Earie Salmon, who runs the YouTube channel Earie's 8-Bit Workshop from Australia, restores and rebuilds vintage computers and estimates his collection at 35 to 40 systems "in various states of disrepair." His entry point was classic sibling rivalry: his brother owned a ZX81 and a Commodore VIC 20 in the early 1980s and rationed access, so Salmon eventually bought the machine he had wanted back then — an Acorn Atom — before moving on to the C64 and Amiga.

Soldering and desoldering skills are a prerequisite, but Salmon advises practicing on a Vero board with disposable components before attacking irreplaceable decades-old hardware. The bigger hurdle is sourcing parts: custom ICs such as ULAs have not been manufactured since the original machines ended production, and many components now exist only in 'dead' donor systems. Harvesting them feels wrong, he says, but has become unavoidable.

His sharpest frustration is counterfeit chips. Ordered bags of 74LS logic ICs may turn out to be re-etched parts from a different logic family — sanded down and relabeled — that pass basic IC testers yet will not work in the target computer. He learned that lesson the hard way. Reading schematics is another core skill, complicated by documentation for Japanese machines like NEC or MSX systems that was never published or translated.

His most rewarding job was a BBC Model B suffering from a previous owner's botched repair: misrouted bodge wires, blown ICs and broken traces, with soldering he suspects was done with a hot spoon. Beyond individual repairs, Salmon argues modern hardware has regressed: 1990s and early-2000s machines were modular, but since the mid-2000s the 'replacement part' has become the whole unit, and devices seem engineered to outlast their warranty by roughly one day. Unsurprisingly, he strongly backs the right-to-repair movement.

His closing safety advice: never work on mains voltage until properly trained, and keep it covered so a stray hand cannot touch a high-side power component while concentrating on a probe — a mistake you might only get to make once.