Commodore PC10-III – Part 4 – Battery

The curse of old PCs is the leaking battery! Seen many units over the years with serious, sometimes fatal, damage from a leaking battery. If left alone it can eat its way through circuit tracks, rendering motherboards beyond repair.

Lady luck is with me again it seems as some lovely person has removed the old battery:

So the next step is to replace the battery, or find a better solution.

I am not really a fan of these board mounted things as if the do fail you have to start messing about with the motherboard. So I think it is best to ‘upgrade’ this with something external.

I found a bit of flexible plastic and shaped it into a tag:

Found a nice DC connector and plug from an old fan and used that as a harness, using the nearby screw to provide the ground connection and convenient mounting:

Next I ordered a NiCad batter online, 3.6V, and soldered the connector on, against within some heat shrink:

Just need a bit of velcro:

Thats done!

A nice easy job but means that if there is a problem the battery can easily be replaced. Granted that the capacity of these cells are massively larger than needed but these were the smallest I could find with flying leads on them that I could modify.

Machine is starting to come together now, all that really remains is to sort out some persistent storage. Much as I love 5 1/4″ floppy discs there is only so much you can do!

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