[sdiy] bit one

[Scott Stites]

Hi gang,

I work in the customer service department for a test equipment manufacturer, and
the term "Gold Pin Mod" is ubiquitous to everything that was produced up until a
few years ago, when my department started forcing its hand.

It has to do with tin connectors, particularly on but sometimes not limited to,
the power supplies.  Invariably, as time progressed, the equipment would become
unreliable, jumpy, -generally screwed up in other words - and the customer would
send it in.  Automatically, we'd replace the pins in the power supply connectors
with gold plated pins, and soon we just started doing it automatically to
anything that was in warranty.  Worked like a charm in exactly 100% of the cases.
 Putting in tin connectors only bought a bit of time, and we are of the philosphy
that you don't clean anything - you replace (these are high dollar boxes to begin
with).  I finally moved up to 'core' development teams, and I *never* would sign
off on anything that didn't have gold plated connectors on the power supplies,
BOM price be damned.  

Of course, these are service monitors that get a lot of field work in all kinds
of environments, but all the same - if I had a tasty vintage synth like that, I'd
raid Fort Knox and see if there wasn't some way to put in gold plated connectors.
 Just a thought......

Cheers,
Scott



On Fri, 06 Feb 2004 09:55:26 -0800, greg montalbano wrote:

> 
> At 06:19 PM 2/6/04 +0100, Rude 66 wrote:
> 
> >well, i disconnected the connectors and then put them together again, they
> >were not cleaned. they didn't look too dirty, though..
> 
> This would be a good place to comment on this, as it's come up before -- 
> many synths with numerous internal connectors (DIP, inline, & whatever 
> you'd call those cheesy things inside the ARP Odyssey) can have their 
> performance significantly improved by cleaning those connectors.  And they 
> probably won't "look dirty" -- it's a matter of oxidation building up, over 
> a period of years, to where the connections are intermittent (or actually 
> behaving more like a capacitor than a connector).  Sometimes removing & 
> reinserting them is enough to clear the invisible oxidation;  sometimes 
> they need more aggressive cleaning.
> 
> >what would be good to clean those connectors?
> 
> This is where the commercially available "contact cleaners" (that are so 
> controversial in pot cleaning) come in handy -- basically, any ethyl 
> alcohol-type cleaner (one that will leave no residue) should work.  I use 
> an old toothbrush;  clean the connector pins AND the socket pins.
> And it should go without saying that they should be allowed to dry out 
> completely before powering up again.
> 
> ~GMM

________________________________________________
PeoplePC:  It's for people. And it's just smart. 
http://www.peoplepc.com