Rescued 68k Mac Saga Begins

I've never people actually 'trash picked' decent hardware until I was walking the dog a couple of evenings back, and came across a pile of junk piled up by the bins outside a recently-vacated house. If there's one thing Reddit's vintage computer scene has told me, is that to always be on the lookout for anything that other people throw away, as it might be gold to someone else.

In amongst the pile I noticed the remains of some sort of beige tower; most of the case was missing but it was clearly a PowerPC Mac of some description (further investigation shows it to be probably be a Performa 6400 series). Sat nearby under a cardboard box I saw another beige pizza box-style Mac peaking out; which I pulled out and found it's an LC475. A quick lift of the lid shows it was complete internally too (although I couldn't investigate too far; it was dark and I had an excitable Dalmatian trying to rip my arm off). An old Sony CD player box was also looked into; and it was stuffed full of floppies.

So what did I do? I couldn't let this lot go to landfill, even if it was dead. So once I got home, I put the dog inside and grabbed my car keys.

After some investigation at home at my leisure; the Performa is 100% dead and partly picked over. The floppy drive was still present so I kept that as a spare. The rest of it will be recycled responsibly (once the recycling centre is open again).

The jewel in this is the LC 475. I was correct in that it's complete and pretty clean on the inside. The barrel battery is dead but hasn't leaked, so that's a bonus. I was disappointed and slightly impressed to find that someone has secured their data by putting something sharp through the hard disk; but a 24 year old SCSI probably was always going to be of dubious condition anyway. The best part is that once power was applied (and disks disconnected for safety), the fan started spinning. There was no chime so I'm thinking that it probably could do with a recap, but that can be planned later.

Reconnecting the floppy drive, I found that the eject mechanism seems to be stuck. However the drive I pulled from the Performa works fine in that regard.

I've fitted a new battery and am waiting for a DB15 to VGA adaptor so I can see if there's any video output, however if it needs a recap I'm not holding my breath.

The plans for this machine are to bring it back to life and put it to use in some capacity. I can see this being a couple of months as I'm going to need to find someone to recap the board for me as I don't trust my own soldering skills.

More on this as I get parts and make progress.