It's been an 11/45 weekend

[Jay West]

Finally dug into my 11/45 restoration project. I removed the oddball custom 
(albeit dec parts, maybe 45 flipchips) test panel and power supply from the 
top half of the rack. Cleaned the fan blades and top half of the rack and 
then stood back, dreading starting on cleaning up the two power supplies. So 
as I stared at it I got the bright idea to start on the cpu chassis before 
heading into the power supplies.

I removed the front panel, backplanes, and all the fans. Cleaned all the fan 
blades (and at 9 or 10 fans, that's a pain). This system was absolutely 
caked in dirt & dust. One of the muffin fans is toast - you can't turn it 
with your hand - so it'll be a trip to the surplus shop tomorrow to see if 
they have a fan the same size. I'm guessing it's not terribly important 
because it's the fan at the very front top. My system has no cards in the 
first few slots so it's probably not a huge deal but I'll do it first thing 
tomorrow anyways.

Cleaning all the wiring harnesses was a bit of a pain. I see no evidence of 
"critters" having been in the machine, except two wires in the wiring 
harness on the flexible metal band are scraped bare in a very tiny spot. 
Could be a mouse, but I suspect it got scraped on the chassis somewhere. I'm 
thinking pull them out slightly and give a turn or two with electrical tape.

The cpu chassis itself has cleaned up VERY nicely, I'm a bit suprised as 
crudy as the machine was. It'll be interesting to see how the front panel 
turns out when I get to that point. That will be a while, as I have to 
solder about 8 or so new switches onto the front panel board. Tomorrow I'll 
pro-gold all the backplane slots (this one has a system backplane {of 
course} and a ME11-L). Then I'll de-oxit the myraid of tin connectors all 
over the cpu chassis. There's loads of them. Anyone know a good way to clean 
all those white card guides? There's tons of them and a toothbrush just 
doesn't seem to get it.

After that... it's on to disassembling and cleaning the power supplies 
inside and out. I can tell those are gonna be a royal pain. Just from a 
visual inspection I'd be suprised if a few of those fans weren't bad.... and 
odds are some big caps are hosed :| At least I get to try out my ESR meter 
:)

Once I get to the point of bringing the machine up, I'm not sure what to 
try. I think vtserver requires something silly like 192K of ram, and my 
machine has 8K of core. Yup, just 8K. I seem to recall I brought this up on 
the list before and people were suggesting using memory boards from a /34 
along with a backplane I wire up by hand. I will dig out the old posts and 
read up on that. I really don't have spare /34 memory, but I can yank memory 
from a /34 of mine temporarily I guess. Just looking at the ME11-L, it looks 
(to my very uninformed eye) like it's got traces specific to the core set 
and no wirewrapping so I'm guessing I can't use that. I'm not sure I want to 
destroy the ME11 backplane anyways even if I could, I'd prefer to get it 
working with 8K core, then switch to something bigger and put the ME11 on a 
shelf in case I ever want to go back to it for some reason. I will need to 
find some way to get something into the machine to run in 8K just to test it 
out and all.

Then I need to put either RA81's or RL02's on the machine, and probably an 
RX01 or RX02. The long journey has begun :)

Jay