Amiga A4000 suffers leaking battery
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My old A4000 which used to run 24/7 driving a BBS has never worked since it came out of storage. So recently purchased a replacement Amiga A4000 with the intention of combining and cannibalising one in order to save the other. The new one, acquired a few months ago was advertised as “fully working” but I knew I was taking a gamble on the state of the battery. What’s worse is that the machine has been sat untouched for a few months while I waited for the opportunity to do something with it.
Things didn’t look good when I finally opened the machine up. From the picture, you can see that the battery has leaked pretty badly. One of the memory modules removed from the SIMM sockets had suffered very badly with the contacts at one end dissolved completely!
Having removed the motherboard from the case the offending battery was removed with the aid of a soldering iron.
Once removed the motherboard was cleaned with some white spirit and then rinsed thoroughly in water. Placing electronics in water felt incredibly unnatural and I must admit I was more than a little dubious doing so. But I figured that the leaky battery had already done enough damage, it was going to be a case of kill or cure!
Obviously the most important thing is to make sure the motherboard is completely dry before powering it on again! Not wanting to take any chances, I left the motherboard drying for a couple of days.
The good news is, that following re-assembly, the initial test seem to provide some hope. The machine seems to work ok – it loads Workbench of the internal HD. I still need to check that memory works in the last two SIMM sockets.
My next problem is that the floppy drive doesn’t work, and I don’t have a replacement in the donor machine. So I’ve ordered one on the internet and just waiting for it to arrive. Only then can my
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