On Apr 8, 2010, at 1:29 PM, Christian Wacker wrote:
Here's a strange question for you.
My school is preparing the old Icebook lab for sale, but we had some
nasty smelling keybaords.
We decided to put the whole laptops in a sealed container, with a
small container of vinegar sitting beside the iBooks.
=8-O
We just dug them out of the tub today, they've been in there for just
over a week, and we discovered some disheartening news.
I'll bet!
The metal around the inside of the battery compartments has corroded
and started creating a whitish foam, and turned the metal itself
brown.
Vinegar is acetic acid, it is corrosive. Worse, it's volatile...the
reason vinegar smells like it does is because the acetic acid
vaporizes and gets into the air. A sealed container also means that
the humidity got very high, which also exacerbates the corrosion.
The corrosion you see in the battery compartment is NOT the only
corrosion in these systems...the innards are not sealed, and so you've
been bathing the entire computer in an acid vapor bath for a week.
Worse still the corrosive action of acids is exacerbated when it comes
into contact with different metals...like IC connects, solder and
board traces. There's a LOT of that white crud throughout the system.
This:
<http://dbdev2.pharmacy.arizona.edu/miscjunk/corrosion.jpg>
is what cola does to a logic board, and it's a LOT less acidic than
vinegar. The legs on the ic in the smaller box have been eaten through
entirely.
Those iBooks are very likely all foo now. They'll fail in
unpredictable and annoyingly frequent fashions as components fall off
or come disconnected, if any of them still work at all.
I would certainly NOT sell them without disclosing this fact.
(Personally I'd proceed to trash them all).
Too late for this batch, but putting them in a sealed container over
(not IN!) a pan filled with baking soda or better yet, activated
charcoal (available at pet shops in the aquarium supplies) would be
the better for absorbing odors. This may not get rid of all the odors,
but it'll certainly avoid the 'dissolving it in a vat of acid' routine.
In the immortal words of Ken Titus: "Betcha won't do THAT again!"
--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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