[AUTOMATIC CAPTIONS BY YOUTUBE®] on the menu today let's see if we can turn this into well I won't spoil it for
you what happened to your ear you're a mess oh hello chip dippers welcome to
retro recipes I hope you're doing well that is to say I hope you're doing
better than this poor Commodore 64
you see I found it on eBay and well it has a lot of issues and by issues I mean
what the hell even is that cobwebs now many of you loved that extreme refurb of
the Atari 800 XL
she didn't but for this one we're gonna team up again with friend of the channel
and legendary refurber Pete aka ... so we invite you to sit back relax and enjoy
this pictorial musical journey of bringing another of these special vintage
machines back to life oh and by the way speaking of refurbs unfortunately lady
fractic fell into a reupholstering machine recently but don't worry she's
fully recovered I'll get my coat don't forget your hat! welcome
now 1982's Commodore 64 remains the best-selling home computer of all time
having sold a reported 18 million units and seen here is the 1986 redesign of
that the commodore 64c and it's one of those that I found on
eBay
and the seller asked please save someone so that's exactly what we're going to
try to do and here's how the unit was received we've got everything from bits
of decomposing paper to bits of cement to tire tracks and unfortunately things
aren't any better round the sides either it's hard to even imagine what this poor
thing has been through
there is some good news the warranty sale is still intact while they're
looking inside it there's rusted screws are gonna be hard to remove and yep the
case just snapped right off but that doesn't let us look inside and the
amount of rust inside as well is just incredible
if you saw the video where I recovered data from the Titanic Amiga 4000 well
doesn't this look familiar
now as we saw the seller said working of course not and they suggested someone
might just want to use this for some spare keys but could that be a chance
this could still work let's take a closer look
that's nothing too bad just a decade or two of dust and those weird cop webby
things again oh no and the poor old said chip will save your buddy
I feel like there's actually some kind of civilization growing here
speaking of bender as we start to disassemble things who might be needing
his services
so what about any screws that are just rusted on well we can try the rather
interestingly named knocker loose + penetrating solvent I just spray it on
liberally on all the screws let it soak in for a minute
and then if you're lucky the screw will pop right off and if you're not lucky
this will happen yeah well so let's use that same method until we get down to
Ground Zero well there's only one thing for it
let's take the case to the spa and beat the devil out of it with the dish brush
but has it happened the case itself wasn't hard to clean at all really most
of the problem dirt is on the keyboard so this is how it turned out but we do
have some areas we need to fix like these cracks in the ventilation shaft
when is this stalled while speaking of the force we're gonna need this to be
stronger than just using acetone to bond the plastic together so we take this
brass mesh and wrap it around the inside of the case and then bond it in place by
running the soldering iron across it to melt the plastic onto it this makes a
really sturdy framework for those fragile vents and we just do a similar
thing for any other cracked areas
another problem you'll sometimes find is these stress fractures in the old
plastic they seem like they would be impossible to resolve right wrong all we
do is heat up our heat gun to about 200 degrees centigrade and just run that hot
air over the plastic and it will reform just enough to undo the stress fracture
it's also very stress relieving fragments like this can just be shaved
off and even seemingly impossible things like a huge hole that once had a screw
mount in it are actually quite simple just match the rises to where they used
to go use the soldering iron and in some cases a lot of glue to put everything
back into place and from motherboard rises to motherboard creators I
recommend PCB way you should check out their new global stand with PCB wires
collaboration you'll find the link in the description because as we all know
PCB stands for Pete's Commodore brilliance doesn't it yes I think it
does here's another example these clips are usually used to keep the top of the
case locked into the base and they're known for snapping off and yes you can
3d print new ones but how about we get bender back so just bend these pieces of
wire into this staple shape and solder them in place they're bound to provide a
satisfying click when we snap the case back on at the end
and therefore completely missing a screw mount well we could get a roll plug
instead or as maybe Frank might call it an anchor after all they are designed to
accept screws just put a generous amount of glue on doesn't matter because we're
never gonna see this when the case is closed
you'll stay strong for another 30 years well look at that
good as new well almost but can we get the machine to actually work stay tuned
well let's see if we can answer that question of whether this will work by
looking at the motherboard again it never gets any easier to look at does it
but let's focus our attention first on these rusted metals and popping the top
off the RF modulator reveals a bit of a state rather than a little city the
metal is actually eaten away there's not much better underneath either yuck and
with it D soldered we can take a look at the circuitry inside and it is really
shot look at those traces rusted away but guess what we've got another RF
modulator in stock thought about the other metals like the cartridge slot and
these keyboard risers well let's drop them into a nice warm
bath of phosphoric acid yeah I don't recommend it for yourself but it's
really great for rust removal it binds with the iron oxide the rust without
damaging the metal itself this really is our preferred method of removing rust
from small parts after 24 hours the bubbling stops and the chemical reaction
is over but it's interesting to note that at the bottom left of the jar there
we had some screws and they've all dissolved and what this means is those
screws were pure iron oxide pure rust by this point said the phosphoric acid
removed all of them that's okay we've got some spares so let's remove
the plates from the acid and it's definitely eaten away a lot of that
looser rust we can still improve this with a grab our wire brush and scrub the
devil out of them and things are definitely looking a bit better now but
it's still quite tarnished so let's get back to the knocker loose Plus spray
that on it and give it some more scrubbing
or let us sit in this bowl for a bit and look at that
good as new well you know not bad no as with any retro computer it's a good idea
to recap the board remove the old capacitors but
particularly with these ones so let's bring in our shiny brand-new ones taunt
by the way beat cells recap kits keyboard springs in all kinds of great
retro stuff at his store retro hacks dotnet now the power switch was not in a
good state so let's remove it from the board an actually a common problem with
these is that the contacts get tarnished and stopped making contact so we can use
contact cleaner to you guess they've clean the contacts and then we solder it
back in place now our processor here isn't going to be doing much processing
in this state so let's get every PCB cleaning tool that we own alcohol spray
anti-static brushes and a toothbrush and just go to work on this it's gonna take
some time and time is marching on for this video but here's how it looks when
we're finished
now we do want to remove the chip so we can check under them for any short
circuits but doing this is really tough so we're gonna have to use a ton of flux
solder wick and our good old hack Oh desoldering gun and eventually the chips
start to pop out told you so let's clean up under all the chips and keep popping
them out
and before long we've cleaned and reinstated all the essential chips so
let's plug it into a monitor and see if this board might still work
oh my gosh it does kind of yeah the text is a little bit lucky now the usual
suspect is the character ROM so let's do solder that along with the kernel just
so that we can socket both of them and try again this time with a diagnostic
cartridge inserted still no coding this is really weird because the only other
suspect would be the PLA and we've already replaced that could it be the
replacement itself was faulty let's replace the replacement
that is truly beautiful picture considering especially everything that
this machine has been through but we're not done yet let's continue with the
cleanup now as you saw earlier the cartridge ports in a bit of a state
so with that be soldered and the board cleaned up underneath is clear there's
still some oxidation on the pins so drop it in some hydrochloric acid for just a
few minutes and well the speaks for itself
oxidation gone so with that solved it back on board we can apply this
conformal coating essentially a varnish to the whole of the PCB and that will
help protect the newly restored traces and we can put our new RF modulator and
the cleaned up cartridge port metal back in place to complete the job
they're not so fast we've still got this keyboard to contend with and flipping it
over we can see the candy floss spider has been visiting here as well so let's
brush that off and remove the screws there's almost like each of these keys
provided an individual apartment for the candy floss spiders but they've since
moved out so let's take the keyboard back to the spa and get scrubbing and
that stuff that we thought was green paper turns out to be all to try to
paint and the nice thing about paint is if it's water soluble it will dissolve
in warm water and that's what started to happen here
firmly looking better an interesting thing to note though is that this
yellowing under where the paint was tells us that the theory this actually
darkness causes plastic to yellow more than light is a little bit proven here
after all the paint was protecting these from the light and they still yellowed
worse than the surrounding keys or popping the keys off and we can see
these Springs won't be able to be saved but let's clean up the keyboard base and
luckily we can spring into action with these new springs from retro hex net as
for the keys into the hydrogen peroxide for the standard retro writing treatment
and while they're sitting in the Sun we can start to look at the keyboard
membrane now on testing it we noticed that some of the keys aren't actually
working and that's because these metal contact pads are not making contact
unless actually a simple fix for that you can use a standard HB pencil and
just draw it onto the pads and the graphite in the so-called LED will
restore the conductivity in theory and after a few hours of retro writing on
new keys already
you
before we can put this all back together there's one thing left to cap this
project off the top of the case we'll just sand down the damaged little bit
not too much so we don't affect the integrity of this already fragile and
cracking case okay ready to see the finished product well first let's remind
ourselves how bad things looked before
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