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Encapsulating electronics in candle wax?!
coppercone2:
I would recommend burning beeswax in the house to provide positive ions and to stick to reasonable solutions like liquid spray on electrical tape for electronics
It is acutally good. You can make good quality cables terminations by wrapping them with self amalgamating silicone tape (all the rage in the hardware store glue section) then spraying on 3 layers of liquid electrical tape. Impressive product, works better then plasti-dip IMO. And I have successfully used it after 5 years storage.
Warning, 1 layer will look bad. You need to add a few layers to make it look like a solid thing, the spray is not perfect enough to leave a nice deposition with a single pass, much worse then spray paint.
Potato:
Scented candles would be lovely
rsjsouza:
--- Quote from: tautech on November 22, 2020, 07:32:19 am ---
--- Quote from: james_s on November 21, 2020, 11:55:42 pm ---I've seen some kind of wax used in a lot of radios from the 70s-90s to cover things like coils and such to keep them from being disturbed. I don't know if it's paraffin though, and I haven't seen it used to pot an entire circuit.
--- End quote ---
And earlier.
I've seen PCB's almost covered in wax and if the stress from cooling paraffin was sufficient to damage a modern SMD design I'd eat my hat ! :P
--- End quote ---
Same here... I lost count of how many fully working 1960s radios I have seen full of wax holding parts together, especially the cores of IF coils and to isolate the resistors from the shields of these coils.
thm_w:
Paraffin thermal conductivity is ~0.15 W/mK
Beeswax 0.25
Air 0.024
Thermal potting 1.0-4.0+
Maybe find some non-conductive fillers to add in there: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1369/1/012022/pdf
One video mentioning they tried a "paraffin based wax" for selective PCB coating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhj7zOzjh3U
The old RF stuff uses beeswax according to here: https://www.antiqueradios.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=146657
TimFox:
Back in graduate school, we encapsulated high-voltage resistors inside acrylic tubes using radio-grade beeswax (which was a thing in my youth).
The practical problem was, in fact, shrinkage. The shrinkage is worst right at the melting point, so one would leave the partially-filled object overnight, and find that the wax had shrunk away from the resistor when it cooled below the liquidus temperature. We had to spend a long time with partial pours to minimize this problem.
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