Revenge from Mars lucky repair (maybe)

There was a thread for a cheap RFM a few weeks ago, I went and saw it, played it a few times and bought it as a working project. Anyway after bringing it home it started freezing up, sometimes after 2 hours, sometimes 10 mins, (it didnt freeze up when I went to buy it and apparently they hadnt had it) anyway I thought I was up for a Nucore system, after reading Wokas thread I thought no worries. Apparently the main cause of a RFM freezing is the motherboard.

I wanted it available for the weekend as we were having guests over so figured I had nothing to lose by trying to fix it. I stripped the motherboard of battery, cpu, ram and all plugs and saturated it in a light solvent cleaner and left it overnight to dry, then soaked every plug and socket in Deoxit Gold and let that dry. The dirt that came out of the motherboard was huge, my thoughts were a possible bad contact.

Next step after it all drying out was to check all pins and sockets for damage, bad connection etc so I continuity checked as far as possible everything I could, I actually found when plugging in the power supply that it was not seating correctly by about 2mm at the 12 v end (orange), after looking at this for a while and not working out why I used some Nyogel grease, (we use it at work to help prevent fretting on electrical contacts) finally getting it to fit properly.

When I put it back together after 2 days drying it wouldnt boot (expected), the cpu fan wasn't running so it was a p/s problem. I replaced the power supply and it came up.

We used it all night last saturday and it has been on for hours without any signs of freezing over the last week.

I might have got lucky and saved myself the cost of a Nucore for now.......YAAAYYY:D:D:D

Nice Work :023:

 

RFM is top fun

 

well done getting all running well again

 

A good lesson for others

Pin 2K problems start with the Power Supply ;)

 

 

Ando

Everything you did could have solved the problem, but a common cause for this is simply reseating the prism card. Maybe in transporting the card dislodged a little. So if it happens again try that as a first step. But in your case what you did may have been required. I'll keep that in mind if I have the same problem.

Should have mentioned that I had already reseated the prism card and the ram, tried it in both slots after cleaning the pwb contacts. Also replaced the ram with a 64m stick. All with no joy, finally decided that I had nothing to lose with my drastic measures.....machine still playing well, but a fair bit of cosmetic stuff to do.