Acorn Archimedes A3000: Restoration Part 1

After restoring an Acorn Archimedes A3010 and a Risc PC, I really wanted to try my hand at the A3000. This was the last Acorn computer to carry the BBC branding, it was in many schools and as such holds a special place in people’s hearts. The problem with that is they are often very expensive to obtain. Luckily, I manage to acquire one recently for my restoration series.

My A3000

The machine I acquired appeared to be in very good condition and even had photos of the battery area, no obvious damage there. So, I thought that any problems I would find would be of the more interesting kind.

It came with no accessories, not even the mouse, I can temporarily borrow the A3010 mouse for now until I have a solution for that.

Disassembly

To open up the machine there are two screws with square nuts behind them holding two clips at the back closed. Once these are removed it is simply a case of opening the clips at the back and front.

Looking at the back we can already tell this is an early model because to save on costs the Econet and serial ICs have not been fitted. These are an easy upgrade later, however.

Now that the lid is off, we can expose the entire motherboard by removing the keyboard. Just like the A3010 there are two ribbon cables that carefully need to be unplugged, and then the keyboard can be lifted away.

You can see a vertical board between the keyboard and floppy drive. This is a 1MB expansion board to give a total of 2MB. A total of 3MB can go in this socket, so I may well consider upgrading this at a later date.

Battery damage

Of course, like almost all machines of this era, there is a battery soldered to the motherboard which has corroded. It is always a question of how much. Luckily it doesn’t seem too bad at all.

That being said, after the battery was removed, there is some odd corrosion I observed. All the plastic for all the jumpers and the memory expansion pins appears to have corroded.

In addition there is some minor corrosion at a capacitor near the back of the machine.

All a little odd, but hopefully won’t be too difficult to sort out.

Next steps

I need to get this motherboard out to inspect it more and do any repairs. The good news is that it is easy to power from my bench power supply until I have tested the onboard PSU. It only requires 5v and there are two blades I can hook the bench power supply up to. The bad news is the RGB video out requires a 9pin cable that I do not yet have. Until I have a video cable for it I cannot really test it further.

I do also have a set of 3.11 ROMs coming for it, so that it is on the same base OS as my A3010. As for the battery, I have an nice idea for this that is unique to the A3000, I’ll see if I can pull it off once I know the motherboard is functioning.