cleaning qbus enclosures

From: Dan Linder <dlinder_at_uiuc.edu>
Date: Thu Aug 2 13:19:27 2001

On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Bill Bradford wrote:

> Did you just tell me to put CIRCUIT BOARDS in the *DISHWASHER*? Or
> do I still have a fever and am delirious.. ?
>
> I've always thought that water was the mortal enemy of anything electronic,
> at least while power was applied. 8-)

My favorite computer cleaning story is one from a fellow who worked at
Fermi National Accelerator Lab, as well as on the doomed Texas SSC. He is
quite a character...

He told me that in the early days of Fermi Lab, one cost-cutting measure
was to NOT build floors in the big shed-like buildings for some of the
detector equipment. Since everything was held up on big gantries and
racks, paying for floors didn't seem so important. Well, then it rained.
A Lot. So my friend shows up to work one morning only to find a LOT of
rack-mounted computer/test/electronic equipment covered in MUD.

His solution? He took each board "out back", hosed each one off with a
garden hose, then dipped each one into a tub of pure alcohol (to get off
mineral deposits left from the water), then set up a clothesline and
clothespinned each board to the line to finish drying. The Boss came out
and almost had a heart attack, but they hooked everything back up and it
worked out great.

In the same group, this fellow had an intern one summer who he told to
dismantle an air deionizer and rebuild it, as it was struggling at the
time. So the intern went off an took care of it. A few days later all
manner of rubber and plastic parts, fittings, etc, started getting brittle
and falling apart, like something out of "The Andromeda Strain". They
hunted all over to figure out what was going on, and eventually disovered
that the intern had reassembled the deionizer as an ionizer, and the thing
was pumping out ozone.

  "doh"

   - Dan


Dan Linder / dlinder _at_ uiuc.edu
Graduate Student, College of Engineering, Dept. of Computer Science
   - Dept. of Computer Science Teaching Assistant
   - DRES Computer Accessibility Researcher
Received on Thu Aug 02 2001 - 13:19:27 BST