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Archive: https://archive.today/kx3Yz

From the post:

>When you tear into an old piece of test equipment, you’re probably going to come up against some surprises. That’s especially true of high-precision gear like oscilloscopes from the time before ASICs and ADCs, which had to accomplish so much with discrete components and a lot of engineering ingenuity.

Archive: https://archive.today/kx3Yz From the post: >>When you tear into an old piece of test equipment, you’re probably going to come up against some surprises. That’s especially true of high-precision gear like oscilloscopes from the time before ASICs and ADCs, which had to accomplish so much with discrete components and a lot of engineering ingenuity.
[–] • 1 pt

Buying a piece of equipment like this off eBay and expecting anything is foolish.

That being said, there was a lot of non-coated points in older devices and we're starting to see carbon tracking and tin whiskers. Whiskers growing from plated cases to other points, or anything not coated with lead solder is becoming a problem. Certain televisions that had tin-coated potentiometer housings are particularly problematic. Older phenolics (tube sockets, boards, etc.) are starting to exhibit carbon tracks and weird issues where the board has absorbed so much moisture and grime, that it (and the fluxes) are becoming conductive.

The comment in the story about someone using lead-free solder is meaningless, almost ANY amount of lead (a percent or two) is enough to prevent whiskering. That person has never had to deal with the problem and is just repeating things they've heard.

[–] • 1 pt

See, this is why I post things like this. Because I am waiting for you to come in and say something interesting that I had not thought about. I don't repair a bunch of old hardware and most people don't this is great info to be shared.

Thanks @stupidbird.

[–] • 1 pt

My pleasure. Just remember that old stuff is going to have issues that the designers never considered.

[–] • 1 pt

Non-leaded soldier in nearly fucking everything and shitty Chinese electrolytic capacitors back in the late 90's to mid 2000's (back in the AMD XP era). I fixed a lot of motherboards and monitors with those shitty caps for cheap (sub $10 for early LCD monitors that cost $100+, mostly for friends or for myself).

I also had some stuff that I did a shitty version of a re-flow on because of chip creep and I had a $30 PS3 that I only really used as a bluray player (pcgamer) anyway (when they would have still cost a fuck load new, people were almost giving them away when they had the light of death).

Fuck load cheaper than buying what would have cost around 300-400$ for just a bluray player. I did play a few games on it but after Sega/PS1 I really only played pc games or arcade games.