Slotloading imac g3 wont turn on after disassembly

[Jairbear73]

Hello, So I recently finally got around to buying myself an iMac G3. It was working quite well, however by about the second day every now and then there would be a pop noise, and power fluctuations which sometimes would cause the device to shut down.

I put this down to an issue with the PAV board, so I took it apart in order to get access to it. After essentially stripping it all the way down to the tube, I was able to successfully pull out the PAV board and found some bad solder joints around the fly back transformer and some other more mild ones which I fixed up.

However, after putting the Mac back together, it no longer turns on properly. I push the power button and the green light comes on.
I get a split second pop from the speakers and the start of the degaussing sound before the whole system dies and won't let me turn it back on again unless I turn off the power wait for 10 seconds and turn it on again.

There was no signs of flyback failure, the image was perfect, with no distortion at all, even during the pops.

Does anyone have any idea of what the problem could be?

Sorry for the long post, thanks!

 

[eljanitor]

I worked on a few of these around 2006. If I remember correctly there were 3 different PAV boards for them and if the wrong one was installed then it wouldn't work and you would experience the problem you are having now. The EMC number used to be what Apple would use to get you the right PAV, but since Apple no longer sells them you have to trust that the one that is in it now should be the right one. However you said that the soldering on it was bad solder joints so if they were super sloppy then chances are it was a novice who did it and that alone could have messed up the board.

The reason why I say this is I worked with this old Chinese guy who was a master computer repair technician and he could solder anything. One day I asked him why he had such a fancy solder Iron ( because at the time I had no idea) and he told me that if you use the wrong settings you can actually push electricity through the circuit board you're soldering on which creates ESD damage and then you have permanently damaged the board you were trying to repair.

So that being said and after seeing my share of cringeworthy repairs ( ram sticks lying on a carpet before being installed, etc, etc) You may have had someone who used a $25 soldering gun they bought at the hardware store and after watching some you tube videos thought they could fix it. So sorry to say you may have to replace the whole PAV board and two of them look the same and will bolt in the same way but are incompatible with certain G-3 and G-4 motherboards. One style only fits one type of iMac and wont physically allow you to bolt it into the wrong model.

Anyhow sorry to hear this and good luck you you, you just have to ask yourself how much do I want to spend on a really old computer for fun or go recycle it.