Acorn Archimedes A3010: Restoration Part 2

In my previous post I managed to get the Archimedes A3010 to a point where it could boot up. But there are still things to test and repair. The work continues…

Floppy Drive Repair

Now that it boots into the OS from ROM probably the most important thing is the ability to load more software into it. I hooked up the floppy drive, picked a magazine coverdisk out of the box of disks that came with the machine and…

Not a great start. The floppy drive was right over the battery area so corrosion damage is definitely possible. I hooked up a Gotek to make sure everything on the motherboard end was fine, copying over an image of Lemmings.

That works so the problem is around the drive itself.

I stripped down the drive completely, first testing the electrolytic capacitors on the ESR meter. They were all well within specification. Then I actually unplugged the floppy cable from the drive. Oh dear, that was pretty corroded on.

This photo is after I removed some of the corrosion from the connector. Unfortunately you can’t see it on the connector here but you can see the distinct green colour on the ribbon cable end.

That connector was removed and replaced. The drive heads given a quick clean, a new cable found and a cover disk that had the game “Starfighter 3000” on it was tried.

(I am not A. P. Hutchings in that screenshot 🙂)

That works, but the sound was really faint. Wiggling the audio cable got the sound working temporarily, but the socket was very loose. Yep, that one is badly corroded too.

Corroded Ports

For the next step I desoldered the audio socket, the parallel port and serial port. These were all pretty badly corroded inside.

The replacement of these will need to wait as I don’t have any in-stock that are exactly the same size. But I have now ordered some.

Finally one thing I noticed was somehow the internal speaker had broken.

So I ordered a replacement for this too. Probably a good idea anyway due to the corrosion.

There is more work to do, but I’m getting closer to a fully working machine!