701C plastic restoration

[H-Atkinson]

Hello,

I recently have been able to get 3 701s, all of which were in various stages of being eaten by their leaking batteries when I got them. Between the 3, I only have enough case pieces to make 1 "good" machine (ie no cracks and not sticky), however, it seems like an absolute waste to just let the rest of it all sit on a shelf, especially since electronically I have enough components to make at least 1 more fully functional 701C, and maybe another CS if I can figure out what traces are bad on one of my upper planars.

So, this then leads into the question - what is the best method for restoring the plastics on these 701s? As for removing the coating, I have found that even warn water peels it right off (used a battery door as a test piece), so that shouldn't be too hard. The difficult part is re-coating it. Obviously I won't ever get anything close to the IBM factory finish since that was a baked coating (if I remember correctly), so that leaves pretty much just paints. I've got experience with plasti-dip from other projects, and it seems to wear quite poorly, so I'm inclined to stay away from it. I would leave it as bare plastics, but I'm going to have to do some patchwork to a lot of these pieces with epoxy, and it would be ideal to hide this under some paint so its a bit less ugly. Has anyone else had luck with re-coating these?

And a totally unrelated question to coatings, but does anyone know how to make a 64mb RAM module work in the 701? I remember reading you either needed a special BIOS or special driver, though I don't recall exactly what.

Thanks!

[pkiff]

I have a couple 701's that I also want to do some work on, and I also wondered about what to do with the cases.

Fellow board member Cooler22 did some testing with paints and plastics back in 2017, and even posted some 3D printer files I think:
701c Repainting?

And in that thread, you'll find links to some other sources - one from the German thinkwiki:
https://thinkwiki.de/Gummierung_erneuern

And another that quotes from a post that dates back to 2003, but which seems to give instructions on the right mixture of Plasti-Dip, Flat Black Enamel, and Naphtha:
/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67411&hilit=plasti+dip#p452775

I hadn't quite figured out which method I was going to try to follow. But I expect (hope?) that there are current members here who have experience with one or several methods.

[pkiff]

And a totally unrelated question to coatings, but does anyone know how to make a 64mb RAM module work in the 701? I remember reading you either needed a special BIOS or special driver, though I don't recall exactly what.

I might be mistaken, but I think that you can only get a 64MB module to work if you have the custom AMD 133Mhz board? The original 701s had a max of 40MB (?), but the replacement upgrade board added 133MHz CPU and it also allowed a 64MB RAM chip.