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I've been working for a few days to restore an Amiga 3000 from 1990 which was owned by an art professor from Philadelphia.

Part 1: mstdn.io/@codewiz/113561527808

Part 2: mstdn.io/@codewiz/113562074864

TL;DR: The Varta battery leaked concentrated potassium hydroxide over the vital region between the three chips which define the Amiga architecture: Denise (video), Paula (audio) and Agnus (blitter, copper and DMA).

Extracting Denise and Paula reveals some corrosion on the pins.

Fat Agnus appears to have been spared, but I don't have a proper PLCC extractor tool and I'm not going to risk prying it out with kludgy methods.

Against best advice, I took the risk to power up the board in its present state.

The power LED flashing 6 times means that the Kickstart's diag routines failed somewhere, and a red screen signals a ROM checksum failure:
amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?t=

This is actually great news: the 68030 was able to execute some ROM code and even write into some of Denise's registers.

The checksum error could also be caused by a fault on either the data bus or the address bus.

Today I received the first batch of components for my A3000 board. Just a few DIP sockets, common logic IC, diods and capacitors.

I couldn't find 48-pin DIP sockets for Denise and Paula, so instead I bought 24-pin sockets to be used in pairs.

I scrubbed most of the green goo with a combination of sand paper and fiberglass pen.

I frequently cleared the dust from the PCB with an ESD-safe brush, distilled water and isopropyl alcohol.

I should probably also wash the entire board with soap water, but I'm not sure which soap is safe for PCBs, and which components need protection.

And this is what was underneath all the corroded metal oxide.

Most of the copper directly under the battery has been completely corroded, exposing a dark fiberglass layer.

This was actually lucky: that big ground plane neutralized most of the leak, reducing the damage on the rest of the PCB.

It's time to clear the corroded components, starting from the RTC circuitry south of the battery.

I used a $30 electric vacuum pump iron on the back of the board to suck most of the solder from the pins.

Then I pulled gently from the front while heating the area with a heat gun.

Most solder would melt easily, but pins attached to GND or heavily corroded would need more heat.

@codewiz If you're going to throw the component anyway, you can trim it off on both sides before trying to remove the leg, that normally makes it easier to desolder.
Have you got a pointer to the cheap pump iron? The ones I've seen are silly money.

Bernie

@penguin42 This is the one I bought, but it's not great: amazon.com/dp/B08V8PGJVJ

The temperature is fixed, and the vacuum button is single-shot: when you release that button, it barfs molten solder back onto the board 😒

The Amiga restoration videos I watched seem to use this better gun:
amazon.com/gp/product/B07542D8

www.amazon.comAmazon.com

@codewiz Yeh that suggests the Hakko FX-301 which is like $300++
I'm used to having a manual solder sucker in one hand, and the iron in the other...and the device held in....