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obitus1990
USA

Posted Tue Jul 02, 2019 6:50 pm

One of my pet peeves is seeing just how many of the so called "professional repair" people burn the plastic components on our vintage gear when, say, recapping them. Sometimes, it is almost impossible to prevent damage to these connectors when using hot air to rework the areas. Use of hot tweezers, or, two soldering irons applied in parallel to both ends of the component can be done to safely remove them, but, these are somewhat expensive solutions.

So, I developed my own technique for preventing such damage, via the use of cellulose casting ring liner, which is used in dental laboratory technology when casting metal dental crowns. It resists being placed into a furnace during wax pattern burnouts, at temperatures exceeding 1000F, with very little degradation. So, it will easily resist 668F (350F) used in soldering and desoldering components.

Here is a video link (my first youtube video, actually) showing how to use it...excuse the poor audio quality, as I don't have a fancy camera, just a cell phone.

User avatar
Mr.Toast
Roseville, CA

Posted Tue Jul 02, 2019 9:51 pm

That's a pretty righteous tip there. Is the material absorbent at all to IPA? Might make a good connector cleaning tool if it can be slid through a dual wipe connector like our Zorro/ISA slots? Right now I have been using shop towels on a piece of card stock-but this is risky as fibers are occasionally deposited.

The intersections between our hobbies and professional activities is sometimes pretty cool.

Toast.

User avatar
obitus1990
USA

Posted Wed Jul 03, 2019 6:04 am

That, I don’t know, as I’ve not used it for that purpose. I’d think it would be absorbent since it feels like paper.

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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Wed Jul 03, 2019 10:42 am

Nice tip! I am thinking of the keyboard connector when recapping an A1200. I think I melted mine a bit when recapping it. Not enough to affect functionality but it is irritating none the less.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Wed Jul 03, 2019 11:02 am

Very cool idea!

For your audio in the future, I'd recommend a lavalier you can clip right to your shirt. They are pretty inexpensive and dramatically improve your audio capture. That fan noise in the background, that's probably a trickier situation.

In any case, very creative solution to this kind of repair.

User avatar
obitus1990
USA

Posted Wed Jul 03, 2019 11:05 am

Thanks for the suggestion. I have a window A/C unit running in my garage/workshop, so, that definitely didn't help. After filming it, it dawned on me that I could probably have just plugged in my iPhone's earbuds, since those seem to work really well for picking up speech during phone calls (I use this for hands-free phone use rather than speaker phone, as do most people). Maybe I can remove the sound track and do a voice over with some of the video editing software on the Mac.





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