How to Clean Vintage Electronic Circuits

Video Transcript

Hi I'm Larin Parker for Expert Village. We're talking about cleaning out some of the dust and dirty that builds up in circuit boards. If it's an older circuit, chances are it's going to get pretty dirty and there is good way to clean them and a bad way to clean them. The first is just if you open something up like this drum machine, you find a lot of dust or you find some grime. Eventually that grime can sort of lead to problems, especially if it's in the pin of one of these chips, and the trick is just not to be intimidated by all of the parts here, you don't have to know how this stuff actually works to give it a good cleaning. I'm just going to dip a Q-tip, if you need to clean a large area you can just use a lint free cloth, but if you did the Q-tip in a little bit of D natured alcohol and just wipe out the areas. It tends to be the best solvents and if I put it over electronic components, it's not really going to be a problem. I can clean of the semi conductors and leads of things with the alcohol and it picks up a lot of the dirt and it doesn't leave behind any residue. Of course that?s the problem with water. Water does not evaporate as quickly as alcohol and then if you get rubbing alcohol from the pharmacy, chances are that it?s going to leave behind a little bit of film. That isopropyl alcohol is not going to be quite as good as the D natured alcohol which is available at paint stores. This stuff is as close to one hundred percent alcohol as you can get. They say D natured they add a little bit of poison to it so you can't drink it. It's illegal to sell a hundred percent saturated alcohol at a paint store of course. Basically every once in a while as things age, they get to be ten or twenty years old you need to open it up and get some of that grime out of there. Especially where there are switches and contacts where dirt from people's fingers are going to get into these grooves and are going make clicking sounds or popping sounds. I could go in there with a Q-tip pretty easily and just kind of pick up some of the dirt in there. The other way I do things, I find one components like a switch like an older style switch like this that really is in bad shape, I actually remove it from the circuit board, here I have an ultrasonic cleaner and it has a little bit of distilled water in it, and I've added just a little bit of a cleaner to it. I'm just using simple green, and this is actually and ultra sonic cleaner that is intended for jewelry. It?s a lot cheaper than the ones that you buy that are intended specifically for electronics, but does the same job. When I turn it on you can see it creates ripples and vibrations in the water. If you leave it in there for about ten minutes it will agitate the component and create bubbles in the cleanser which allows it to clean off all the grime that you can't get to. It will get into all the little nooks and crannies and clean it where we can't reach with Q-tips.

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