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Freon TF spray cleaner

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Deepak:

--- Quote from: David Hess on April 03, 2019, 02:00:26 am ---
--- Quote from: Conrad Hoffman on April 02, 2019, 08:29:48 pm ---Decades ago we used Freon TE-35 in plastic squirt bottles for cleaning small instrumentation parts. Best cleaner ever. We also used the bottles to shoot down wasps that were common in the production area. No idea why it was so effective, but they dropped like stones when hit.
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1,1,1 trichloroethane is the most potent bug killer I ever used.  I do not know the mechanism of action though.

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Most likely a similar mechanism to dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane

IDEngineer:

--- Quote from: N2IXK on April 02, 2019, 03:23:45 pm ---The other widely used solvent in electronics was 1,1,1 trichloroethane, which was phased out because it was a potent greenhouse gas.
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Man, I miss that stuff. They sold it in highly pressurized cans as brake cleaner at every auto parts store. Like a pressure washer in your hand. Incredibly useful for cleaning anything from electronics to carbs to you-name-it. Because it was used on brakes it specifically left zero residue on the item being cleaned, which is useful for a whole lot more than just brakes!

I may still have a can or two around with actual 1,1,1 trichlor in them. Otherwise now it's whatever (likely less effective) thing they sell as non-residue brake cleaner.

Sometimes I think they ban stuff a bit too aggressively. Like DDT - very effective and very inexpensive. Yes, it definitely had bad side effects but from what I've read those appear to result from gross overuse by neophytes. Properly applied it's amazingly effective. There are some who are now advocating for its use against malaria-bearing mosquitoes because nothing invented before or since has such a great bang/buck ratio. But the anti-DDT crowd won't be satisfied. Nuclear energy shares the same bad reputation... improperly used it can be terrible, but properly used it has a lot of advantages. What were we talking about again?  :o

SeanB:
Trike worked so well because it is an incredibly good solvent, and dissolved the internal lipid membranes of the insect cells, meaning they turned into bags of goop inside a hard chitin shell. This also means it is really good at dissolving your skin if you use it, and at a minimum it is a very good way to strip the underlying fat from under your skin as well, leading to some really bad side effects. Plus the whole dissociation into assorted hydrogen chlorides when heated up, and the contaminants in dirty solvent also turning into cyclic aromatics and other nasty organic short chain compounds when hot.

DDT however is still very popular here in Africa, where the biggest killer of people is still the mosquito, and coming in second and third is TB and HIV, followed by war.  Using it correctly, in directed spraying where they will stop in the house eaves and room corners, and using coated nets, is a very effective control method, and also uses very little DDT, not like the USA where they were applying it in ratios of tons per hectare over swampy ground, killing entire ecosystems as a result.

texaspyro:
One place where I lived as a kid used to send the DDT fogger trick around at night.  Kids used to run / drive bikes behind it to play in the fog.  Even as a kid, this did not seem like a good idea to me.   The DDT cloud was HUGE!

Circlotron:

--- Quote from: Conrad Hoffman on April 02, 2019, 08:29:48 pm ---Decades ago we used Freon TE-35 in plastic squirt bottles for cleaning small instrumentation parts. Best cleaner ever. We also used the bottles to shoot down wasps that were common in the production area. No idea why it was so effective, but they dropped like stones when hit.

--- End quote ---
I think it has very low surface tension, enabling it to get into tiny cracks and crevices. Probably blocks the wasp’s breathing passages.

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