It was really a fun day last Saturday working on the SE/30. But unfortunately at the end my SE/30 would be completely dead. While the journey started with a garbled screen (SimasiMac), it did not really get better over day. It got worse, at the end the SE/30 had a short and was stuck on a black screen. Even with the help of Bruce (thanks Bruce!) it seemed there was no easy path forward to get this Mac working again.
The last days I poured some more time into it and my initial suspicion was after recalling the timeline of the day, that the ROM that we sapped out caused it. But the short was stil present after taking it out. Next on my list was the RAM. The board came fully loaded with 8 SIMMs. One got some acid damage from battery liquid dripping onto it from another Mac that stacked on it. The RAM module in question cleaned up nicely but after removal of all modules from that bank the short was gone!
Never had a short caused by a SIMM moudle ever before. But guess there is always a first time.
But now I was back at square one, no chime but a garbled screen, still better than a short. I resoldered UE8 and UD8 assuming some issues with acid leakage from caps on these guys but no chage. Today after educating myself a bit more related to the symptom I removed the other lot of the SIMM modules on Bank A and replaced them with those from my working SE FDHD (rescued from the tip).
And voila, we got a chime and mouse cursor!
Minor issues like an unstable screen were resolved by capacitor replacement on the analog board (I believe the 4700uf 16v on the edge is mostly to blame).
Lastly I put an image on that BlueSCSI I was dying to try and was able to boot the SE without any issues. Time to play around with it 
Oh and we need more days like this!