I found this Mac Se 30 on eBay, not the cheapest of my finding considering the seller stated it was broken, but looking at the pictures I knew I could probably repair it.. and accepted the challenge.

I already repaired Macs with similar issues, and also had a few spare chips in case the problem was the horizontal sync on the logic board…

It arrived in a few days sitting on a bunch of cozy bubble wrap. Great cosmetic conditions! No scratches or labels, minimal yellowing. Once opened I noticed that the motherboard was almost in impeccable shape. The Mac had also a radeon Colorboard installed.. and the usual expired battery.

The floppy drive was in poor conditions, and with a system disk stuck in. I took it apart and patiently remove all the dust, clean the (extremely dirty) heads and lubricate again the slides and moving parts. Always disassemble and clean the drive before insert any floppy! The risk of damaging both the drive and the magnetic support is quite high when you have 30 years of dust stuck in the unit.

Moving on… The issue with the display has been quite easy to find, some solder joints on the analog board were cracked. After reflowing the joints I tried to turn on the machine and the screen was working.. showing the annoying checkerboard pattern, this happen with all the SE30 I tried. I simply replaced all the capacitor on the logic board and the machine worked properly.

The entire process took around 3 hours. Once booted I discovered a nice 20Mb of memory installed in the system! I backed up all the files on my external drive and contacted the owner. I think he was surprise to find something this old still on the hard disk : )