Flea Market CSS Black Box Find--Salvageable?

[Mathy]

Hello electronizer

 

Not sure about the BB, but I lifted a couple of traces off the FB years ago. Not sure if that was due to the quality of the FB or my desoldering skills.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

Edited May 2, 2016 by Mathy

[BillC]

I found a couple of old 300MB SCSI drives, hopefully one of them works. They're massive, they must be 5lbs a piece!

 

I'm getting ready to replace the fried termination resistor network. It's the only chip on the board that isn't socketed. :-( How easy are these boards to desolder? Do I need to be more careful than usual about lifting a trace?

If you're certain any chip is dead the simplest way to remove it, and reduce risk to the PCB, is to cut all the legs off and desolder each one individually. Much less likely to lift a pad/trace from a PCB using this method,

[themrfreeze]

Hello electronizer

 

Not sure about the BB, but I lifted a couple of traces off the FB years ago. Not sure if that was due to the quality of the FB or my desoldering skills.

 

Sincerely

 

Mathy

 

The early Black Box PCBs (made for us by a company in Chicago) were more prone to this problem than the later ones that were made by a Canadian company. The Chicago boards had thinner traces on them...so thin that sometimes there would be breaks in them that couldn't be seen with the naked eye. We didn't find those until I had spent 2 hours building the BB and it failed testing.

 

By the time the Floppy Board came to market, we weren't sourcing anything from Chicago, so there were no problems with PCB quality. As such, I blame your desoldering skills.

 

And +1 on the suggestion to cut the pins and desolder them one at a time. Set the board on its edge, use a pencil-tipped soldering iron on the bottom side to melt the solder, and a pair of needlenose pliers on the other side to pull the pin out once the solder softens.