A Mac SE/30 battery leak can turn an “untested” eBay bargain into a chemistry experiment that eats copper for breakfast — and in this short clip, Adam Wilson (Adam’s Vintage Computer Restorations) shows exactly what that looks like in real life.

Mac SE/30 Battery Leak: What Went Wrong

On the SE/30, the PRAM battery sits in exactly the wrong place: when it leaks, the corrosion can crawl under chips, wick along vias, and quietly destroy inner-layer connectivity. Adam walks through the telltale green/black crust, the damaged component legs, and the kind of board rot that makes you realize you’re no longer “repairing traces,” you’re rebuilding a machine.

When Trace Repair Stops Making Sense

The interesting moment in Adam’s story is the decision point: instead of sinking more hours into patching an increasingly compromised original board, he switches strategy. That’s where the classic-Mac community’s “escape hatch” comes in: reverse-engineered SE/30 replacement logic boards that you can have fabricated by a PCB manufacturer, then populate using a donor board as the parts source. It’s not a magic shortcut — you’re still doing careful component transplanting, inspection, cleaning, and lots of continuity checking — but it changes the problem from “is this corroded laminate salvageable?” to “can we re-home the machine’s parts onto known-good copper?”

Debugging, Persistence, and the Payoff

Adam doesn’t oversell it: the rebuild is a grind. He describes debugging that stretched over roughly two years (on and off), because vintage Macs are full of failures that can masquerade as each other: power quirks, bad sockets, damaged IC legs, intermittent connections, and the general fun of bringing up a complex board that was never designed with modern rework in mind. But the payoff is the bit everyone watches for: a cleaned, restored SE/30 that boots and runs happily again, with the original “dead” board kept as a framed warning about what “sold as seen” can really mean.
 

What Makers Can Take from This

If you work on any aging electronics, this is a useful case study in triage. First, stop the damage early (battery removal and proper cleaning matter). Second, know when you’re doing engineering versus archaeology: sometimes a replacement PCB is the most honest route to a working machine. And third, it’s a reminder that the most valuable thing in retro restoration isn’t a rare part — it’s time, patience, and a test methodology that keeps you moving forward one verified subsystem at a time. For more context, see the full Elektor Engineering Insights interview, and if you’re in a Mac mood, Elektor recently covered the new Apple Macintosh book release.
 

Background reading (if you want a broader look at replacement-board efforts in the community) includes a write-up on a brand-new SE/30 logic board and an open project repository.