Non-booting A2000...

[Darrin]

WD40 the hell out of the motherboard, let it dry and take a good look at the battery area.  Press those chips in hjard.

[Darrin]

save2600 wrote:
Never EVER spray WD-40 on anything electronic. It's conductive!! Good luck getting around everything to wipe it off anyway.

No, WD40 is a dielectric - an insulator.  If it was conductive then the A2000 and A3000 I cleaned up yesterday would have burst into 2 balls of flames instead of powering up happily.  :-)

[Darrin]

LOL.  OK, I'll take your word for it.  For what it's worth, I cleaned the mobos up until they were sparkling afterwards BEFORE I powered them back up.  :-)

Oh, and after multiple googling, it is DEFINATELY not a conductor - in fact it is a very good insulator.  What it can do is attact dust if you don't clean it all off.  It also disolves the heat paste used between CPUs and their fans/heat sinks!   :-o

[Darrin]

save2600 wrote:

Yes, because it is mildly conductive and metal filings/shavings are likely to cling to it, it worked well for distributor points, etc. in automotive use as a quick "fix". But now that you bring up its use in an auto, think about those components you just mentioned. There's not really a great chance of there being a true short as there would be on something so populated/mini/precise as a printed circuit board.

We're also talking about a rugged 12volt system. Not the more fragile 5v and less found on mobo's.  

I can't find anything from a reputable source that says that it is even mildly conductive at those levels.  In fact it is supposed to be non-conductive up to 5000v.  I've personally used it on my pool pump where it was sprayed onto the active motor and contacts while it was running with no shorts, sparks, bangs or flames.

Now, you're right that the liquid could dislodge some metal filings and cause a short, but you could do that with compressed air too.

I think the main reason people think it conducts is because several of its rival products do.

[Darrin]

save2600 wrote:
Okay - since we're obviously going to beat this thread to death and I've clearly got the time, I thought I'd set up a little experiment for you. I did not perform this experiment solely for myself as I've mentioned before, I know all too well the negative affects WD-40 has on electronics. If you're easily tricked by what you read, marketing, whatever, then no wonder this world is where it's at today!  lol

Alright... here's what I did:

1) brought out a variable DC power supply and set it to exactly 5.14 volts. That would be typical of the logic voltage present in an older computer system such as our beloved Miggy's.

2) alligator<>jumper clipped the positive lead to my DMM set on mV.

3) alligator<>jumper clipped the negative lead to a plastic sandwich bag.

4) liberally sprayed the baggy down with the "dielectric" in question, while making sure it spread from the alligator clipped -5v throughout the middle of the bag.

5) using the other lead from my DMM, I poked about the bag and measured as high as 44mv down to 1.2mv depending how for away I got from the power lead and how much was sprayed near the lead.

I returned to the baggy after a half hour to measure voltages again. Interestingly, I measured even slightly higher readings this time!! A chemical reaction with the plastic?? OR is it attracting microscopic conductive particles, further enhancing its conductivity? There *has* been a lot of talk lately about plastics relating to brain tumours, cancer, etc. Maybe the truth is finally starting to leak out on some of this stuff, or more than likely, another company and group of people have an agenda with a product that they'd like to replace plastic with  ;-)  

Back to the topic at hand...

To make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong (this test could not be any simpler), I snagged another new plastic baggy without WD-40 and proceeded to measure... hold on to your hat here... NOTHING! Nada. Zip. Zilch. τίποτα. Niets. Rien. Nichts. Niente. 何も. ничего.

The reason why you may have had good luck in the past douching your boards down with WD-40 is the simple fact that the traces etched into the PCB are covered by silkscreen. It's the chips and components that are more at risk of having something conductive stick to the excess of the WD-40 (which doesn't seem to be evaporating any time soon on my baggy I might add).

...hopefully this will be the end of the thread   :-)    

Are you sure?

 :-D