I recently bought a CBM Amiga A1200 on eBay ... the seller described it as "clean", which turned out to be code for "you'll want to make sure your inoculations are up to date before touching it"
Never one to miss an opportunity for an article, I thought I'd take a few pics of the cleanup operation.



First up, the external PSU - yuk!




The best thing I've found to clean old plastic with is biological washing powder - not only does it get the smeg off, it also removes the odours that inevitably seems to attach itself to old iron - a lot it tends to ming of Rothmans & chip fat.

Use 2-3 tablespoons full (or about 1/4 - 1/3 of a cup) of powder per 2 gallons of hot water. At that sort of solution strength you don't really want it on your skin for too long (or at all if you've got sensitive skin), so wearing a pair of marigolds would be a _Good Thing_.




I use a wrung out dishcloth to clean flat surfaces & cables, and an old toothbrush (shaken nearly dry) for crevices & fiddly bits.
10 minutes later, & the water looked like this (yuk again):




... and the PSU looks a lot cleaner






Next up for the photo sequence, the A1200 itself. Note the variations in colour on the plastic parts - this shows just how manky the exposed surfaces had got.





Keyboards can get pretty unsavoury, so a thorough clean was up next. Before anyone suggests that I could have just bunged it in the dishwasher, here are some reasons why I didn't:
1 - I don't have a dishwasher;
2 - If cleaning the kb in a dishwasher goes wrong with a PC keyboard, there are more replacement options than you can shake a stick at. With an old computer, the only replacement option would be to buy another identical machine & steal the kb from it;
3 - I don't have a dishwasher.


Step one was to take a couple of decent photos of the keyboard:









Step two: ping off the keys, being careful to keep any springs & clips safe (bear in mind the potential replacement problem).





Step 3: Hoy all the keys in a bucket, along with more washing detergent:





Step 4: fill up with hot water & leave for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally:





Step 5: When the keys are done, tip the bucket out into a colander & rinse:





Step 6: shake off any excess water & spread the keys out on a cloth to dry:





While they're drying, time to clean up the other bits. Here's a heavily posed shot of 1/2 of the case being scrubbed:






Here's an "after" pic of the keyboard base, post cleanup. The 'before' pic was just too horrible:





The metal/electronic bits got a few squirts of WD40 & a wipe over with a bit of old t-shirt:





Back to the keyboard, step 7 is to reattach the keys, referring to the pics I took earlier for the more obscure keys.





Putting it all back together, here's the finished unit - all squeaky clean & lemon fresh :

ok first thing

ROFL LMAO
ok seriously thats a good job cleaning it up there
that kinda how i clean my crap up

can i just ask what you are planning to use it for and why?
just wondering?

i had one of those once and spent hours at a time writing programs for those things and storing them on the old skool disks

Wow, now that is dedication. All that work on such an old computer. You are truley PIMPIN'.

Quote: Originally Posted by stereomod ... can i just ask what you are planning to use it for and why? just wondering? i had one of those once and spent hours at a time writing programs for those things and storing them on the old skool disks

I haven't really got any plans for it - I saw it on eBay with a "buy it now" price of around 1/2 what they usually go for & snapped it up ... I forgot the first rule of bargains though: it's only a bargain if you actually _need_ it

A1200s seem to come in two flavours - one's that boot up instantly, and ones where the kickstart ROMs have to think about booting for a few extra seconds. If it had been one of the former I would have swapped the board out with the one in "Chickenhead" ... but it's one of the latter, so I didn't. I guess I'll just call it a spare

Sweet job man, nice everything, tru dedication there ...

Nice Example of clean up JE!

This can be done to any keyboard or set up if takin apart properly, take lots of pics if your not sure where everything should go.

I think I have the same Amiga stored in my basement!
By the way, what do the two empty keys on the keyboard do?

Quote: Originally Posted by ERAD I think I have the same Amiga stored in my basement! ...

Well get it out, dust it off & use the thing!

Software availability is better than it's ever been - loads of abandonware games & public domain demo downloads out there, + I just bought a 3 DVD set of Amiga game disk images on eBay - 21,543 disks worth (5,500 complete games) for £9 !

Quote: Originally Posted by ERAD ... By the way, what do the two empty keys on the keyboard do?

Nothing I think they might be marked (& do something useful) on European models ...

Games? Like what? Pong! , you are one dedicated guy. Hell I wanna smash anything less then 2Ghz. You must be one patient man!

Quote: Originally Posted by Jonny English Software availability is better than it's ever been - loads of abandonware games & public domain demo downloads out there, + I just bought a 3 DVD set of Amiga game disk images on eBay - 21,543 disks worth (5,500 complete games) for £9 !

I have a whole shoe box filled with floppy disks with games for my Amiga. Sure, its floppy, but you're lookin' at 500+ games!