Cleaning an Atari Falcon 030
on Tue Feb 21 2017 by Ingo HinterdingThe Atari Falcon 030 is without a doubt my most precious item in my vintage computer collection. The last home computer made by Atari which after only one year, decided to stop producing it and focus on the also-destined-to-fail Jaguar game console. Well, we all know what happened to the company shortly after.
I got this one from eBay about ten years ago for around 100 Euro, quite expensive back then but a bargain compared to the price you would pay for a working machine today (350 Euro and up).
While it’s still working fine, it was always in a very bad condition, so I decided to do some cleaning on it. At first, I only wanted to bleach the keys like I do with many computers, but after opening the little bird I was shocked.
The whole computer was a huge mess inside, unbelievable, never seen such hardware before. It must literally have been the dirtiest place in my apartment, without me knowing about it all the time. Here’s another detail shot.
And a closeup of the keyboard
Long story short, I disassembled the complete keyboard, cleaned all the keys, bleached all keys, cleaned them again (yes, three passes where necessary), cleaned the keyboard itself and most of the rest of the computer (as much as possible without completely taking it apart). As a result, the keyboard looks pretty good now (not perfect though, but you can see the difference…).
And the reassembled Falcon 030 in all its glory.
Bottom line: never give up on an old computer!