic paints I bought, and instead I’m going to
use this flat black.
Well, here goes nothing.
Hey, I think that might actually work out.
So far so good.
And now I’ll get these areas too.
Well, I’m going to need to let that sit for a while and I’ll give it a second coat.
While waiting on that to dry, I’m going to take a look at this keyboard.
So you can clearly see where it is bent.
I think I’ll need to remove this little daughterboard.
It’s held in place by these little nylon snaps.
And here we go.
I’m a little perplexed by the design decision here.
Anyway, I tried to bend this back with my hands but didn’t have much luck.
So I tried using a fulcrum point.
Like most of life’s problems, this one can be solved with bending.
And now to move on to removing the keys.
Some I could remove with my fingers, but others required the key puller.
And I’ll use some compressed air to blow the crud out of here.
One thing I noticed is that the keyboard wasn't made by Apple, which does explain the need
for that daughterboard.
As usual, I used a wet paper towel to clean the keys.
One bright side of the Apple II is that it has a small keyboard so this took about half
as much time as usual.
Also, as usual, some keys did have extra gunk on them that required some extra work.
However, none were more irritating than these F and J keys.
Somebody had added these bumps so they could find the right touch typing positions without
looking at the keyboard.
But, I thought it looked terrible and wanted to remove these.
I thought maybe I could pop them off with a screwdriver, but I came to the realization
that these weren’t just bumps with adhesive on them.
This was, in fact, some sort of epoxy that had been dropped on here and allowed to cure.
And then there was this stuff!
I thought I’d give WD-40 a try.
I let it sit for a while.
And while it had no effect on the epoxy, which I was not surprised about, it did make this
tape or whatever it is loosen quite a bit.
I continued to work on this epoxy for several minutes and eventually was able to scrape
most of it off.
Unfortunately, it did end up scratching the keys some.
But at least you can actually see the letter now.
It might be possible to polish this down, but I’m not going to worry about it for
now.
So, it’s time to re-assemble the keys.
And, of course, I took a photo of it before hand.
And there we go!
So, it was time to re-assemble the computer.
I’ll put this language card back in there.
And I think I’ll try out this floppy drive emulator I acquired a while back.
I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet.
And now to put my painted top back on.
That doesn’t look half bad.
And this little TV I always use looks almost like it was made for this computer, even though
it’s about 19 years newer than the computer itself.
Well, let’s try out some games.
And, so this is another computer that I am happy to be able to move from the repair pile
to the display of properly working computers in my home.
The Bell and Howell unit, if you haven’t figured it out, is basically just an Apple
II Plus with a black case.
And, I could in fact use the standard Apple II floppy drives even though the color doesn’t
match, although they did actually make floppy drives that match this, but they look exactly
like these except they have black.
I could probably paint one of these and you wouldn’t know the difference.
Anyway, so that is it for the moment, so I have a lot of neat stuff coming up soon, so
stick around for that and thanks for watching!