Reccomendations on adding vintage/legacy Macs to my collection

Compact Macs aren’t good first collector Macs. The problem is the flyback transformer and other analog board components are prone to failure and it can be difficult (and dangerous) to diagnose a fault. It’s also difficult to get parts like the special Apple Sony floppy drive and the hard disks that are beginning to drop like flies; you really need to do a SCSI to CF/SD adapter. On top of this, you need a 720k capable floppy drive for the 128/512k and modern floppy drives do not read these things - you will need to find another Mac to do it because the formats back then were all different - this applies to Macintosh, Lisa, Commodore and the many BASIC machines from the 80’s. There was no standardization until MS-DOS.

To add insult to injury, the unpatched version of Disk First Aid checks for the Apple firmware or it won’t recognize the drive. You really need to download a patched version if you want to use non-Apple drives, and at this point you have to unless you want a expensive pile of dead SCSI drives.

The safety issue is a matter of life or death. You can actually DIE if you touch the flyback without properly discharging it since the CRT holds ~10-15,000 volts on average. Start with things like laptops and towers where the risk is significantly lower. It isn’t a problem if you’re familiar with CRT safety and can do board level work, but I would STRONGLY recommend waiting. Other then that I really don’t have much to add.