I had a company in the 1980’s that sold high resolution video cards (none of the kids around today would believe that once computers had only had eight colors). We got a nice contract with a local Air Force base for about 12 of these units.
Installing these cards was fairly complicated as you also had to install a paged memory card to have enough memory to work with. These units were all installed by the system that proceeded ‘plug and play’ (curse and pray). As a result, we always included free installation and set-up.
I had a young kid working for me who was really good at installations. He had been at the base for about four hours when I received a call that went something like, “you gotta come out here and help me, I’m in real trouble.”
In addition to the tons of screws you spoke of, all these pieces of metal (netic I suppose) that shielded the innards went together like some kind of interlocking jigsaw puzzle. He was completely flummoxed as to how to get it back together.
As I had no idea either, I said let’s take another one apart and use it as a guide. He said, “wait a minute, I’ve got a Polaroid camera my car, let me go get it and we’ll take pictures to use as a guide.”
With that, the blue suiters that were watching this circus sprung into action. A few minutes later a two striper showed-up and quickly had the thing back together. He hung around and helped us finish the remainder.
Needless to say, it was my first and last experience with Tempest shielding - and just darn near a disaster.
Sounds like you got away clean.
In my shop, we’d probably have had to shoot you...:)