I plan on posting a much longer piece on the cleaning and restoration of this waveform generator, but I have a quick question about cleaning the analog output boards.
There's a lot of components on these boards that I either haven't worked with before, or haven't had to deal with as part of a cleaning. I just want to know if someone sees anything here that I should watch out for. The generator works, but has some output scaling issues and gives off failure codes for these particular boards. My aim is to improve its performance, not degrade it. ; )
My typical process:
- Soak with foaming Simple Green Crystal
- Rinse with distilled water (would use DI if I was rich or had a place I could steal it from)
- Spot clean with 99.9% isopropyl while removing the old capacitors
- Spot clean again
- Use Caig DeOxit on the corroded legs of the regulators and xstrs.
- Rinse-repeat, if necessary
This method works beautifully on the beige Macs I restore, and served me well on the other boards on this unit.
The data sheet for the Omron G6H-2 relays says, "When washing the product after soldering the Relay to a PCB, use a water-based solvent or alcohol-based solvent, and keep the solvent temperature to less than 40°C. Do not put the Relay in a cold cleaning bath immediately after soldering." I won't be reworking those, but they look safe to get wet as part of the cleaning process.
I really like this generator and for $300 and a lot, but not unreasonable amount, of elbow grease it has excellent value. The frequencies seem to be dead on (at least at 4.5 digits, which is all I need) and I like having two channels, not to mention the arbitrary waveform features. Like I said, my hope is help, not harm it.