We will admit it. If we found a 386 motherboard as badly corroded as the one [Bits und Bolts] did, we would trash it—not him, though. In fact, we were surprised when he showed it and said he had already removed most of it in vinegar. You can check the board out in the video below.

There was still a lot of work to do on both the front and back of the board. The motherboard was a Biostar and while it isn’t as dense as a modern board, it still had plenty of surface mount parts jammed in.

One challenge was that fixing corroded vias could break connections with traces on inner layers of the multi-layer PCB. It was important to try to find out where things were going in case it was going to need some wiring repair after some of the other repairs.

Even after cleaning and resoldering, there were some bad components — notably some tantalum capacitors. With those replaced, the board came up as you’d expect. It is worth listening to the maniacal laughter of satisfaction at about the 53-minute mark when the board booted up. We get it.

The 386 is simple enough that you could do your own motherboard. Otherwise, you might expect to have to provide some TLC.