It's time to restore the 11/45.

[Jon Elson]

On 02/04/2015 09:08 PM, Jacob Ritorto wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 10:00 PM, Jon Elson <elson at pico-systems.com> wrote:
>> The 11/45 has a row of little step-down regulator modules, all plugged in
>> with
>> those horrible AMP Mate-n-Lock connectors.  We often had bad contacts on
>> those and they would sometimes burn the connector housings or char the
>> ends of the wires.  That was all about 1980, I can't imagine they've
>> improved
>> with age.  I think you may have more trouble with these than anything else
>> in the machine.
>
> I wonder if spraying out with crc contact cleaner and a nice slathering of
> dielectric grease would help.
>
I had a Conrac studio video monitor a long time ago that had 
been dosed with some horrible
contact "improver" gunk that turned all the Molex connectors 
to green blobs.  After this had
been done, the monitor would never work reliably.  This 
totally turned me off to these
materials.  I do NOT know what specific thing was used on 
that unit, but the results were
awful.

The problem is these pure tin coatings oxidize, and 
especially once the contact starts to
run warm, the process accelerates.  The only REAL solution 
is to replace both terminals,
and possibly the housings if they get burned up, too.  
However, that was too much trouble,
so usually I just carefully squeezed the female pin to give 
a tighter grip on the male, cleaned
them as well as I could and put it back together.  If it 
really got burned up, I did have to
replace the contacts.  I may have had to do the replacement 
on maybe 2 contacts in the
time we had the 11/45.  But, we had bad contacts causing one 
of the +5 regulators to
drop out happen a number of times, maybe 10+ in those 5 or 
so years. I think it was
just about always the +5 regulators as they had the highest 
current, but at least once
is was one of the 15V regs.

Jon