Repair : Fixing an Amiga tank mouse

I recently bought an Amiga mouse on Ebay.  Unfortunately the little sucker wouldn't work in the horizontal axis.  After a little searching I found this very useful youtube video.  I plugged the mouse into my scope and saw right away that one of the photo transistors wasn't working properly. So I decided to just replace them.

So off to RS Compnents I went to get some OSRAM LPT 80 A Radial Side Lookers.

Taking the black body off was a pain in the bottom.  I DO NOT recommend trying to lever the locking parts apart.  Just try to lever the whole part up.  I broke mine and had to glue them up.

You need to put the parts together and slide them in, just really gently. The slide the wheel in really gently as well.

If you do happen to break any of the plastic there isn't much that will stick to it.  I tried Tamiya model cement and super glue with no joy.  The only thing that did work was E6000 and it worked amazingly.

I did let mine cure for 3 days before re-assembly.

Now I have another working Amiga 600 tank mouse.

 

 

Alternate parts : A new battery for my Amiga 500 memory expansion

I've heard horror stories of Amiga batteries destroying boards so I thought I'd replace mine with a coin cell battery.  It turned out that the memory expansion was in really good condition and the battery looked brand new, but still it had to go.

I ordered a replacement battery from Amiga Kit on Ebay and off I went.

First things first the RF shield has three soldered tabs to deal with.  I used my desoldering gun to get most of the solder off and then a hot iron and heaps of solder wick.  A couple of plastic spudgers are also useful to help lever out the tab while heating it with your soldering  iron.

Off with the old and on with then new.

While I was in there I decided to replace the capacitors as well.

In the end it turned out very well, although the RF case was a little tight going back on.  I didn't resolder the tabs,  I just used some Kapton tape to secure it together.