I’ve had this Amiga 2000 for several years, but it was only recently that I put in the effort to fix it. The big problem with these machines long-term is that the Varta clock batteries explode and corrode all the traces and sockets. Mine has a leaky battery for sure, so I hope I can save it.

One of the biggest obstacles so far was to get the power connector unplugged from the motherboard. As they get old, the plastic housing of the Molex seems to mate with the board and needs a lot of coercion to get loose. I ended up working under the release tab with two pointy spudgers from an iPhone repair kit until I started hearing plastic moving.

It probably took more than three or four hours of straight work to release it, but it did eventually come up with the most glorious sound.

Pulled the tinwork and got some better pictures of the backside of the board.

Leaky battery from up close:

battery gore

Whole motherboard out:

motherboard freed

Backside of the board, approximately where the battery is at:

board backside

More corrosion:

corrosion all over

After going through my collection of side cutters I finally found one that worked pretty well on the battery and clipped it out:

bye battery

large power trace

I have a feeling this large trace is obliterated beneath this capacitor and it’s actually doing nothing at all. Also tempted to just fire it up and see what happens, but I should clean the corrosion off the CPU pins first.

Next step is to find a clean scratch brush somewhere in my pile of auto body tools and start scraping this gunk off the traces/the 68K’s pins. Hopefully everything is OK underneath, and once it’s back to the brass I should have a better idea of what needs repair/patch wiring.