By request, I am posting my writeup on adding a fan to the 128 DCR and installing heat sinks that I posted elsewhere. This was a fairly quick, easy project that probably adds some life to the unit and is suitable for a fairly low skill level with a soldering iron and screwdriver.

I went on a bit of a bender modding my 128D for reliability and thought I'd share the ridiculousness a bit. The Commodore 128D is the fabulous ne plus ultra of 8 bit computers. An elementary school friend of mine had one of these bad boys, and I remember thinking it was really cool compared to my 64. It looked very professional with the separate keyboard. So since it is the coolest computer from my childhood, and the greatest 8-bit computer of all time, it is, by definition, the coolest computer EVAR. And now I own one. I rule!

Anyway, considering it took me nearly 4 months to find a decent one and it cost considerably more than I intended to spend, I decided to do some reliability mods. I had to get inside the thing to cut a trace and solder another so that the built in drive was no longer the first one, and while I was in there I noticed that this, the 128DCR (Cost Reduced) does not have any fans or heat sinks, even though there is clearly a space on the power supply for a fan. In Europe the regular 128D did have a fan, so Commodore was just cutting costs on this US version.

I originally posted to CBM-hackers about this project. I was of course entertained by Bil Herd's expression of mild surprise: "So it shipped without a fan? When we designed it in '84 we specifically had intake vents on the front and had specified a small (mitsumi?) fan. They didn't release the D until after I was gone so I don't know what all got added/deleted." So as suggested, I made my merry way over to newegg and looked for parts that are normally the purview of overlockers. For about 30 bucks I got a ton of tiny little heatsinks that already had adhesive, and a 60mm fan that moves 10CFM at 8dba... So it can turn over the volume of the chassis about 10 times a minute and is essentially inaudible.

Attached is a PDF with photos showing the process. I have much higher resolution photos that I will post separately as attachments.

Thanks for sharing this little mod/enhancement with us and welcome to the Forum! And congrats for being the first post in this new Hardware sub-forum here on Retrohackers. Hope to see more of this here in the future

Regards

RG

Here is my 128D FAN MOD :

http://www.n2dvm.com/blog/2011.html#1152011

http://www.n2dvm.com/blog/2011.html#11192011

Thanks DMackey and look forward to more of your great blog additions.

Merry Xmas. All

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Have Fun!!