I wasn’t really expecting to go any further than the local Jaycar Electronics store for new capacitors as part of my Retrochallenge entry.
I certainly wasn’t expecting a 650km round-trip roadtrip, but that’s what I find myself undertaking today to expand my europlus Refurbapalooza.
The main purpose of the trip is to pickup two europluses I’m adopting – they normally live 1700km north of me in Townsville, Queensland. Their current owner, Chris (who donated an EDD+ card to me for disk imaging work), is visiting our national capital, Canberra, so I thought a day’s roadtrip early in the month would allow me to include these two machines in my entry. I’m going out of my way as Chris is gifting them to me – I couldn’t really expect him to drop them off as well!
One machine is missing a PSU, and the other’s operational state is unknown. I’ll post an updated census once I have them all at home.
While in Canberra, I’m also picking up a europlus case base with original sticker I’ve acquired (thanks, Jeremy!) – one of my europluses is missing its label, so it’ll be nice to have labels on them all by the end of Retrochallenge 2016/10. The machines are already a weird mix of date codes vs serial numbers, so I’m taking the liberty of grabbing this serialised base for the label-less europlus.
Hopefully, that’ll be the bulk of my Retrochallenge travelling done for the month – at least it won’t be said I didn’t go the extra mile (or 400 miles) for my first Retrochallenge entry!
Let me know in the Comments section below the furthest you’ve gone specifically to pick up gear for your retrocomputer collection.
I flew to Kansas City to pick up a IIgs and a QuickTake 150 with extra lenses that I’d bought on Ebay (neither seller shipped to Australia), as well as anything that caught my eye at the Kfest Garage Give Away.
Well, although that’s a (very) long way, you didn’t specifically go that far to pick up that gear, did you? Or was KFest a happy side benefit of this long haul trip to pickup retro gear?!