Welcome to the Level1Techs unofficial Item Appraisal and Sensible Selling Advice thread! This thread is intended to be a companion thread to our Buy/Sell/Trade subforum. This not intended to be an actual marketplace. Please visit the Buy/Sell/Trade subforum for that.
This thread is intended for topics like:
- How much can I sell/trade ITEM-X for?
- Should i sell ITEM-X or keep it? Is it in a sell-able state? Is it economically viable to sell?
- What can i do to make ITEM-X sell-able/trade-able?
- Item-specific advice (Do’s/Dont’s, What people look for in an item, Shipping, etc)
Have some random item that you were on the fence about selling, or have no idea how much its actually worth? Too lazy to google its value or take it to a physical store? Post it here!
Our forums doesn’t really have anything for this as far as i can tell so i figured it would be nice to have one big area for such posts as opposed to fragmented posts all over the place. This thread helps all members, new and old, get selling advice from hobbyists all over the world, helps make our members aware of more items that wouldn’t normally popup in the B/S/T subforum, helps mods keep our forums organized and clean, and helps random internet explorers who are just passing by get advice and possibly further expose them to the L1T community.
Try not to post twice about the same item and keep it civil 
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This thread is a bit of an experiment. I’ll start off with some of my stuff
I’ve come into possession of a Macintosh Classic 2. It had the typical checkerboarding issue. I decided to get it up and running because why the hell not! One thing led to another and here’s where its at so far:
Items in possession:
- Mac Itself(its the “improved sound” model with a Rev. 1 logic board, mfg date Jan 1992)
- Power, ADB and SCSI cables
- External Lacie SCSI Enclosure
- 20x 1.44MB floppies
- Manual for the old macintosh and how to use the OS (system 7.0.1 i believe)
- some sort of floppy based quick start manual
- Apple ADB Extended Keyboard Gen 1(orange Alps switches that feel absolutely godly to type on)
- Older style Apple ADB Mouse
- Some spare components and leftovers from upgrades/repairs
Work Done to mac:
- Recapped both the logic board and the analog board (and replaced a few extra bits on the analog board that were corroded by leaky old caps)
- upgraded its original 40MB SCSI HDD to a 525MB SCSI HDD, then placed the original 40MB HDD into the Lacie enclosure, so its both a usable drive and an original part from this mac
- upgraded the ram from 4MB to 10MB(max)
- upgraded the internal fan to a Delta fan
- added a passive manual fan controller for better airflow and sound adjustment (old fan was garbage but works)
- installed System 7.5.5 along with a few random apps and games i scavenged from the internet
- adjusted the CRT image to the best of my ability
- providing all original hardware that came with it and some spare parts
As you can see, a fair bit of work was put into it so i want to sell it to a collector of sortds and make it worth my time, money and effort. But theres some problems:
- I have no idea how much to sell it for or how much to expect. I didnt sink a horrible amount into it but there was lots of work done
- shipping. i live in canada so i have no idea whats a good way to ship this delicate heavy machine or how much that might cost to ship to various countries
Hopefully L1T can help out
If I’m not mistaken, the Classic 2 is from the early 90s so it probably still has a PSU that can handle only 1 type of voltage. For Canada that would be 110V, limiting your options to North and South America (there’s a couple of countries on other continents that use it too, but those are rare).
If you want to sell it anywhere else, the new owner will have to replace the PSU or get an adapter to go from 230V to 110V.
I can tell from experience that you don’t want to plug one of those older 110V Macs into a 230V socket. Back in the early 90s my dad worked at an Apple dealership (this was in the pre Apple Store era) and I used to spend quite a bit of time there in the holidays and on Wednesday afternoons.
One day they got in a 110V Mac Plus, which one of my dad’s colleagues plugged into the 230V mains. 25 years later I still remember that bang and I still check the voltage of all machines I work on, even though in the last 10+ years I haven’t come across any PSU that doesn’t support 110V as well as 230V.
As for pricing, you might want to keep an eye on Ebay, there’s some working ones being sold there. Plenty of Classic IIs with screen issues too, so I’d focus on the ones where you can actually see the desktop or startup screen.
I’m seeing some that ask 250-500 $ US, but that’s just asking price, of course. Nobody seems to be buying those. Personally I wouldn’t expect to go far beyond $100.
It is true that mines the 110V model, but it is actually poossible to change it to the 220V model by desoldering one large cap and soldering in a jumper to a specific spot. I noticed some leads labelled “110V only” and “220V only” when recapping the board.
I did check ebay though i couldnt find many classic 2’s that were properly working. Most are either broken classic 2’s, older model machines, or ones slightly ahead of mine.