For pickup: VAX-11/750 and RK07

[Ethan Dicks]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Henk Gooijen <henk.gooijen at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I have five (!) RK07 drives. I want to keep 3 of them, so sooner or
> later two drives will have to go (in The Netherlands).
> I plan to connect them all to the RK07 Field Test Box to see in what
> shape they are. They should all be OK ...

They probably are... in my experience, they are very sturdy
mechanically and electrically.

I was cleaning and prepping for sale a pair of them about 21 years
ago.. one was just fine, but when I flipped the breaker on the second
one, *huge* amounts of thick black smoke poured out of the PSU.  I
slapped the breaker off and tipped back the PSU to see what happened -
two of the rectifier diodes (1N4007 or similar) were charred and
perforated.  A few minutes with a DVM narrowed down the problem to a
completely-shorted filter cap.  It was great that it was held in with
#8 bolts, not solder.  The "hard part" of the repair was replacing the
diodes.

Lots of smoke + two $0.07 diodes + one C-battery-sized filter cap ==
working drive!

It was one of the easiest DEC repairs I ever had.

-ethan