Contact enhancers?

I got some Cramolin copper grease. I never used it, but someday ?

My view on lube. Somewhat why oil works for sharpening, helps push aside oxides, might also soften them.

Greg

Bad example. There are carbon doped greases that are used mostly to dissipate static electricity between sliding surfaces and to lubricate mechanical switches. It doesn't take much resistivity to be considered "conductive".

As in cold weld? That does happen, but the adhesion forces to the nickel base metal is stronger than the wiping forces, so the gold stays in place on the contacts (unless the plating is really soft and thick). Here's the rules of the game for gold:

Gold oxide is an insulator. I did some googling and couldn't find any references mentioning such an oxide coating on gold. Certainly aluminum is protected by an oxide coating, but methinks not gold. To the best of my knowledge (at this late hour) gold's primary attribute is its resistance to oxidation.

Nobody plates contacts with pure gold. Nickel and Cobalt are added to make "hard gold". There's also an under-plating of nickel, on which surface the gold is plated. If one gets the contacts hot enough, the nickel will diffuse through the gold plating, get exposed to air, and oxidize or tarnish forming nickel sulfate. If the gold has a greenish tint, you have nickel sulfate. That might be what's happening.

When I was building marine radios, we used big 0.156 gold edge connectors for everything. Dry loads, high power, DC, RF, whatever, it all used the same 50 micro inch gold plated connectors. We had a few problems, but never any env test failures. I even built a machine that would insert and retract the cards repetitively until the connection showed some "noise". I gave up after about 10,000 cycles and no noise appeared. Inspection under a microscope showed that none of the hard gold had migrated.

Maybe, but I would want to know the failure mode of your PCIe connectors before I passed judgment.

Gold on boards isn't anything like pure, and the cheap stuff has lots of gaps in its surface coverage. Depending on the pH, you can get a monolayer of gold oxide on a surface, or (interestingly) a monolayer of water, which it turns out forms a _hydrophobic_ surface, since all the available hydrogen bonding sites are hidden.

(I was going to answer that gold didn't oxidize, but checked first, and found this interesting paper:

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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I've got a tube of silver grease, that we bought but never used... it's shoved to the back of my 'gunk' drawer. It reads,"Typical applications include lubrication of switches or circuit breakers, heat dissipation from transformers, or static grounding on seals or O-rings."

Contains Silver, dimethyl poly-siloxane, carbon black.

George H.

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Thanks for the paper. Years ago I made this bouncing gold wire quantum contact gizmo. After sitting for a while it wouldn't work as well and I'd wipe the wires with a 'gold cleaning solution' that was used in a lab I visited. I think the ?recipe? for the solution was 2 parts ethanol, one part toluene and one part methanol. (But it could have been acetone instead of methanol?) This worked.. but it could have just been the act of wiping that cleaned the surface.

George H.

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Anybody do anything using VCI emitters. A long time ago I got samples from a wadia guy, never used those. I wonder if it's still good. Also used Bullfrog spray electronic protector cleaner, smelled like maple Syrup. Never could conclude anything. I do remember the little sheets often packed around mechanical switches, especially silvered. Some areas outside the paper had a lot of oxide.

Greg

Don wadia Moses, the wadia guy. He sure did some shit. Passed way in 2008.

Greg

Crystals DO work. My digital watch has a quartz crystal that works as an oscillator to keep the time. It also has liquid crystals that work as displays.

I have an electronic lighter I use to light candles. It has a piezoelectric crystal that works to generate sparks.

Diamonds are crystals. They work as abrasives in various types of saws, grinding wheels and drills. Sapphire is a crystal. It works as a phonograph needle.

Diamonds also work to keep a woman happy.

Hi

We sell Stabilant 22A. You can buy it at sibert.co.uk

I have both Tweek and Stabilant 22A. I have never been convinced they provide any meaningful improvement in conductivity or sound quality.

Is there something wrong with Caig products? At least they clean the surface, a useful step before applying an enhancer.

Stop being cruel!

I was having trouble with my golf cart. Backup warning microswitch was mostly not working. Took switch off, squirted some CRC 2-26 into the button, worked several times. Works now. It enhanced the contact.

Greg

Another case of cruelty to animals, eh?

You replied to a post from 2012. Do you think they were waiting for you to spam them?