Tricks for cleaning a PCB?

derSturm

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So now it's pretty much socially acceptable to drown a monitor with a garden hose or throw it into the dishwasher. Anyone know the quickest, easiest way to safely clean a PCB?

All I'm really wanting to do right now is get a couple of PCB's (Tekken 2 and Capcom Bowling) cleaned up real nice for eBay/Craigslist pics.
 
So now it's pretty much socially acceptable to drown a monitor with a garden hose or throw it into the dishwasher. Anyone know the quickest, easiest way to safely clean a PCB?

All I'm really wanting to do right now is get a couple of PCB's (Tekken 2 and Capcom Bowling) cleaned up real nice for eBay/Craigslist pics.

I'll clean them for $20 when you come on Friday! :D lol!

Edit: I heard if you remove the socketed chips its safe to put in a dish washer. Then after you wash them you can bake them in the oven lol. Ive never been brave enough to try.
 
So now it's pretty much socially acceptable to drown a monitor with a garden hose or throw it into the dishwasher. Anyone know the quickest, easiest way to safely clean a PCB?

All I'm really wanting to do right now is get a couple of PCB's (Tekken 2 and Capcom Bowling) cleaned up real nice for eBay/Craigslist pics.

Simply Green
Garden Hose
Let dry for 10 minutes (if in July/Aug @ 110F), otherwise a day or two.

Use Air Compressor if worried about water in sockets or other nooks and crannies.
 
This is what I do for all PCBs:

Remove batteries
Pre-heat oven to 170F
Rinse board off with hot water in sink
Use liquid dishwashing detergent and an old toothbrush to clean board
(Same thing to clean slots on Neo Geo boards too)
Rinse well
Drain at an angle for about a minute
Pat dry with lint free towel
Put in oven for 20 to 25 minutes, or until dry
Remove, let cool.

The only issues I've had with the hundreds of boards I've done are drooping plastic over the memory card slot guides on the Neo Geo 2 slot boards and accidentally leaving my wife's pot holders in the shop after taking boards back out there. OOPS.

:D

And no air compressors needed. I've had parts (socketed chips!) fly off of boards. :(
 
This is what I do for all PCBs:

Remove batteries
Pre-heat oven to 170F
Rinse board off with hot water in sink
Use liquid dishwashing detergent and an old toothbrush to clean board
(Same thing to clean slots on Neo Geo boards too)
Rinse well
Drain at an angle for about a minute
Pat dry with lint free towel
Put in oven for 20 to 25 minutes, or until dry
Remove, let cool.

The only issues I've had with the hundreds of boards I've done are drooping plastic over the memory card slot guides on the Neo Geo 2 slot boards and accidentally leaving my wife's pot holders in the shop after taking boards back out there. OOPS.

:D

And no air compressors needed. I've had parts (socketed chips!) fly off of boards. :(

Are you trying to get revenge for my alcohol-tinged rant politico the other night? lol.

What do you put between the board and oven rack?
 
This is what I do for all PCBs:

Remove batteries
Pre-heat oven to 170F
Rinse board off with hot water in sink
Use liquid dishwashing detergent and an old toothbrush to clean board
(Same thing to clean slots on Neo Geo boards too)
Rinse well
Drain at an angle for about a minute
Pat dry with lint free towel
Put in oven for 20 to 25 minutes, or until dry
Remove, let cool.

The only issues I've had with the hundreds of boards I've done are drooping plastic over the memory card slot guides on the Neo Geo 2 slot boards and accidentally leaving my wife's pot holders in the shop after taking boards back out there. OOPS.

:D

And no air compressors needed. I've had parts (socketed chips!) fly off of boards. :(

Not saying it wouldn't work but man is that scary. lol
 
Something you might try (ymmv).

If you have an auto store near you, there are several brake cleaners that will remove rosin flux of a board without destroying the parts, board or the plastic sockets.

The best one I've found is Wearever Brake Parts Cleaner from Advance auto Parts. The standard one, not the VOC one. A few sprays of this across my solder patches, and voila, no more flux, and no stickiness either. Just do it outside with adequate ventilation.

Test it on a small section of your board first. The plastics used in some older boards are much more susceptible to solvents.

DO NOT USE ACETONE!!!!!
 
Are you trying to get revenge for my alcohol-tinged rant politico the other night? lol.

What do you put between the board and oven rack?

Nothing in between. The board goes in right side up. 170F isn't enough to affect most things. Hell, your car dash gets up to 160F in the Texas summer.

NO "revenge". This is how I clean boards now. You can ask my wife and I've done this on boards belonging to many members who have sent them in for repair. It works and works very well.

Just make sure there are no batteries on the board when you do it.

RJ
 
I use "Purple Stuff" to clean my boards.

Remove any chips in sockets, mix up a solution of purple stuff and water (a little goes a loooooong way), let the board soak in it for about 10 mins or so. That will remove any/all flux on the the board. Rinse the board and go over it with an old tooth brush to make sure you get rid of any dust on the boards. Then I put them in the oven on the lowest setting and dry them off.

I don't know how many boards I'd done this with and I've had no issues with any of them.

For larger boards that you can't put in a container to soak, just put the purple stuff on the board and scrub it with a soft brush of some sort.

Don't let that Purple Stuff get on your skin, it will kill of the top layer of your skin and it will get very dry and flaky. Just a heads up.
 
Nothing in between. The board goes in right side up. 170F isn't enough to affect most things. Hell, your car dash gets up to 160F in the Texas summer.

NO "revenge". This is how I clean boards now. You can ask my wife and I've done this on boards belonging to many members who have sent them in for repair. It works and works very well.

Just make sure there are no batteries on the board when you do it.

RJ

I know a battery when I see it on a PC/MAC board. I'm assuming that I'd know one on an arcade PCB. How common are they?

I use "Purple Stuff" to clean my boards.

Remove any chips in sockets, mix up a solution of purple stuff and water (a little goes a loooooong way), let the board soak in it for about 10 mins or so. That will remove any/all flux on the the board. Rinse the board and go over it with an old tooth brush to make sure you get rid of any dust on the boards. Then I put them in the oven on the lowest setting and dry them off.

I don't know how many boards I'd done this with and I've had no issues with any of them.

For larger boards that you can't put in a container to soak, just put the purple stuff on the board and scrub it with a soft brush of some sort.

Don't let that Purple Stuff get on your skin, it will kill of the top layer of your skin and it will get very dry and flaky. Just a heads up.

Many moons ago I managed a restaurant. The only thing worse than tomato or jalapeno juice in an open wound was the purple stuff on healthy skin. It will denature the hell outta lipids, colloids, and who knows what else. If you could inject the stuff into the nucleus of a uranium atom you would probably make a mushroom cloud.
 
I'm not sure why some people are afraid of using water. What damage could it do if you use it and then dry the board quickly?

Anyway, if making it look new is overkill, a soft bristled paint brush is great for getting most of the dust out of all the nooks and crannies of a board. Usually that's good enough for me.
 
I'm not sure why some people are afraid of using water. What damage could it do if you use it and then dry the board quickly?

Anyway, if making it look new is overkill, a soft bristled paint brush is great for getting most of the dust out of all the nooks and crannies of a board. Usually that's good enough for me.

Dunno...

Water and LIVE electronics doesn't mix. Water and powered off (no batteries) is just fine AS LONG as you dry it quickly. If you dry it quickly you leave it no time to rust up and otherwise corrode things. The heat even dries out moisure inside of those pesky DIP switches.

Batteries are batteries and are similar between game boards and computers in that they all come in different shapes and sizes. Some are stick, some are coin, and others are stacks of coins. Some are soldered in and others are just slid into a mount.
 
Many moons ago I managed a restaurant. The only thing worse than tomato or jalapeno juice in an open wound was the purple stuff on healthy skin. It will denature the hell outta lipids, colloids, and who knows what else. If you could inject the stuff into the nucleus of a uranium atom you would probably make a mushroom cloud.

Yeah, it does some crazy stuff to skin... your skin will get all slippery and weird feeling. Then it just kinda starts to shed... ... but it'll clean the hell outta some PCBs.
 
after perusing many monitor cleaning threads for what seemed like many years I started to wash boards with the dollar store variety of Simple Green called Mean Green. the first board I ever washed was the power supply board for my Defender, cause I bought it separate and it was covered in probably 30 years worth of shit and there was no way I was going to rebuild it like that.

besides the fact that I didn't dry it 101% (it would make these awful sizzles under the caps when I tried to desolder) the operation turned out to be a success and I wound up doing it for a lot of games, even broken ones, afterward.

I don't have this luxury anymore because I quit my job, but while I was there I would spray the boards with the Simple/Mean Green first and then place them in the big kitchen sink in the back and use the intense water sprayer on hot water for the initial cleaning. I adopted the use of a toothbrush later on if there was any ruthless stuff caked on.. and then turned the water down to cold for the big rinse. rinsing is particularly important cause I don't know what'll happen if you leave the chemicals still on there and run it..

my approach to drying involved bathroom hand dryers early on, possibly about 20 cycles per whatever I was working on at the time.. until I found an extra hairdryer of my wife's sitting in the van, I kept it as a tool. :D

lots of people insist on using air compressors around sockets, like channelmanic mentioned, but I never did. with some finesse with the hairdryer blasting the socket at various angles you will eventually get the water to pop out. I focus on the sockets extensively just because you don't really know how much water is underneath.

the next part either involves you jumping in and operating on the board (power supply rebuilds, cap kits, etc.) or you could alternatively let the board sit overnight. I don't do anything fancy with fans or leaving boards upside down, I just let it sit in a spot where it won't fall off.

if you wash monitor chassis always make sure you remove the flybacks or any other crucial parts that don't have replacements first like width coils or other funky parts that I don't know the names of. I always remove transformers too.

now what I have observed happens with this Simple/Mean Green stuff is sometimes after you clean a board, it will develop this weird white film on it that you can't get off. for the times this has happened to me, I used a toothbrush sprayed with Windex and just cleaned any of the affected areas with it. you can re-wash with the Simple/Mean Green again if you would like. a rinse might be just enough too.. Windex won't hurt anything, it evaporates pretty well, but it might leave marks where you cleaned with it, so re-cleaning is optional.
 
This is what I do for all PCBs:

Remove batteries
Pre-heat oven to 170F
Rinse board off with hot water in sink
Use liquid dishwashing detergent and an old toothbrush to clean board
(Same thing to clean slots on Neo Geo boards too)
Rinse well
Drain at an angle for about a minute
Pat dry with lint free towel
Put in oven for 20 to 25 minutes, or until dry
Remove, let cool.

The only issues I've had with the hundreds of boards I've done are drooping plastic over the memory card slot guides on the Neo Geo 2 slot boards and accidentally leaving my wife's pot holders in the shop after taking boards back out there. OOPS.

:D

And no air compressors needed. I've had parts (socketed chips!) fly off of boards. :(

Just wanted to say this method works perfectly, of course i changed it up a bit and used a different brush as well as used my hair drier before putting it in the oven for about 10 minutes. (i also used the dish sprayer (gun w/e it's called) vs direct from the spout if that makes any difference)

Wish I took a before shot :(

I also broke out the temperature probe so i could control the temp of the oven. it never went above 167 at the probe :D (i recommend testing the temp of your oven before putting your board in tho)

8374607411_c94df14238_c.jpg
 
I use the Simple Green + water hose + TX sun method. I haven't been brave enough to use the oven for drying yet, but actually plan to today on a couple of MVS carts that need a bath. Edit: Just put them in the oven...we'll see!

Here's a couple of pics of my filthy Neo memory card reader before and after a good bath with simple green (more pics here). And now it works like a charm! :)

MV-IC+Cleanup+01.jpg


MV-IC+Cleanup+04.jpg
 
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For monitor chassis I've been using Zep Fast 505 Industrial Cleaner and Degreaser.

You get awesome results, just spray on and let set for about 10 seconds then spray off thoroughly with hot water. I usually clean it twice and the board is freaking immaculate. It removes grease, dirt, and resin buildups. No brushing or touching the board!

Follow up with a hair dryer until dry then place in the oven at 170F for about 10 minutes. I follow up with compressed air on some of the areas that take longer to dry, such as the neck board connector.

If you do use 505 make sure its in a well ventilated area and gloves or wash your hands thoroughly after usage.
 
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Personally I just use dawn dish soap in a wash tub with warm water and a parts washer brush (can buy at most automotive parts store).

Rinse with warm/hot water and leave in the (drained) wash tub for a few days. I have used an air compressor the odd time, but mostly I am not in a hurry and the boards usually sit for some time before I reassemble into the monitor or cabinet.

Never had an issue and I washed my first circuit board (not gaming related) back in the late 80's.

You can also regulate your air pressure down if you are worried about 'damage' or 'blowing chips' off. ;)
 
You can also regulate your air pressure down if you are worried about 'damage' or 'blowing chips' off. ;)

Ok, I have a few junk boards, now I'm going to have to see if I can damage the boards using my Air Compressor :p

I think I can get around 90PSI no problem, but I seriously doubt that's going to do much, but we'll see :D

Might damage the PCB itself, but blow chips off? :rolleyes:
 
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