commodore 128

Another recent addition to the collection is a Commodore 128. I picked it up at a local estate sale with a 1571 disk drive, another Commodore 64, and some cartridges and accessories.

When I first brought it home, it was filthy. I decided to clean it up first before I tested anything.

The power supply had some little plastic caps that filled the screw holes. I used a bit of hot glue on the end of a small screwdriver to pull the caps out.

With everything disassembled, I soaked and scrubbed the case and keys in a mixture of dawn and hot water. I used a bit of isopropyl alcohol and/or windex on any stubborn spots and everything cleaned up pretty well.

I reassembled the power supply and mounted the board back in the case for testing.

I powered it up and it worked on the first try.

I put some new thermal paste on the RF shield and re-mounted it on the board. I then closed everything back up.

Upon testing, I found two keys that were sticking.

The comma and the F7 key were a bit sticky. The comma key wasn’t always registering a keypress, so I decided to spray a little bit of contact cleaner in the plunger and agitate it a bit which turned out to be a bad idea.

The contact cleaner that I have apparently melts plastic. A little bit got on the space bar and started melting into it.

Luckily I had a bit of water nearby which I used to douse the area. The damage isn’t too bad, and the only area you can see it is on the space bar. You probably wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t looking for it, but I know now to be more careful with contact cleaner.

I cleaned each of the plungers with some alcohol and added stronger springs to both of the keys and now they are working okay.

Now I need to do the same for the 1541 drive and see if I can boot CP/M on this thing.