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).