I have had three Macintosh SE/30. The first one (pictured above) was a purchase from a well known auction site in about 2018. These days everyone seems to want an SE/30 but considering it was in working condition, had 32M of memory, and came with a network card, keyboard, and mouse the cost was pretty good. Given that it was a working unit, i powered it up immediately. It booted up fine on the hard disk, but i did notice the audio was very low which was a hint that the logic board capacitors needed work.
On first use, i broke it. I was very much a beginner with old macs. I put in a disk and when it ejected the eject drive gear broke. There’s a lesson.
Of course, the gear probably would have broken anyway; they go brittle. I was able to buy a replacement online.
I now clean and lubricate 3.5″ drives on arrival. IPA is generally sufficient for cleaning. Silicon grease or bike chain lube seem to be ok lubricants.
I then discovered that Macs are hard to open. I had to by the required torx bit, and then gradually lever the case open (i later got a mac cracker).
I noticed that the insulating card on the back of the analogue board had been replaced with piece of plain old cardboard. It was probably fine, but I replaced it with the appropriate material. It wasn’t quite as large as the analogue board, but it covered all the active areas. Later, i swapped in the correct card.
Premium Apple Service Centre repair!
The SE/30 has a reputation for leaky logic card capacitors. i replaced them with tantalums. I also replaced the PRAM battery.