Lithium battery corrosion on PCB, will this keep eating away the board?

[smiba]

Hey everyone,

I've taken it on myself to fix another Macintosh SE/30 with the most horrendous battery damage. The battery holder rotted itself off the board and even ate away a part of the shield.



Now, let it be said I'm not unknown to repairing devices like these and I'm progressing nicely:


Some pads have rotted off, no big issues I'll just run some wires..... But wait, those vias look pretty bad too.
Oops, most vias around the RTC area are absolutely rotted through!! 

This makes it really challenging as this is a 4 layer board, a lot of these vias come and go and I have no way to know what they carry. (Also in this area is the System ROM, RAM memory and Video Rom.... so eh, probably important)
This means I'll need to check pretty much half of the motherboard for continuity. An absolute pain in the ass, but also relaxing once you're going and cross off all lines on the schematic one by one.

Now to cut to the chase, if I leave these vias untreated will they keep on rotting away further and further? The battery is removed and the surface is cleaned off (for the most part).

How do I stop these vias from worsening over time? I want to make sure I'm not spending 50 hours of my time on this, only to have 10 new open circuits the next year.

[rvalente]

I never had myself a good experiences cleaning battery leakage. Although you wash with detergent, scrub with isopropanol, try to neutralize it with some weak base/acid, after some time it always come back, even in the simpler parts like bat contacts. With boards I believe the battery electrolyte gets in the boards fiber (fiberglass has a tendency of absorbing moisture, why not electrolytes).

I would scrub it over and over again, water and detergent

[smiba]

Might just be a bit over my head with this one then, it had more then 10 years to slowly rot away.

Like I say, doing all the work is not much of a problem... but if in the end it will still die I may have to prematurely pull it off life support before it takes up more hours