Kenwood 3010 Repair

My old man gave it to me when I was in grade school. Seen a lot of action. Loudness always on.

It’s been at least a decade since I’ve serviced this box. The volume dial developed dead zones and the light won’t turn on. In addition to corroded contacts, I think it may have a dead bulb and/or a blown fuse. I’m going to open it up, clean up the dust, clean the contacts with Deoxit, and see if I can determine what else might need replacing. I found a service manual here (free account required.)

Very dusty

The two fuses are easily located. I don’t see any leaky capacitors, which is a good sign. I tested the two visible fuses in-situ and both read the same as shorting the contacts, so I assume they’re good. Next step was to clean the dust out and apply Deoxit to the pots and switches.

Much cleaner

With some trepidation I powered it up. No light bulbs and there are still some deadzones in the volume knob, but I’m able to pick up FM stations. I’d probably call that a success but I’m not sure where I’m going to put the thing yet so I might as well go the distance and try to fix the bulbs before I screw it back together. I’ve seen enough mixed messages about the dead zones that I’m a little afraid of doing more harm than good by repeatedly cleaning the main pot.

I found replacement lamps from this ebay seller. When trying to replace the bulbs, that’s where my lack of experience really started to show. The bulbs where wired in like this:

I don’t know the name of these connectors, but with two pairs of pliers and two steady hands, you can denature them enough to pull the bulb’s leads out

Two of the bulbs are on fairly long wires which give you enough slack to pry the connectors off and squeeze the connectors onto new bulbs or splice the wires. The middle bulb, however, does not afford you enough slack to pry the connectors off, so I cut the leads from the old bulb and attempted unsuccessfully to splice the old leads to the new leads. As a hail mary, I crammed the bulb into the socket anyway, figuring that the narrow wells that admit the wires should force them into contact. And I was right! All three bulbs lit up.

And with that (and a desk our neighbor didn’t want anymore) the setup is complete. I have a Bluetooth connector so that I don’t need to plug in my phone to use it; it’s now fully integrated into the 2021 music ecosystem. Not bad for a forty year old piece of hardware. And it’s still plenty loud.

iMac resto

The iMac G3 is, to my nostalgic eyes, the most beautiful computer ever designed. So when I saw one lying there at the dump I had to take it, to see if it would boot. It did. It hadn’t been used since ’06 and was slightly beat up. I took pictures while restoring it, but much of this post is from memory.

When I found the machine it was booting OSX, and absolutely dog slow. It’s crazy how much faster SSDs have made computing; we used to wait. I posted on /r/vintageapple and got tons of help picking a hard drive replacement. Of course I found out that you pretty much need a working disc drive to boot one of these things, so I picked one of those up on ebay.

Replacement hard drive: adapter in an adapter
Old hard drive above. Adapter-adapter needed a bracket.

In order to get the thing apart you need to first remove the plastic on the bottom, then remove the EMI shield which is a metallic mesh under the plastic. It requires some finicky movements and faith that it’s not all going to fall apart on you. Also screws will try to get lost, so be careful about that. I was able to recover all of the screws once I removed the drive cage; I even had some extra!

The easiest way to disassemble it was face-down. The disk drive is easy enough to take out, but to take out the hard drive the entire cage (metal, at the bottom) needs to be replaced.

Once the thing was put back together with a new hard drive and disc drive, I installed OS9Lives’s version of OS9 from a burned CD. I was then able to load games on via a USB key!

Now running EV Override on OS9!