Cleaning Plated Electrical Contacts?

Some has 'Oil of Wintergreen' but that is usually colored green. It is an old type of pain killer. They still make it, but they don't use real 'Oil of Wintergreen'. between the dye and other additives, I wouldn't use it on electronics. I do use it for some types of pain in my hands, from the Diabetic Neuropathy.

Been there. I love big silver plated ceramic switches.

A friend used to say, he liked using both Cramolin Red and Tweek on contacts, together.

The current Caig R100 full strength is also great.

greg

The reason there is oil in some, its supposed to give oil back to the skin after a rub down. After using alcohol on the skin its usually very patchy looking removing the oils.

I didn't exactly point out, even using 100% alcohol on things, and you will get water build up, after the alcohol starts absorbing it, and dries, leaving water. Plus, 100% is contaminated with drying agents.

greg

You will get dry patches of blue.

I got an experiance I never felt. I eat hot peppers all the time, and have heard of capsation rub for pain. Capsation particles are extremely small and float in the air. Well, I was cleaning some Habenero and jalapeño peppers in haste scraping the seeds out and taking most of the core. Besides having to wash hands many times and being carefull, after about 20 minuites I started to feel the action penetrating the skin on my hands. They were tingly, much the same as a burn would do but mild. It wasn't a real bad feeling, but I could see how it might numb pain in the joints.

Also try vitamin D. If your out in the sun, forget it. Just take minerals.

greg

Years ago, we used to treat the long multipole open slide switches that were fitted to dual standard TV sets, to a liberal does of white heatsink paste. This did a grand job of stopping the sections that did the timebase switching, from arcing, and the sections that did the low-level signal switching, from tarnishing and becoming intermittent. Happy days. Gentler times ...

Arfa

On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:41:18 +0100, "Arfa Daily" wrote:

: :"Ross Herbert" wrote in message :news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com... :> On Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:28:42 -0700 (PDT), GeneO wrote: :>

:> :Have been Googling the proper way to clean plated electrical contacts :> :but either get nothing if use " or a lot of nonrelevant hits without. :> : :> :Am interested in any suggestions esp how to remove the nonconductive :> :oxides. :> : :> :If a connector is too damaged would also be interested in what are :> :considered the best type replacement. :> : :> :Thanks :> : :> :Gene :>

:>

:> I don't think I have ever come across a "plated" electrical contact. In my :> experience electrical contacts are always a solid material such as brass :> (cheap :> and nasty - often used in electrical appliances) or a more exotic alloy :> material :> such as nickel-silver. The contact material used is dependant on the :> application :> (AC or DC and whether inductive) and the magnitude of the current being :> handled. : : :I'm sure that you must have, Ross ?? I'd agree with you on 'solid brass :contacts' in clunky mains power switches etc, but elsewhere, many contacts :seem to be plated rather than solid. For instance, I just put the word :"plated" into the search pane on one component supplier's website, and it :came back with 59 items, most of which were connectors with a variety of :plating materials quoted for their contacts, including gold, silver & tin. :Similarly, a quick look in a catalogue at switches, reveals many to have :either gold or silver plated contacts. Also, many relays have contacts :described variously as gold "plated", "covered", "overlayed" etc. It is :these contacts that I find you have to be careful not to use any kind of :abrasion on, for fear of going through the very thin layer of plating. I :generally find that pulling a piece of dry cardboard through things like :relay contacts, is enough to clean them. A tiny spot of cleaner/lubricant :introduced to the contact gap, finishes the job off. : :Arfa :

My experience has been mainly related to relays of both open and enclosed types, from miniature pcb mounted types for signal transmission to heavy duty high current capacity types. I will agree that particularly for the low level signal types the manufacturers often "enhance" the contact material by adding a gold "overlay". However, the actual relay contact will be made of some alloy material such as silver-palladium or other mixture. The contact is usually rivetted or welded to the spring leaf, which is probably a plated phosphor bronze material, while the gold overlay on the contact pips is simply to reduce contact resistance due to oxidation through lack of a wetting current. A typical relay of this type, which I have on hand, is the Fujitsu FBR46. With such relays, as you have mentioned, you never use abrasive methods of cleaning or burnishing but with gold as an overlay this should not be necessary. The problem with any "plated" contact is that once the plating material has been lost either through repeated operation or arcing etc, the base contact material is all that is left. In cases where no plating is used unless the contact material is one of the recognised traditional materials such as nickel-silver, silver-palladium etc, the electrical performance of the contact will be unreliable. Such a relay used for heavy current carrying capacity which I also have on hand is a Fuji HH62 witha contact rating at 10A. In this case the contact material is simply a "silver alloy" - probably made to Fuji specification. Such contacts can be burnished and reconditioned using abrasive tools.

It may be that later contacts, manufactured for cheapness, do not use traditional solid alloy contact material which is rivetted or welded to the base contact spring material, and by so doing they would, in my opinion, be inferior to the types which do.

Your blockquoting looks pretty sad.

Have you heard of this 3rd-party update for your M$ software?

Funnily enough, as soon as I replied to that particular post, I thought it looked 'wrong' ... To be fair, I don't usually quote in a way that appears "sad" or confused as far as I am aware. When my replies pop up in threads, they usually seem to look ok on my machine. However, thanks for the pointer to that piece of software. I've put it on now, so perhaps that will allow my posts to present in a way that does not further upset your sensibilities ... I'm sure you'll let me know if that's not the case ?? :-)

Arfa

OK. Understand what you're saying ...

Arfa

This looks much better. Often text you cited from previous posts appeared inline as if it were your original material ;)

Michael

Interesting that you say "often". I really hadn't noticed that this occured except on the odd occasion, and I had always put that down to there being something amiss in the formatting of the text that I was 'breaking into' with my comments. I don't very often reply in that way, answering individual points within the text body of the original post. Normally, I append a total reply to the bottom of the post, sometimes snipping irrelevant text from above or below, if it is one specific point that I am replying to, or where the post has become unnecessarily rambling. I had always thought that the original text gained right arrows at the start of each line automatically, with my text identified by not having these, as a function of OE as it stands, and when these didn't appear, as was the case that started this sub-discussion, that something had just 'gone wrong'. Surely, I wasn't seeing something different on my machine, than what everyone else was seeing, was I ? Presumably, once the post is on the server, I see the same as everyone else, don't I, even though it's my own post that I'm looking at ?

I must admit to being a little confused now (not unusual !) The indicated bit of software is now installed, and I guess it must be doing something as you say that things now look "better", but I'm not sure exactly what I am seeing here, that looks any different, other than the number of right arrows at each line start seems to be increasing as you go further back ... ??

Arfa

That's what its supposed to look like. Each new meassage is supposed to add another row of arrows to any quoted text, so you can tell who posted what without going back and reading every message in a thread.

FWIW I don't remember your posts having a quoting problem before.

But I'm confused, too: I don't understand why so many people use an operating system that has to be patched every three days, and software that has to have third party shit added to it to work properly.

Fair enough ! Mission accomplished then, I guess ...

Arfa

Well, part of it is that I don't look good with a beard, or in sandals. I also find riding a bike a bit too much like hard work ... :-)

Seriously though. My computers are just tools. They are not a hobby where I like to tinker with software and so on. I understand probably more than most average Joes about how they work, and how to keep them working, but the vagaries of operating systems and so on, are way, waaaayy over my head. For that reason alone, I just leave them with the Windows OS on them that they came with, but as a side issue, I like to know that if I buy or download a piece of software, chances are it can be thrown onto the machine, and will just work with a minimum of fuss.

Gates-bashing seems to be an international pastime, and one that I don't really understand. OK, so the guy makes a lot of money, and some of his company's policies might be a bit monopolistic, but so what ? He puts a lot back into the community, and I really don't think that his business practices are any worse than many other large corporations. It also has to be remembered that pretty much single-handedly, that company has been responsible for spreading affordable and powerful computing throughout the world, from the poorest to the richest countries, and with a common platform that allows anyone from any of those countries, to develop software that can be used by pretty much anyone *with* a computer.

As to it needing patches every couple of months, it has to be remembered that it is a large and complex piece of software, trying to please all of the people, all of the time. Of course there are going to be bugs, and as we all know, patching one - in any piece of software let alone an OS - is likely to cause other problems that just can't be forseen until they occur. Many of the patches are security-related, and wouldn't be necessary if the little toe rags who think it's funny to attack computers and wreak havoc in the commercial world, were properly targetted, and jumped on from a great height. Anyway, updating with those patches is no great shakes, is it ? My Windows machines check with MS regularly, and just get on with downloading and installing any updates, with little intervention from me.

And before everyone starts squawking at me in self-rightous indignation for being crass enough to use, and actually *like* Windows, I really don't care. It does what I need it to do, without me having any deep understanding of either it, or the computers it runs on, and does it pretty much faultlessly the majority of the time ... d;~}

Arfa

I use the ink (ie; rougher) end of an ordinary eraser.