Extreme Refurbishing: Amiga Edition

The last Amiga personal computer rolled off the assembly line in 1996, well over 20 years ago. Of course, they had their real heyday in the late 80s, so obviously if you have any around now they’ll be in need of a little bit of attention. [Drygol] recently received what looks like a pallet of old Amiga parts and set about building this special one: The Vampiric Amiga A500.

The foundation of this project was a plain A500 with quite a bit of damage. Corrosion and rust abounded inside the case, as well as at least one animal. To start the refurbishment, the first step was to remove the rust from the case and shields by an electrochemical method. From there, he turned his attention to the motherboard and removed all of the chips and started cleaning. Some of the connectors had to be desoldered and bathed in phosphoric acid to remove rust and corrosion, and once everything was put back together it looks almost brand new.

Of course, some other repairs had to be made to the keyboard and [Drygol] put a unique paint job on the exterior of this build (and gave it a name to match), but it’s a perfect working Amiga with original hardware, ready to go for any retrocomputing enthusiast. He’s no stranger around here, either; he did another extreme restoration of an Atari 800 XL about a year ago.

17 thoughts on “Extreme Refurbishing: Amiga Edition

    1. It’s used in paint-on rust inhibitor gel such as Jenolite and Kurust. It’s also a major ingredient in Coca Cola. If you soak parts in Coke Zero, you don’t get such a sticky residue from all the sugar either!

  1. very interesting restoration. But how exactly were the keys painted red, because the print still shines through, while the color red seems to be very vibrant. Is this special paint or a special technique or was the text on the keys reapplied?

    Any way, this thing looks awesome! It’s actually even more awesome realizing that it looked like trash to begin with. Very cool job well done!

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