[sdiy] Tin Whiskers

[Richard Wentk]

At 04:44 12/01/2005, The Peasant wrote:
>  > any suggestions for suppressing whisker growth?
>
>NO NO NO NO! You should *encourage* whisker growth, it's what gives that
>vintage equipment it's special sound characteristics! (Not to mention those
>*special* reliability characteristics). The unique inductive/capacitive
>networks that are created by years of tin whisker building create a truly
>analogue and fractal electrical response; no two Minimoogs sound quite the
>same. You just can't get that kind of performance with new parts and
>construction!

Yeah, but so what? Anyone who knows what they're doing can simulate the 
whiskers in software. ;-)

I think - leap in the dark here - it's hard to solve a problem when you 
don't know what the cause is.

Lead works. Lead is banned. Lead isn't a solution. Long term once the 
industry wakes up I expect some other alloy will be the fixer.

Short term, it's hard to imagine a solution that doesn't severely limit 
maintenance access. A naive attempt might involve lacquer coating. But 
since this mostly won't affect local potentials, it might not do anything 
useful. And the only way to get full coating, especially under ICs, would 
be full immersion - problematic, as a process.

Richard