What's Killing all the iMacs?
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
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Today we're saving a very rare and special iMac G3 from the fate that dooms them all...
LINKS:
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🍎 My iMac Optical Drive Bezel STL: makerworld.com...
🍎 MacEffects: maceffects.com/
🍎 The successful bezel Kickstarter: maceffects.com...
🍎 Bezel page on MacEffects: maceffects.com...
(Amazon links are affiliated links)
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💾 For more vintage Apple stuff, please subscribe: www.youtube.co...
💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! / actionretro
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Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com...
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💬 Come talk about old computers on the BitBang Social Mastodon! bitbang.social
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#bambulabblackfriday #bambulab #bambulabA1 #makerworld #bambulabp1s #bambulabs
Bambu, I love your printers bit.ly/bambusale
yo action retro i got a late 1999 imac g3 dv tangerine (Orange) and i busted my speaker and are there replacements i already found a video but the link to the ebay site doesn't work anymore
hey, do a fedora linux video.
Loving my A1/AMS - thanks for the recommendation!
@@Acer_Realspeakers are the hardest part to find but doable if you find a newer speaker and mod it in place
this whole 3d printing thing looks so convenient and easy, it would be something that would help my projects a ton, kinda thinking of getting a printer for myself
For the longest time, I felt like there was no hope for old tech. I love the fact that some really smart people, like the folks at MacEffects, are coming up with innovative ways to save these old computers. And for people like Sean who put up 3D printer projects to help us replace those little bits that are often lost to negligence and carelessness. You all rock!
cjsebes
What did you do with your iMac, sun ? too hot ?
Only cosmetic issues ?
@@lucasrem I recently sold an Indigo iMac with a strawberry mouse and grape keyboard. I really had no room for it, with its cracked inner housing. But someone who was directing a play found me. They needed some period-correct computers and the iMac will now be a part of the play. I'm glad to see it get some time in the spotlight.
You are absolutely right. There was a period there in the late 00's and I'd say most of the decade from the 10's to 2020 where when stuff started breaking the general answer was "too bad, find another unit to cannibalize for parts". Now we've got access to 3D printers, cheap injection molding and the like where we can actually produce actual solutions for these machines.
this face is very. Nice
IDK, you start off with a bit of hyperbole -I mean, "no hope for old tech?" What does that even mean? Are the little plastic parts, especially the purely decorative ones, "old tech"? I'm pretty happy with beige cases, and really I wish more people used old wooden boxes, like you sometimes see with the original Apple I. Praising Sean is fine, but you're laying it on a little thick. How about calling out Apple for using crappy plastic and not providing more part replacements themselves?
Love the recent videos focusing on restoration and preservation, especially in ways that are achievable by most average interested folks.
The plastics yearn to become dinosaur sauce once again
Return to the primordial soup
No it is the bromide wendigo, it wishes to escape and find a new bleached chemical host to drive to madness
Plankton. Oil is made from plankton that once lived in a calm, ancient sea.
that CD drive bezel looks super cool, here's a tip - it'll look way nicer with top and bottom fill set to "concentric" in the slicer
An original Bondi Blue iMac was my first computer that was really mine. Tray loading CD drive, FireWire 400 port, USB 1.1, 233 MHz. I loved that machine. I remember carting it in a shopping cart to the checkout of a Best Buy around Christmas. Thing filled up the entire cart.
Bondi iMacs never had FireWire. Might have been a Blueberry iMac DV? :)
uh, the Bondi Blue didn't have FireWire, stock. You could add it with the SoNNet HARMONi CPU upgrade-card which would replace the stock 233 or 266 MHz CPU with 500 or 600 MHz and add a single FireWire 400 port, tho.
No firewire on that model, but also no tray loaders on firewire machines. mystery story...
Yyyeah, no. No FireWire on that machine.
as a somewhat seasoned CAD-er (who also started with tinkercad) i gotta say that first attempt was painful to watch, but you got it close enough after revising so kudos!
I am in love with these modern components for retro machines. I hope someday someone will create a brand new 486 motherboard.
What an important project! I’ve scrapped quite a few inner bezels for this reason, glad to see no more iMacs will go to landfill
It's an Imac from 1998. It has belonged in a landfill for well over 20 years, if not the day it was manufactured.
@@encycl07pedia- Or a museum
One of my iMac's bezel completely shattered during shipping. The computer still works fine but the CRT is completely loose and there are pieces of the plastic everywhere inside the computer. I can't do much about it right now because the situation will get even worse if I touch the bezel. I can't wait for this thing to be available so I can get it right away! :)
You should claim buyer protection 😢
I bought an used iMac (slot loading) in 2009 or 2010, and had it shipped via post. The internal bezel completely shattered. I was puzzled how brittle it was and I was sure the thing was dropped or something. Anyways the post reimbursed the package value and shipping cost, something they probably wouldn't do nowadays. So those plastics weren't really great even when they were just 8-9 years old...
Have these frames gone to sale yet? I am desperate for one, but it says they are out of stock. I hope it is because they have not released them yet and npt that they have been sold away
The plastic doesn't actually kill them. People have been gluing them together and even using other solutions to get around this, and it's especially common in the second revision. What's really killing them is the flyback inverter. They get old, and at some point, a very high voltage spark jumps to some part of the metal skeleton. Usually this spark finds something that is grounded, but at some point, it will hit something on the CRT board, and that will be the beginning of the end.
I had this :( now it wont turn on, any hope to fix it? I got a replacement psu module for the crt...
@@DavideNastri I don't think it's worth repairing the CRT, even though it's iconic and part of the design, it's only going to get harder and harder to find replacement parts, and it's also very dangerous. A good quality LCD is the obvious way to go, the problem is aesthetics, it's necessary to maintain the curvature in front of the flat panel to keep the computer looking nice, it would be necessary for someone to replicate the curvature of the CRT using acrylic or glass.
Even if the flyback inverter just burns out, you will hardly find another quality one, you will possibly find things made in China that will work for about 5 years.
The dilemma is the same for the emachines eOne computers.
_Note: I tried to sand a piece of thick glass so that it would have the curvature of the CRT, and I even got a good result. The big problem is that the glass had an optical distortion, just like you would see through a glass jar with water, and I didn't find a solution for this. I believe it would be necessary to create a shape in the shape of the CRT, and throw the glass in a liquid state into it so that this doesn't happen._
Ah, so that's what killed mine. Good to know all these years later
@@InfernosReaper I've also seen many first revision G3s (tray load) dying because of the CPU board (probably bad capacitors), it will turn on and play a chirping and sometimes interrupted startup sound, and then do nothing else. It's not a memory or solder problem (from my experience, I simply removed the CPU board from another machine and put it back in, and it worked).
I had one that had this problem, and it had a 3DFX accelerator card in the mezzanine slot, but at the time I didn't know it was rare, I ended up selling it as a regular iMac.
How do flybacks go bad over time? I have an old CRT that makes spark noises occasionally.. I don’t use it though due to this.
I received a green imac for Christmas in 1999. It was so underpowered (ram wise) that I could not do anything with it except play dvd's. I gave it to a friend in trade for the pc components he had received for Christmas but could not figure out how to assemble them correctly. He was thrilled. I built my first pc and never looked back. Now that Windows has freaked everyone out with 11 I'm thinking about Linux which I should have done in 1999. I know it's great fun, but I couldn't build a healthy, non-frustrating relationship with Apple, unlike a plethora of other computer people.
You could've just put some ram in it dude. You weren't going to enjoy powerpc linux more than you were 64mb ram in 1999.
Mark is a mad scientist. Is it expensive? Yes, it's expensive. But it took a huge amount of work to get this product to market, and there is literally no other solution to fixing these old machines. Much respect to Mark for putting the work in.
Always cool to see hobbyists and companies come up with ways to keep these things going. These are legitimate historical and cultural artifacts worth preserving. And as much as preservation in their original form is great, that's just not always feasible.
I just picked up a G3 500Mhz Indigo from summer of 2001 from a local goodwill that had it listed for free pick up. It works perfectly.
It's been a wild ride down memory lane and finding your channel :) Keep up the good work!
Great video. The way you integrate your sponsors in with the whole video is really clever. Rather than being a nuisance, the sponsorships are actually an interesting part of the video.
That touchscreen iMac, btw, is insane!
Yup, I had a Graphite iMac 600 with touchscreen. Part of a batch I bought at a local auction, lost it when the storage I was renting didn't call me to let me know they lost my payment information. I liked it, but I miss my great-grandparents' and grandparents' combined record collection that was in there more.
Work you do, how we keep systems running for decades is valuable for the the next gen.
Loved these iMacs. We used them in my High School Photography lab and they were really fun to work with. Sad that they are all falling apart, but glad there is a way to save them.
I can't belive this happens because you sold your TAM!
i just want to see the Lisa
I have a Rev. D iMac (the one with the 333 MHz G3) with the same problem that affected the iMac I had, of the same model and revision, which was my first Mac: the flyback transformer on the CRT has melted inside and short circuits every time I turn it on. The computer works, but soon after the startup chime, when the CRT tries to turn itself on, this short circuit on the flyback transformer shuts the whole thing off. Back in the early 2000s all it took was driving it to my Apple dealer to have it fixed, but now no one knows how to fix it and I'm afraid the plastic will break.
They know how to fix it, problem is the flybacks are not available anymore.
@ I've even seen some for sale online, problem is they have to access the insides by removing the top plastic and it will certainly break
Search your Yellow Pages phone book for "Alternator and Starter Repair" and start calling around. You are looking for the shops that actually rebuild those parts for cars, not swap bought parts out _in_ a car.
You want them to build a new flyback transformer for you, wind a new coil on your CRT, and rebuild all of the transformers (those that form the power supply unit) in your computer. If they have someone who does board repair soldering -- and they almost certainly do, because they do rebuilds -- then, that's a place that could do a complete rebuild of your motherboard, too. If you have other old gear you would want to work again, that's a place to keep in mind once you find it.
By the way, the best Uninterruptable Power Supply I have owned was built by the rebuild shop I found. Four deep-cycle batteries of very substantial amperage, in a shell from one of those diagnostic carts, with custom control and maintenance-cycle circuits on boards the shop designed and built.
@@ferrreira Take modeling clay and use it to make a mold of your case plastics, carve any latches and overlap in using a modeling knife or putty knife, then use acrylic or Bondo from an auto supply shop to cast a whole new body. You can mix dyes to get pretty much whatever color you want, but acrylic is transparent and Bondo isn't.
This problem is the reason so many of my iMacs are not getting repaired. I know that if I take it apart, the bezel will shatter, and I'll be left with a working Mac with the CRT flopping around.
The price is fair with all things considered, but unfortunately my Blueberry for example will probably never see one of these because the repair is worth at least 3 times the iMac's value. My Flower Power would be a nice candidate though!
Yep, the Flower Power is gonna be worth a lot of money in the future.
Check out his link to Bamboo.
Their 3D printers are all $100 off, making their cheapest $200. The accessories are marked down, too.
I used to work at MacVizion, a used Apple dealer and Apple VAR before Apple started opening its own stores, repairing and rebuilding printers, CRTs, and computers and installing upgrades. Access inside almost every model of Apple has its quirks, some painful. I never liked the access panels in the iMac, so I am thinking that since no home 3D printer I have seen can handle printing the full Apple pieces, I'll design a custom case with the same shape and dimensions, but assembled from smaller panels and designed for easier access to things like RAM and battery.
It would be really keen to find an ATA-to-MMC adapter or something, to replace the old hard drive, but something I have wanted to do for twenty years is find a controller chip that could replace the USB 1.0/1.1 with USB 2.0 (before amperage and voltages got funky with 3.0), and a firmware patch or software Control Panel that would let OS 9 use it . . . so many Macs could've used that, if it was as easy as Louis Rossmann makes soldering look!
Anyway, best wishes, and good luck if you decide to build a shell!
Oh!
It does alter the appearance, and the clasps tend to snap either on disassembly or assembly, but you can make a supportive mold using modeling clay, rest it in a bed of sand for support, and take fiberglass insulation (Pink Panther!) and wipe it in on your Mac's plastic body as reinforcement, using acrylic (Auto Body supply shop) to bind the fiberglass in place. Easy and pretty cheap, but the disassembly and assembly . . . .
If you make good molds, you can use the same materials, fiberglass and acrylic (or Bondo, but it's not transparent), to make whole new case plastics, but if you have cracked latches you'll have to work those into your mold with a putty knife. You can card flat or sand any rough spots in the mold, before you make your casting.
The best part of this approach is, it's cheap. But if you were part of a M.U.G. (Mac User Group) back in the day, you may know others who would want to use your molds, and you can dye acrylics just about any way or color you want.
8:56 looks like the speaker grills are from a blueberry iMac and the bottom foot and back are from an indigo iMac! Gotta get those colour matched!
So glad that this MacEffects project reached its goal and is progressing! I agree it is probably the most important project taken on to date. Glad to be a backer of it as well. It's great to have a video documenting the replacement process and how the (prototype) part goes together!
I can't wait to replace my G3's inner bezel as well - in addition to the structural stability, I also really love how it actually restores the proper (whiter) color beneath the translucent outer bezel, instead of having the noticeably yellowed part showing through. Great stuff!
Oh man, this is great! I have several G3's that need a new bezels, thank you for sharing!!!
I really hope Ken can make a misadventure replacing the frames of his iMacs (including the prototype).
The tray loaders and slot loaders have different bezels but the tray loaders also don’t degrade like the slot loaders so his prototype is probably fine
This is great news!!
I’ve been terrified to open my G3 DV Ruby because of this! Thanks for shedding light on this.
The cd loading surrounding just needs the black felt cover inside and will be perfect ❤
I think the optical drive bezel would look better with all walls instead of infill (or 100% concentric infill).
Looks incredible, I can't wait. I have an iMac in the closet that needs a new install of Mac OS, but I've been afraid to work on it because every time I do the bezel cracks and shatters even more.
The PLA BambuLab sent you which you used here looks very good. I think the official plastic is more vibrant still, not by much however.
I checked the Bambu Labs site, and they advertise another plastic -- not PLA -- that is supposed to be "diamond bright." I'm thinking I'll try that!
That’s great. I love that there’s people out there that invest time and effort into these types of projects
There was a crack in mine, and I repaired it using beige epoxy. After it dried, I sanded it, and then I sponged over a paint that I custom mixed to match the shade of the plastic. With the semi-translucent pinstripe plastic on top of that, you can barely tell there is a crack there. I picked up everything from Menards.
I will absolutely be buying one of these once they're released.
Appreciate that this channel keeps us riveted to the bleeding edge of the trailing edge of computing
Thanks!
I'm thankful neither my Bondi Blue or Lime iMacs are having this issue, but I'll keep this in the back of my mind.
This project won't work on the Bondi Blue iMac, that was the tray-load, and the MacEffects part is only for the slot-loaders.
@guspaz
Well those are just as bad, are they not?
@ yes, but my point is, don’t count on this repair being available for tray-load iMacs, because it isn’t. Maybe they’ll do a variant for them in the future, but they haven’t yet.
Nice its great that mark had that inter bezel recreated great job recreating the missing the blue CD slot load case surround
Not sure I’m a fan of the 3d print color but it does look a lot better with that there though
On the note of the touch screen G3, I vividly remember around 2003 or 2004, I was at a Burger King that had a "PlayPlace" like Mcdonald's does, and this specific location had an "interactive activity center" type of deal in there. It was literally a touch screen G3 in a kiosk set up in there. It's the only time I've ever ran into one of these in person.
You can use a car buffer and stage 2 polish to take the scratches out of the plastics. if they are really bad, wet sand with 2000 or 3000 sand paper and buff.
Wool pad on the buffer first, once its perfect, foam pad to remove swirls.
Optional wax with foam pad.
I restored many G4 towers to brand new like this.
I hope something like this gets made for SGI workstations, as more than a few of them are _completely unshippable_ as they currently are. D:
For prototyping a precise fit replacement part with 3d printing I recommend making a paper mockup first, then you can just take a flat picture of the model and then import that, scale it, and model over the image. Can save a lot of prototyping time!
By the way you can use B7000 glue for trim pieces instead of CA, it's rather gentle on the plastic, reasonably flexible and you can easily remove it without any harsh chemicals.
As an EX ELO touch service tech (who also owns a iMac 3, no touch 😢) I love the driver board/capacitive touch overlay. Never worked on the CRT's only LCD/TFT models of AIO/POS pc.
This is an excellent project. Props to MacEffects for getting this in motion, it not only saves the iMac G3s structure but also may add more momentum to getting further fragile parts remade. PowerMac beige drive bezels anyone?
Now all we need to do is find someone who can remake flyback transformers… that’s the *other* thing that’s killing iMac G3s
I remember the old ads to get your iMac, iBook and PowerBook retrofitted with a touchscreen on MacAddict. It did greatly jump the cost of Mac, I think a PowerBook G4 retrofitted with a touchscreen was priced very high for what it was worth. I was wondering when some of these would show up in the wild. Very cool!
Capacitors, plastics....
Steve should have put a damn cooling fan in one
Tbh I'd love to replace my bezel, but mines electrically dead
As long as your components (resistors, capacitors, potentiometers, diodes, transformers) haven't detiorated to the point of not being able to read them (color bands on resistors, especially), then Alibaba is your source for most components. If you grab a Yellow Pages phone book and look up Starter and Alternator Repair, find the shops that rebuild those and call around. You want either the old guy who has done it before, or a young tech who is up for something different; preferably at the same shop! Have them replace the flyback coil, the windings, and rebuild any transformers. If they give you a sweetheart deal for giving them an interesting job, it's still going to cost you at least a hundred bucks for materials. Picking it back up is going to have to wait until they have a gap in their schedule, because there's a lot of custom equipment set-up for winding the coil.
But when that's done, and you have replaced the old motherboard components, everything but the phosphor-layer inside the CRT is going to be new hardware!
I was just checking out this Bamboo thing, and even if the joins in the plastic aren't in the same places, I can see building a complete new iMac case to replace those decaying plastics -- and giving myself *much* better access to the insides, too!
Maybe add a cooling fan, too . . . .
Speakers also go bad on those... and optical drives...
I don't think the fan would've saved the plastic. :-\
@@nickwallette6201 definitely prevented the heat issues the DVs suffered
The tolerances on the G3 iMac cases are crazy, got some small cracks recently even replacing the pram battery
I had one of these, a 233mhz version I think… I LOVED IT… I almost cried when a lightning strike killed this and a dual G4 Mac that was my daily driver at the time
This was the hardest part of putting together the iMac wall for VCF SW. I had to buy three Grapes just to get one that wasn't completely wrecked in shipping. Can't wait to get my hands on the new bezels! I showed Mark pics of the wall while at MW and hope to get him to come down to SW next year.
Your iMac wall is the stuff of legend!
Very cool repair! Really great to see the community come together on this. 🎉
I love the action music you put during the action bits of the video.
An iMac DV SE was the first I purchased. The family loved it and we even played Playstation games on it.
Since then it’s been a bunch of Apple devices and I have enjoyed using them.
I just purchased my first used Apple device, a 2018 i7 Mac Mini to run old Intel Parallels VMs 😊
They are built very well and seem to last forever, good to see this solution!
It reminds me of Makers by Cory Doctorow 😊
Man, my nana had one of these in her crafting room for the longest time. Was fun using as a kid and got weird when I visited and given the age, even YT wouldn't load.
The day someone figures out how to make a fully aluminum iMac G3 case will be the the most amazing day ever.
Been trying to get my hands on an Imac g3 since it was the computer lab machines in elementary school. such a nostalgic and cool machine.
I bought a Sage iMac G3 (FINALLY! Took me a very long time) which has this same issue. This project is fascinating to me!
I had a few iMacs, three of the the newer slot load models, one of them a DV model with DVD drive. That's the one I had the longest. Sold it in emmaculate condition around 2005 for $600. The reason why I had a few of them was because I gotten a pallete of about a dozen broken unts, and out of that I got two working first gen Macs. The three slot load units I got from a business that asked me to take them when they upgraded everything. I didn't hang onto any of them long enough for the plastic to become brittle.
iMac DV = with FireWire
iMac DV+ and DV SE = with FireWire and DVD-ROM drive
That's very cool! I have a tray loader iMac G3 and the physical construction is a lot different than the slot loaders.
I was about to ask about the colour difference between the blue side and the green front, but I assume the touchscreen accounts for it's uniqueness.
Also a problem with beloved consoles from the 1990s. In the case of my SNES, I was able to take care of brittle plastic with peroxide and UV light.
I have an imac I picked up years ago just sitting in my closet with a busted up and brittle under bezel. I, like you, tried to 3d print one and it simply didn't work so I gave up and just kept the imac in storage. I will be picking one of these replacements as soon as they are available.
Only cosmetic issues ?
it turns on ?
Thumbs up? Heck I wish I could give it a HALLELUJAH!!! 😁 That was fantastic! I’ll order one for my 600 MHz G3 iMac. Plus that touchscreen was the icing on the video’s w!!! 🎉 Bravo!!!! 💜🙏🏻
I remember this computer is very well, I was not not Mac fan the time like I am now, but I remember I wanted to take web design and technical communication class in my last semester which fell on fall 2001. The room had all computers like this one, and there was no room for me in a class, due to my late decision caused by delay in senior project . And there was a requirement, that if I want to take a class - you need to get exactly Mac even as a notebook, borrowed from your friend.
Nice. However, I thing the color of the CD surround could have been a bit darker. Maybe printing something dark grey to go behind the green? Or just paint?
This touch screen is typical of kiosks, so that iMac probably ran without a keyboard and the CD slot was completely covered. I worked with some developers that used Macromedia Director to create interactive kiosk software for touch screens like that.
This is SO nice! I have one of the ones like you're talking about where there are cracks visible through the outer housing
You should make more videos about Haiku, I love that os
today i was like im bored, lets see if action retro made a video, then i refresh page after another video and see this
Me, too.
I love how the modern M1 iMacs also have failing displays, as a homage to the original iMacs
Printing the disc drive piece very slow and hot will help it be more translucent and get rid of the white coloring!
ACTION RETRO, you're on point for sure watching your work is part of the show, don't stop giving us the stuff we like, keep working hard day and night. 👍
We need more projects like this. So many retro devices with crappy plastic in need of saving.
My most favorite computer of all time.
I have an iMac G3 myself that is showing some very concerning internal cracks. Hoping that thing can save my iMac G3.
I hope they have a version for tray loading iMacs being planned as well. My Bondi Rev.A is in desperate need of this bracket.
I love the Mac OS platinum sounds theme
This is a crazy awesome project! Thanks so much for sharing!
The Bambu is neat but it has a pretty small build volume. If you want a hell of a project you could build a 600x600 voron, that should be big enough.
Gotta love the gateway mouse pad on a video about an apple product...
This is great. Have one of the Blueberry iMacs that would be a candidate for this fix But also it would be nice if they could make one to handle one of the 15” lcd monitor screens. It could be used to upgrade and move away from that power hungry CRT. Even doing a complete retrofit of a newer Mac mini in this housing with a lcd display. It would be a fun and modern machine.
Over the years I've collected several IMac and eMac variations while trash picking. First thing I do is lose the CRT, and replace it with a modern flat panel screen. The loss of weight in itself is worth the price of admission. For once, that handle now has a purpose!
I worked as a Mac consultant back in 2001-2002 (and moonlighted with it until 2009) and I can assure you, we used the iMac handles back then.
@@tookitogo I believe you. My first computer didn't have a handle, but it sure could have used one. That was a mac 2si I picked up in 1990 along with a one scanner, and laser printer I used for desktop publishing of ads, and flyers. Total ran me over $5k I recall. Last time I checked the now near 30 year old machine still worked same as day one.
@ nice!
I would go check it for leaky capacitors and batteries, though, just to be sure nothing has happened in the interim. (I should do that with the old Macs in my basement…)
@@tookitogo That's some good advice. Thanks! I made a rack that I use to dry out the wet, or just damp electronics I find. I have a Dell xeon server I found partially submerged in h2o. After extended stay in the drying rack damn thing booted right up! Blew my mind!
@@guruoo Most electronics aren’t actually that sensitive to water _as long as they aren’t powered up while wet._ It is extremely common for modern electronics to be washed with water during manufacturing. And it’s common during servicing. At work, I’m switching over to water washing for more and more of the electronics I build or service.
Damage occurs when electronics are powered up and water is present, especially water with contaminants (which most water has). Ionic contaminants allow electricity to flow through it, causing electrolytic corrosion.
Even if not powered on, the contaminants in tap water (never mind seawater, river water, toilet water, etc.) can stay behind if simply left to dry. They can sometimes be conductive on their own, or they can be hygroscopic and allow moisture to condense there. So that’s why electronics that get wet (whether by accident or on purpose) need the final rinse to be done with distilled or deionized water.
I just checked mine.... sho nuff.... it's falling apart on the inside. Dang it!!! Thank you for the link for the new bezel, I guess I'll need to get one of those.
Although I like the video's you posted - and I've seen a lot of em - I never had any trouble with the iMac's, and I have serviced maybe a 1,000 or more, from power supplies to motherboards, from drives to analog boards... I have seen it all.
Ahh, ABS syndrome. Museums have also pondered about this issue as well.
Reminds me of a somewhat related problem in the automotive world: because of how the various materials react to one another, the paint on ABS plastic is fading at different rates than on sheet steel, so paint matching on used cars is often a serious problem...and it gets even worse when you add yet another material, like carbon fiber or fiberglass.
So you end up with a car with a mix of old and new parts on it, all with the same paint and paint process applied, but it looks like three or four different colors on the car. It's especially bad when it's all right next to one another, like an ABS front bumper cover, carbon fiber fenders, fiberglass hood, and OEM steel doors...
I remember the first time I opened either my VIC-20 or C=64, I looked at the horrendous machine soldering job and thought... wow... this was made literally as fast as possible to last only a few years tops.... The mass produced Commodore boards were literally the worst.
The Macintosh motherboards by that time were high end premium made... so I never had any problems with them unless they were zapped by lightning.
Fairy good video and design, Sean.
Man, I wish there was a iMac G3 clear case.
Nice video. Very interesting as always. I enjoy your channel and learning from it.
I interrogated an LLM while you were busy and forced it to teach me that she blue shape you made is more accurately known as a "stadium", which would not have clarified anything. But as they say, technically correct is the best kind of correct. Exciting update: What the LLM did not divulge is that there are some much more edifying terms for the same shape: pill shape, discorectangle, obround, and sausage body. Wikipedia is such a nerd,
"...this has unfortunately experienced some trauma."
Haven't we all at this point?
Story of my life.
I'd love a discussion topic or kit to be devised for an analog board swap to get a LCD conversion up and running. IMO the CRTs dying...that is what is killing iMacs. I've got several that need a LCD swap
Bambu sponsored club!!!
Man, I remember dragging one of these behind a hearse when they were in recycling everywhere, the handle was pretty durable for a rope. Seeing it bouncing in the mirrors and break checks was funny. I got a few for free from a recycling center. I was a stupid kid lol, I now regret destroying them all
This is amazing! I have a slot load iMac that is very cracked and brittle
I like your new haircut. Also great video.
Wow, it looks like new! Great job!
Amazing! Let's cross our fingers for a flyback transformer fix next!
Wow that's the same Elo that we use for our POS systems, so cool
Only time I saw and used an Imac G3 was at an internet cafe in Penzance in 2000.
The first "modern" apple computer, love it!
Nah, that was the original iMac G3 with a tray disc drive. The Book G3 (the true fun one) was released in 2001 as the consumer focused laptop.
The last of the "fun" era of Macs from Apple was imo the iMac G4 with the hinge that reminds me a lot of Steve Jobs other endeavour; funding Pixar.
He talks about looking for bugs in the pre-production plastic front surround. Which got me thinking, if you find bugs in your entomology project, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I have the once white G4 eMac that is slowly turning yellow despite being stored in a poorly ventilated basement for the past 5 years!