I used Apple II computers a lot in high school. The rows of Apple IIc’s locked in steel anti-theft cages on each desk in our computer lab and the ‘headbanging’ racket they’d all make when the teacher flipped the power switches on the wall to bring them to life is stuck in my head. I learned the foundations of software
development on the IIc, but the machine I was always drawn to was the older IIe in the corner. It just always felt more high quality and solid, and I loved the feel of the keyboard.
It always kinda bugged me that I never got to own one. When I started working on repairing old computers I decided to make a IIe one of my first projects.
I bought this machine from someone who said their power supply had “blown up”. They’d bought a new power supply but hadn’t been able to get it working.
The thing was filthy and had blotchy yellow plastic. The first thing I needed to do was to tear it down and give it a good 
cleaning. Warm, soapy water did wonders for the plastic parts. They were still an icky yellow, but at least they were clean.
The keyboard was a special pain to clean. The key switches are soldered in place, so I didn’t want to submerge the plate behind the keys, but it was filthy. I ended up resorting to cleaning swabs and isopropyl alcohol. It took forever.
We need POWER!
I dug into power supply(PSU) first. The new ReActiveMicro power supply was
there, just like the previous owner said, but the inside of the case was covered in stinky yellow gunk. A “Rifa” cap exploded in there at some point. That was probably what they meant by “blown up”. It’s the most common fault I’ve seen in old Apple IIs. The “safety” capacitors in the power supply have a tendency to go “foom” and spew smoke and gunk everywhere. Isopropyl alcohol(IPA), toothbrushes, towels, and elbow grease cleaned that mess up.
The PSU itself all looked right. The last owner couldn’t get it to work. Why? The wires all went where they were supposed to. I hooked it up to power but got nothing. Odd.
I pulled out one of the wires and saw the problem. They didn’t strip the insulation off any of the wires. I pulled them all back out, stripped them, and put them back. When I tried again, it worked!
Motherboards are better than bored mothers
Next, I checked out the motherboard.
I always do a visual inspection before power on. Everything looked ok, so I hooked everything up and flipped the switch.
The faint crackling sound and burning smell were NOT what I’d hoped for. Meter time! Something shorted 5v and 12v rails to ground. That might explain why the power supply failed.
I did some research. There’s a block of 4 capacitors near the power connector, one for each of the voltages that comes in from the PSU. They’re supposed to filter out noise, but they often fail with a short circuit. I tested those caps and 2 of the 4 were toast. Bingo! I replaced all 4 with new high quality axial caps.
Everything looked good, so I connected everything and powered on. I got a nice beep from the speaker and it booted up to BASIC.
I spent the next few days testing with both a vintage floppy drive and CF adapter. Some things were odd. A lot of software wouldn’t work, and it wouldn’t auto boot from the CF adapter. I started researching why and got sucked into a bit of history.
The Apple IIe originally shipped in 1983 with a 6502 processor. In 1985 Apple decided to release the IIe “enhanced” which switches to a 65C02 processor and has more capable software in the ROMs installed in the machine. At the same time, they released an enhancement kit that contained the 4 chips that need to be replaced. The Apple IIc and IIgs retained compatibility with the feature set of the enhanced IIe.
An Apple II without the enhancement kit is pretty limited. Fortunately, there are modern recreations of the enhancement kit. I ordered one online, and once I got the updated chips and swapped them out, everything worked fine.
I’m on the case
With all of the electronics working, I turned back to the case. It was as yellow as a
Vogon constructor fleet. A nice soak in warm peroxide and UV light (retrobright) helped a lot. I decided to do just a gentle treatment to leave some of the history intact on this beautiful machine and avoid any risk of bleaching. Several port covers were missing or cracked, so I replaced them with new 3D printed ones.
I reassembled everything and tested by playing some games and running some diagnostics. It looks great and runs well.
I'm really proud of the final result. It struck a great balance between keeping the original integrity of the machine while giving it a much needed refresh.
This machine is sold already, but I often have similar machines, other things I've repaired, or parts (both original and things I've created) up in the FRKNetwork store. Check it out!