I delved into the depths of my trusty Showa-era NEC to remove its leaking (leaked?) battery. Here’s what I found.

For some reason, the case is held on by large-headed self-tapping screws. This seems really dangerous, but as long as I am careful things will be okay. Inside the machine, there is a ton of structure to this case, with good high quality rolled edges. It’s pretty dirty - the floppy ribbon cables in particular are gross and need a good rubdown before I start thinking about how to add a Gotek.

Case opened from the top

The floppy drives are really exposed here - they are, as expected, big old 5.25” TEACs. In the future, I’ll have to figure out how to get them out of their rails so I can clean the head and re-lube the slide rails.

Big PC88 fan

Around the side of the case is this monster AC fan. This is probably the loudest fan in my computer collection, including the SGI Octane 2. I gave this a decent blast with the compressed air, and amazingly the bearing still sounds great. Whoever made this should be proud.

Dead spider

This spider died so long ago that he’s pretty much all gone. RIP little guy, I hope you ate some tasty bugs in here before the end.

I reached in with side cutters and clipped the battery leads, not wanting to get too deep into this machine with limited desk space to store all the gubbins.

Battery label part 1 - 2.4V 30mAh Battery label part 2 - YUASA 2-30FT

I was a little surprised to find this odd-sized NiCad battery is 2.4V and only stores 30mAh. This relatively wimpy composition is probably why things weren’t worse when it popped.

With the battery removed, the computer starts up fine still, and DATE$ continues to think that it is currently 84/00/00. Back to Showa 59, I guess.

You can find new-old-stock Yuasa “MEMO POWER” computer batteries all over eBay, but I’ve yet to find a 2-30FT like this one. I wonder how irritated their sales staff would be to get a cold call asking for a new battery.

I’ll be dismantling this computer further later to remove the remaining leads. I don’t think I’ll be replacing it with a battery holder unless I find out that it is necessary for the continued operation of the machine (or any expansion bus peripherals).

Repair Summary

Fault Remedy Caveats
Battery leaked. Remove battery, clean area.