Project: iMac G3

This is actually a tale of 2 iMac G3’s. A 600Mhz Graphite I got from Ebay and a 350Mhz Indigo from Facebook Marketplace. First off, we got the Graphite. It sadly got demolished in shipping :( The inner bezel on all slot loading iMac G3’s has become really brittle over the years because of the fire retardants Apple put in the plastic (according to Google). Meaning iMac G3’s can’t really be shipped without becoming 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles… I learnt that the hard way…

When I saw it arrive in this state I knew I had to do everything in my power to make it at least presentable. Needless to say other than broken it was also filthy inside due to the CRT.

After cleaning it came time to tackle the shattered inner bezel. Super glue was able to melt the ABS plastic back together!

Then came time to put the computer back together. The CRT had suffered a damaged shadow mask and used the same brittle ABS plastic on it’s yoke so there wasn’t much I could do to fix the discoloration and bad convergence. You can even see how bad it is in the pics below…

A few days had passed since I’d finished working on the Graphite iMac when my friend sent me a Facebook Marketplace link containing this gorgeous Indigo iMac in my city! It didn’t power on at all but I decided to risk it since all I really wanted was a CRT and it’s bezel to have a fully functional, good looking iMac. It turned out that the only thing wrong with it was its analog/PSU board and I was able to replace it with the one from mr Graphite :D So here it is: A frankesteined iMac G3 Indigo with a 600Mhz CPU, 600MB RAM and dual 10GB HDDs, one for OS9 and the other for OSX.

Bonus: IKEA shark likes to use it too! (It’s blue just like him)