Hello, and welcome back to The 8-Bit Guy.
So, for those of you guys who love restoration episodes and always wanting more of them,
well, you’re about to get your wish.
You see, I have several machines that I need to restore for upcoming documentaries.
And, it’s kind of one of those things where I didn’t necessarily want to make a video
about it, but I’ve got to get them restored before I use them in documentaries because
I’m really nitpicky about making sure I show these machines in their original glory
when I do these documentaries.
So, If I’ve got to restore it anyway I might as well document the process and make a video
about it.
So, here we go, I’m going to start with this one.
This one is a Commodore 128D.
And, as you probably guessed, this is going to be for Commodore history episode number
5, which is going to cover the 128 series.
And, I actually bought this one on eBay a month or two ago and it’s actually in pretty
good cosmetic shape for the most part, except for the fact that it’s, well it’s really
yellowed.
Particularly the keyboard.
And so, I’m going to take it apart, and we’re going to clean it up and retrobrite
it.
So, let’s get started.
Before I get started too much, I’m going to go ahead and setup my trusty black crate
and fill it up with water.
It’s late morning at this point, and I wanted to give the water a chance to warm up before
I tried to use it.
I’m probably putting more water in here than is needed, but I can always dump some
out later if that turns out to be the case.
Let’s check the water temperature.
That’s Texas in July for you.
This water is 96 degrees right out of the tap.
Let’s see what the temperature of the concrete is.
OK, it’s 111 degrees already.
Give it a few hours and I suspect that number will rise some more.
So, let’s take a closer look at this computer.
The keyboard is the most obvious part that needs help.
And while it is very yellow, it is also pretty dirty.
And this is one of those situations where sometimes you wonder what caused the yellowing.
Well, in this case there is no doubt it was UV light that caused it.
For one thing, the bottom has a lot less yellowing than the top.
So if it were heat or something, it would be uniform on both sides.
But what’s even more interesting is you’ll notice this part here is the most yellowed.
However, if you look closely up here, besides seeing all of the dirt between the keys, you
may notice small key-shaped bright spots above the keys.
This is essentially where the keys were providing shade, and so these spots never received as
much direct sunlight.
You can also see it up here on these top keys.
And you can tell exactly what direction the sunlight was coming in.
It looks like it was coming in from this direction.
I’d like to start with this cable, since it would probably be easier to clean it while
it is still connected to the keyboard with the strain relief.
A lot of people don’t clean cables when they restore a computer, but I always do,
especially if they are proprietary cables or cables that are permanently attached to
the computer.
This one is pretty dirty, but I suspect alcohol would probably clean it up.
I’ll start with one small area here.
A lot of the times on video it is hard to show somebody how dirty something is without
having something to contrast it with.
So I’ll just clean a little spot here.
And after a short scrub with alcohol you should be able to see a pretty noticeable clean spot
here as compared to the dirty area here.
And you can see how much dirt came off on the paper towel just from that tiny spot.
So, I’ll go ahead and do the rest of the cable now.
After cleaning this side, I’ll just flip the keyboard over, which will expose the other
side of the cable and I’ll get to work on that.
Anyway, I actually spent about 10 minutes just on this cable and connector, but you
should be able to tell a significant improvement now that I’m done.
So, now I need to disassemble the keyboard, but upon first glance there doesn’t appear
to be any screws.
However, I suspect the screws are located under these rubber feet.
So I’ll just use a screwdriver to pop one of them off.
And sure enough, I can see there is a screw hole there, but it also appears these feet
are held on by some sort of double-sided tape.
I’ll need to get all of this residue off before I retrobrite it.
Interesting thing, as I remove this glue, you can see the original color of the keyboard
underneath.
So it appears the bottom of the keyboard is slightly yellowed after all, even if not nearly
as bad as the top.
Next, I’ll come back and hit all of these spots with alcohol to clean up the glue residue.
And while I’m at it, I’ll clean up whatever this gunk is.
OK, time to disassemble.
And thank goodness, there aren’t any hidden snaps or anything.
But it does look like I’ll need to remove another set of screws to remove the key mechanism
from the case.
And that will just lift right out.
Now, there is a lot of dirt and dust bunnies inside this case, but I’ll take care of
those in a minute.
For the moment I need to clean the dirt from the exterior, especially paying attention
to the inside parts like this, where it looks like somebody was eating spaghetti or something
over their keyboard.
As for the dirt on the inside, I’m just going to hit it with the sprayer.
And then the other piece.
And the next thing I need to do is spray off this pavement as it is now so hot outside
that if I knelt down on this it would burn my knees.
So the water temperature has only risen to 107 degrees, but it will continue to rise
over the next few hours.
I’ll put in my two pieces, and as I suspected I have too much water.
I only want enough water to cover the objects, that way it requires less peroxide to do the
job.
Unfortunately, I can’t get both of these pieces to really fit exactly, but the bottom
piece barely needs any retrobrite so I’ll just come move them around periodically to
make sure it has an even appearance.
I’ll set a timer to keep track of how long this has been going.
Well, a few hours passed and I could see some improvement but the problem was I’ve been
running out of properly angled sunlight due to the height of this crate.
I keep rotating the box and moving the keyboard around, but I’ve reached the limit here
and this is about as as much as I’m going to get.
So, after 6 hours I removed it.
And after bringing it in and having a look, I can tell a significant improvement, especially
when contrasted with the keys.
So, while these pieces do look a lot better, they’re still not quite perfect and they’re
going to need to go back out again tomorrow for at least a few hours.
Now, I could have probably finished this today had I used the old method with the creme and
the plastic wrap because that generally only takes an hour or two really under most cases
to finish.
But, experience has told me that that method can, in many cases, leave a streaked or marbled
look appearance and submersion is the most reliable way to make sure it comes out uniform.
So, yeah, back out tomorrow it’s going to go.
Well, the next morning there was a surprise.
We have a saying in Texas that if you don’t like the weather just wait until tomorrow.
Although that rarely holds up in the Summer as it usually stays hot and dry for months
at a time.
Anyway, there was going to be no Sun for a while.
That being the case, I turned my attention to the rest of the keyboard, starting by pulling
off all of these keys.
And the C128 has quite a few keys.
And once all the keys were removed, you can see the dirty little secret this thing has
been hiding.
And the sad part is this is so very common it’s crazy.
Anyway, let’s see what we can do about this stuff.
Looks like the vacuum picked up most of the big stuff, some windex should take care of
the rest.
Well, onto cleaning the actual keys.
You know, I’ve tried a variety of methods for this, including doing it under running
water in the sink, or just doing it with a wet paper towel like I’m doing here.
The reality is it takes about the same amount of time either way as you have to clean all
5 sides of every key.
People rarely realize how time consuming this is, but it took about an hour to clean all
of the keys on this computer.
Anyway, time for retrobrite.
Hey, this sounds like legos, doesn’t it?
The sun finally came back out.
And that is all of my peroxide.
I will have to fill the rest with water.
And I’ll cover the top with plastic wrap.
This helps both as a means to trap the heat, but also helps keep in the magic gasses that
make this process happen.
So unfortunately, I ended up running out of sunlight again, because after the rain finally
stopped I only got about 2 to 3 hours of good sunlight.
And so I’m going to drain these out, but after I had a look at them, there was no surprise
that they weren’t quite done yet.
So they’ll have to go back out tomorrow.
In the meantime, I’ll get to working on the main unit.
I’m only going to worry with the plastic on the front in this case.
But to get that off, I’ll need to remove the top cover, which I’ll start by removing
these 3 screws on the back of the unit.
And then I’ll flip it over and there are a couple of screws on the bottom here.
And then I’ll just slide this off.
It probably helps that I used to own one of these and so I know how to take them apart,
but I’ve never taken the front panel off.
But it looks like there are just some screws here holding it on.
But before I mess with that, I’ll need to pop this latch off.
I assume this works just like on the 1571 disk drive, since it is the same latch.
And yeah, it just pops right off.
Now I’ll take those screws off.
And yeah!
It just comes right off.
But I’ll need to disconnect these two LEDs.
They appear to be held on by a screw.
However, that alone didn’t seem to help, I realized there’s a little plastic catch
underneath.
And there we go, the panel is now free.
This should be an easy treatment since it isn’t that badly yellowed.
You can actually see the original color hiding in the shadow of that drive latch here.
So, this should be pretty easy.
Of course, there’s still all that dirt down in here, so I’ll just use the hose to spray
that off.
Now, what I’m going to try to do is treat both of these pieces at the same time.
They should fit.
But I’ll have to add a little more water as the front panel is too tall.
And, I had to go back to the store for more peroxide, but here we go.
I’m going to pour the whole bottle in there.
This bottle costs about $5 so that’s not terribly bad, especially in most cases I can
use less than a bottle for most smaller jobs.
Now, some of this is already in a shadow, so I’ll need to re-orient this some for
even exposure.
And of course I’ll come out and check on it every 30 minutes or so.
Also on the other side of the driveway I have the keys still cooking over there.
OK, so skipping forward a few hours, I think the keys are pretty much done.
So taking a closeup look, they look pretty good.
Certainly better than they did.
However, the keyboard parts still look a tad yellowed, and probably need another few hours.
Although, I think this front case piece looks like it may be finished.
Well, we’ll give those pieces a bit longer and take care of some other things, such as
cleaning the drive heads on the disk drive.
This is just something that you might as well do on a restoration like this, especially
since the case is already apart.
And might as well lubricate the drive rails as well.
Lithium grease works well for this.
Well, now it is time for re-assembly.
And, as always, this is the most satisfying part about completing a restoration.
And here’s the finished keyboard.
It certainly looks more presentable.
OK, now I’ve got to re-attach these little feet.
Now, these have no adhesive on them on either side.
I’ve cleaned out what residue was on there and now I’m going to need to reapply them
back down on the keyboard.
And for that, I’m going to use this clear silicone.
So, here’s what the computer looked like before.
And now after.
I’ll take this opportunity to connect my Commodore monitor and try a few games.
All right guys, well thanks for watching!
I’m not going to go into a lot of the architecture or history behind this machine because I’m
going to save all of that for the official Commodore 128 documentary which will be coming
out soon and of course will also include the regular 128 as well.
I did want to mention one thing, though.
Those little feet on the bottom of the keyboard, well, they didn’t stick.
I thought silicone would work, it seemed like a good idea, but after 36 hours they just
practically fell right off.
So, I managed to remove all of the silicone off of this and the bottom of the keyboard
and I’ll be experimenting over the next few days with some other adhesives and hopefully
I’ll find one that works a little better.
So, I don’t know which one will work, I can just tell you that silicone apparently
does not.
So, anyway, that’s about it for this episode, so stick around for the next one and thanks
for watching!