how did gear wind up 20 feet underwater?
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> wrote:
On Mon, 22 Oct 2012, Josh Dersch wrote:
So, here's a fun one:
See the picture(s) here:
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/**scratch/gridcase/<http://yahozna.dyndns.org/…
This is in a Gridcase 3+ I picked up last week off eBay for what seemed
at the time to be a pretty great price. Heard some stuff rattling around
inside so I opened it up before doing anything else and what I seem to have
is a few large mineral deposits on the main circuit board.
It's pretty well localized,and aside from a completely dissolved drive
support post and a few rusted screws there really isn't all that much
rust(amazingly). And thankfully the corrosion that's present has almost
entirely avoided any custom ASICs or other parts on board. Everything else
in the system aside from the bad patches in the pictures is clean (although
the whole thing smells like a dank basement, geeI wonder why) and the
underside is almost corrosion free so there's a non-zero chance I could get
this running again. Except I have no idea how to go about removing the
buildup of... crud... on this thing. It's pretty solid, I've soaked it for
a few minutes in water and chiseled at it (gently) with the tip of an xacto
knife and I got some of it off that way but it's very slow goingand I'm
afraid of removing what's left of whatever's underneath it before I can
identify it.
Any tips for removing this stuff?
Yuk. Still, I've seen far worse :)
Vinegar and a toothbrush for neutralizing the battery electrolyte and
removing the loose corrosion, then rinse it off really well with water (hot
water and a sink sprayer). I usually remove any remaining corrosion with
baking soda and water formed into a paste, again using a toothbrush,
followed by another rinse. You might have to do this several times and
remove the socketed chips after an initial cleaning.
This sounds harsh (and is pretty messy), but when you have a board that
looks like that, this is usually what it takes to clean it up. In the past
I've successfully savaged PC boards and test equipment that had been under
20ft+ of water for more than two weeks due to flooding (the on-board
batteries had of course also burst and the corrosion was severe).