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Mad-Mike started a blog post More Versa Work.....
January 23, 2021, 02:37 PM

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More Versa Work.....

Just got the Ultralite in, I got a REAL basketcase, lol. Rusty oscillator, looks like water damage, ticks when the battery is installed, no status on the LCD display, LCD panel thrashed but control boards good, AC Adapter is down for the count as well, and the plastic is cracked. When they said "for parts" they were not kidding. Managed to use a few parts to fix the M/75 I just got.

The M/75 was also a bit of a basketcase - overpaid. But the chassis on this one is flawless - no cracked plastic, though the mold work looks different from the others in some respects. Should have used this plastic with the older molds and it would have been a killer mix. It also looks like NEC was using a different screen panel setup as well as the screen cable, LCD Controller daughter card (daughter card that sits between the PCMCIA slots and the Hard Drive connector), and screen cable are all incompatible with the regular screen cable/controller combos.....or there's something wrong with that entire mix as the screen just shows lines, the cable refuses to boot with any other screen, and the LCD controller won't let the PC boot with a different screen assembly installed. So either there's something special about the NL6448AC30-12 LCD panel, or there's something broken along the way that allows only that combo to work (but with the screen shifted down by 32 pixels - making the DOS prompt invisible). So I swaped in the NL6448AC30-06 from the 40EC in with the screen cable from the Ultralite and my 1st M/75's LCD Controller card (Which might prove useful later as I'm going to be doing the baking-soda/superglue trick on the touch screen and put a new panel in it - or repair the NL6448AC30-10 it originally had with new controller boards).

And a hit, anyone else with an NEC versa that's prone to cracking and has a good engineer's eye can really solidify that plastic with the Baking Soda Superglue trick. I did iit to my P/75, it's been two weeks after molding new parts and gluing things together using this combination and nothing has let loose and everything is rock solid. Even the existing plastic is not cracking.

And speaking of plastic, the Ultralite cracked to pieces in shipping. I'm seriously toying with making a "Jigsaw Puzzle" out of this project and put it back together with the BS + Superglue, filling in spots where I can't find the original plastic with J.B. Weld Original and then puting fiberglass gause and BS + Superglue on the back for ridgitiy. Maybe some Titebond Epoxy flood fills in certain very weak areas. What I'm hoping is I get good enough at this that I can maybe rebuild and save a few more of these PC's from the trash simply from the plastic case problem.

I'm also working on my board level repair skills - I'm keeping all motherboards until I figure out what's killed/harmed them - and making necessary repairs if possible.
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