Because this subject has been discussed so many times and there is so much interest, I thought I'd bring Paul Larona, KB6MIP who worked for HP and cleaned and repaired equipment.
You can read his comments below, to correct my comments the soap wasn't Simple Green but "Zoom". From: Paul Lorona [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2011 08:35 AM To: John Hudson Subject: Re: FW: [Drakelist] Baked Drakes Hi Johnny - I wonder who this person reminiscing was? I clearly remember doing exactly what was described, except for the distilled water part. I recall using plain old tap water. That was back between 1983 and 1993 for me, at the "new" HP Fullerton office on Manhattan Avenue, just northeast of what was back then Griswolds Hotel. The old HP building is now the Albertsons / SavOn Corporate HQ, I think. Our "wash rack" at HP Fullerton was nothing more elaborate than an enclosed area maybe 4'W x 3'D x 4'H, with hot and cold water taps and a spigot / hose assembly at one end. It had a turntable in it, and as I recall we had some sort of heavy duty de-greaser we called "Zoom" in a 55 gallon drum with a hand pump that we used. The wash rack also had two heating units. One was a simple oven that had a rather crude thermostat that held the temperature within somewhere between 150 and 180 degrees F. This is where we dried the stuff we washed. The other was an "environmental chamber," which was basically a much better insulated and sealed oven with humidity control and a much better temperature setting and regulating method. We used the "chamber" to heat run equipment while powered up, to see if things would fail in hot environments. I want to think the "chamber" ran a bit cooler ... somewhere between 100 and 120 degrees F to stress test operating equipment. And yeah ... things with transformers of high-voltage power systems usually got baked for at least a weekend, usually a week if the customer wasn't in a hurry. I couldn't even guess how many pieces of electronic equipment I ran through the wash rack and oven ... dozens, maybe hundreds. Customers would send us stuff that was horrible ... rat nests, dust and crud so thick you couldn't see individual components on the circuit boards, CRTs that were dim to the point of being useless for the crud built up between the glass and the transparent protective covers ... and it would all go back looking sparkling and almost new. Somewhere in my pile of HP memorabilia I think I have a letter from a customer thanking me for "resurrecting" an old logic analyzer by cleaning it up. I washed logic analyzers, data generators, oscilloscopes, DC power systems, RF generators, spectrum analyzers ... all kinds of stuff. And after hours I was known to wash the off the odd MICOR or MASTR II as well <winks>. Those were good times. Thanks for the memory poke. That was fun. Paul I thought you'd get a kick out of this string of comments.. -----Original Message----- From: Ed Tanton [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, December 02, 2011 5:34 AM To: John Hudson; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Cc: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [Drakelist] Baked Drakes ...and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the key reason for the transformers being OK, related to the distilled water!!! Surely that says something about other, non-hermetic components as well. Ed Tanton website: http://www.n4xy.com All emails <IN> & <OUT> checked by Norton AntiVirus with AutoProtect -------------------------------------------------- Wag more / Bark less -------------------------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Hudson Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2011 3:15 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Cc: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Drakelist] Baked Drakes As we all know this has been a hot topic many times on the list. One of my good friends worked at HP Fullerton cleaning, repairing, and aligning test equipment. The process was, as described prior, blowing out dust, removing whose items that water would damage, using a solution of simple green under pressure washer, scrubbing with brush as needed, then rinsing with distilled water, air hose, and baking at heat under 200 degrees for a week. He said transformers were not a problem for this process. It would be awesome to find photo's or documentation of this process and placed in our document files. ///snip -- ====== Paul J. Lorona "El Coyote Mas Grande y Viejo" [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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