Blow or Suck - Which is Best?

From: William R. Buckley <wrb_at_wrbuckley.com>
Date: Wed Apr 30 00:45:00 2003

In my years as a consulting software developer, I had the
opportunity to work with a small firm Unit Design. They
manufacture small scale circuit board production equipment,
to include defluxing cleaners. These cleaners were built
of standard home dishwashers, with added and removed
components to support the new application. The cleaning
solvents were typical surfactants mixed with deionized
water. The customers for this kind of equipment were
most commonly those which build small batches of military
hardware; one-off kinds of builds. If I get the spelling
correct, one kind of cleaner used was *keizen* though as
I recall it was a bit volatile and so difficult to use.
Generally however, we were quite able to use more common
household or industrial surfactants to clean circuit
boards without damage. For the purposes of list readers,
I expect that a dish washer will work fine. The one
question I have (caveat) concerns proximity of cleaned
boards to the heating element in the sump. We did not
have problems even with seven, eight, and nine layer
boards but, the boards of PDP and similarly aged boards
may be more delicate.

What say any readers who actually use a dish washer for
cleaning of older boards?

William R. Buckley

> David Holland said:
> FWIW, YMMV/Etc...
>
> This is what I do, when I find some nice bit of old hardware
> that's full
> of dust.
>
> Use a nice _SOFT_ 1" paintbrush, and canned air.
>
> The canned air doesn't seem to have enough pressure to cause any real
> damage, (be careful however not to turn the can over, so the liquid
> comes out.) The paintbrush knocks all the dust loose anyways, so it
> doesn't take much to get rid of it either.
>
> There are rumors of folks here using a dish washer, but I'm not brave
> enough to try that. (Soap and water on the plastic parts works pretty
> well though.)
>
> On Sat, 2003-04-26 at 17:46, Lee Courtney wrote:
> > I need to remove several years of accumulated dust and
> > debris from the inside of an HP3000 Series 40. I will
> > remove the boards and vacuum the inside of the cabinet
> > (size of a washing machine), but was wondering what is
> > the best way to remove dust and dirt from the PC cards
> > in a way that will not damage them - mechanically or
> > electrically.
> >
> > My default would be to clean with a shop vacuum, but I
> > was wondering if that might cause static damage to the
> > components on the board? Would a high pressure air
> > compressor be a better choice?
Received on Wed Apr 30 2003 - 00:45:00 BST