> I think it's a mistake to apply power to them in their current state since that could cause damage.
One big issue is that these old electrolytic caps can leak and damage the motherboard and this is a common fail state for both the A1200 and CD32, as Commodore used some particularly low quality caps in the 1992-1994 era.
Even if you don't replace the caps they should be removed from the board before they go in to long term storage.
Powering up is unlikely to damage the machines. If the caps have already failed powering up won't cause any additional failure. A cap that hasn't been powered in a long time and is on the very edge of failure can be caused to fail by passing power in to it but that is a vanishingly rare edge case. The most likely issue for the caps, if they aren't working, is that they have already leaked.
FWIW when wire wrapping you can get handy little hollow tools. You feed the wire in to a hole in the tool, drop the tool over the pin and just spin the tool to wrap the wire round the pin. It's all very neat and tidy and requires pretty minimal hand-eye-coordination to get it looking nice.
I bought a tiny little one of the tools a while ago when doing some raspberry pi prototyping. Makes it easy to attach a wire to the GPIO header if it's not a dupont lead/wire
One big issue is that these old electrolytic caps can leak and damage the motherboard and this is a common fail state for both the A1200 and CD32, as Commodore used some particularly low quality caps in the 1992-1994 era.
Even if you don't replace the caps they should be removed from the board before they go in to long term storage.
Powering up is unlikely to damage the machines. If the caps have already failed powering up won't cause any additional failure. A cap that hasn't been powered in a long time and is on the very edge of failure can be caused to fail by passing power in to it but that is a vanishingly rare edge case. The most likely issue for the caps, if they aren't working, is that they have already leaked.