We will admit it. If we found a 386 motherboard as badly corroded as the one [Bits und Bolts] did, we would trash it—not him, though. In fact, we were surprised when he showed it and said he had already removed most of it in vinegar. You can check the board out in the video below.
There was still a lot of work to do on both the front and back of the board. The motherboard was a Biostar and while it isn’t as dense as a modern board, it still had plenty of surface mount parts jammed in.
One challenge was that fixing corroded vias could break connections with traces on inner layers of the multi-layer PCB. It was important to try to find out where things were going in case it was going to need some wiring repair after some of the other repairs.
Even after cleaning and resoldering, there were some bad components — notably some tantalum capacitors. With those replaced, the board came up as you’d expect. It is worth listening to the maniacal laughter of satisfaction at about the 53-minute mark when the board booted up. We get it.
The 386 is simple enough that you could do your own motherboard. Otherwise, you might expect to have to provide some TLC.
eh just dip the whole thing into a solder pot, it will be fine
Aww, a BabyAT motherboard! 😍
Another chemical time bomb soldered on to the motherboard with multi-layers to boot all to be eaten by that little battery. I’ve seen it spread for many inches go thru vias into socketed chips and into those chips innards! For decades this was done and now they self destruct trace by trace. They didn’t want to deal with off board mounting and RFI considerations. Made for expensive factory servicing instead of being user replaceable. Most battery cells fail and leak in consumer goods. Seals are only so good.
Bits and Bolts has been making great retro stuff, like RAM upgrades for Voodoo cards and DIY 30-pin SIMMs.
Btw, the robotic voice you may hear in the video can be turned off by selecting settings, audio track, English (original).
If it’s not there, enable desktop website mode in your mobile browser.
You mean you dont have your youtube set to english by default?
im dutch and very much dislike the interface, and translations to be in dutch, I much rather see and hear the original language and maybe subtitles if not english (or dutch in my case)
its a good tip you gave, if videos come with alternative soundtracks. not sure how many does this. Tom Scott on youtube did so I think
Make me think of https://www.vortex86.com/products/Vortex86DX3
Get a proper de-solderer, you will question why you didn’t get one before. It makes things like this 1000% easier and less frustrating.
Mine = https://hakko.co.uk/product/fr-301-portable-desoldering-gun/ (other de-solderers are available :))
I just fixed 386dx40 biostar motherboard i got from ewaste. it was quite corroded as well, i cleaned it all up so it seems, fixed some cut traces on the bottom of the motherboard and it still didnt start. so i decided to strip it for chips and as i was removing bios chip i noticed it was kinda crusty, verified contacts between bios and the motherboard, one pin wasnt. so i cleaned it up and it booted. i ended up replacing the bios socket, giving the chip legs a good scrub with steel brush and replacing keyboard connector as well since it was crusty. now it works. yay. now i have 4 386dx40 baby at motherboards, i can build a beowulf cluster.