OT: Tax the rich???

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Slavery was pretty much universal when the US constitution was written; the the US Civil War wasn't about slavery per se, but about the economic consequences of freeing the slaves. the American South was to the United States what Greece is to the European Union at the moment.

Sherman's march through Georgia

was largely directed at civilian targets. This isn't a question of my moral relativism, but your santimonious ignorance. And you seem to have forgotten about the Andersonville prisoner of war camp, which prompted one of the first war crimes trials.

Your population isn't stable, but rising steadily - your current fertility rate is just at replacement, but your age structure means that that you have a disproportionate number of women in the fertile age range.

Having too many young people around makes it more difficult for old farts to remain in the work force and productive, as many of them would like to - many more of them in countries where good universal health care decreases the incidence of crippling diseases in old age.

Whether you like it or not, human society is going to have to adapt to having a smaller proportion of young people. We've already done the spade work - the elderly are, on average, a lot fitter than they were thirty years ago, and a retirement age of 65 doesn't make sense any more. As usual, legislation and social attitudes are lagging the reality, and there are a lot of fit, healthy elderly people around who would like to work but can't get jobs.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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krw in full me-too mode. He's a productive generator of flattery for people whose political opinions he shares, but shows little other sign of creativity. No doubt he wields a mean rubber stamp at his place of protected employment.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

He doesn't even know how to use a vapor phase degreaser correctly.

This must be AlwaysWrong posting under yet another idiot nym.

Vapour phase degreasing is just getting a solvent to condense onto the item being degreased, collecting the grease-laden run-off and boiling the solvent off again.

It's the kind of stuff I did when I was an undergraduate chemist when I needed to get glassware very clean.

I'm sure AlwaysWrong needed three week training course to learn how not to burn down the factory, but most people can learn a lot faster, particularly if they understand the basic ideas involved.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Which doesn't work very well to clean PC boards. The condensation heats the board rapidly, so condensation quickly stops. All you get is a brief burst of dirty drops running off the board, pitifully inadequate to clean the cosmetics, much less get under parts. You should appreciate the simple thermodynamics here.

We have a Baron-Blakeslee 2-tank cleaning machine. One side is filled with vigorously boiling solvent with a deflux agent added; the other side is clean distilled solvent. A refrigeration loop condenses the boiloff back into the clean side.

PC boards are dunked into the boiling deflux tank for about a minute. Then they are lifted out and sprayed hard with a wand, pumped up from the clean/distilled tank, with the drips going into the dirty side. Works great.

We use it exactly the way the manufacturer intended. It seems to have upset AlwaysWrong for some years now. He calls it a "vapor degreaser" and then gets upset because we don't use it as a vapor degreaser... we use it as a board cleaner. I think he is seriously rule-bound.

Did you actually clean glassware by vapor degreasing?

John

Sort of. The solvent was water, and you directed a jet of more or less dry steam at the inside of the - inverted - flask or beaker. The steam condensed, heating the glass to close to boiling point and ran off, carrying anything remotely water-soluble with it.

Rinsing with hot distilled water would have worked almost as well, but you could leave a flask being steam cleaned for hours while you got on with other stuff.

I used much the same technique with a non-aqueous solvent - methyl chloride IIRR - to get the packaging off an ic in my first industrial job in 1970. We boiled the methyl chloride in a conical flask and and adjusted the heat so that all the evaporated methyl chloride was condensed on a water-cooled "cold finger" condenser stuck in the neck of the flask, from which it dripped down onto the ic which was suspended on a couple of wires above the boiling surface, directly underneath the cold finger.

I had to revive my glass-blowing skills to make a cold-finger condenser of the right size and length to fit in a suitable flask.

The whole thing went into a fume cupboard and boiled away for a couple of days.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

If this is happening quickly, you are too low in the vapour column. Your board should drip constantly when in the condensation zone. How would the PCB get any hotter than the temperature of the condensation zone???

Are there any other types? One side dirty the other distilled?

If you are keeping the PCB under the boiling, and dirty, solvent you are probably cooking some parts, or at least removing some shrink wrap marking from some parts. We don't EVER put our boards under the boiling solvent, just in the condensation zone *over* the boiling side, so the crud falls into the dirty side and not in the nice clean solvent on the cool side. The spray wand is used over the hot side too, for the same reason. The boiling solvent should be nothing but concentrated flux, and so on, the PCB should actually have a lower concentration of contaminants on it than the boiling solvent, so why would you put a PCB in it?

Maybe we are doing it "wrong", but it seems to be working.