Testing Power Supplies! Re: Norsk Data Nord-10/S restoration

[Tony Duell]

> I've only ever seen a real spontaneous fire in a monitor though, not in
> a system unit. It's probably possible if there's enough dust and
> something gets hot enough though.

I've had an RK05, or more precisely the blower fan, catch fire. Being a 
good, solid, DEC device it carried on working with flames visible through 
the front window (!). I retraced the heads, shut the system down, and 
fortunately the flames went out. It turned out to be insulation breakdown 
in the fan motor windings. 

A friend of mine gave me anothe defective RK05 blowwer, this one with bad 
bearings, and using parts of each I got the drive running again.

-tony