Homebrew PCBs

> I looked at the Household products database and found tarn-x is 3-5
> sulfamic acid but also contains Thiourea which may help cleaning.I
> found that Lime Away has < 11 percent sulfamic acid acording to the
> MSDS sheet. Tried some on some BAD copper and all the dark brown areas
> turned that nice reddish color you want. The black and green areas
> appeared to clean up with some scrubbing. This stuff is readily
> available. Assuming the sulfamic acid is what you want there is a
> product called Aqua Mix Sulfamic Acid Crystals available at Lowes that
> is a 99.5 percent pure sulfamic acid crystals. Don't know what it
> costs yet. But Lime Away does work and it doesn't have a lot of exta
> stuff in it you may not want.
> Keith

That NIH link:

http://householdproducts.nlm.nih.gov/

is pretty useful (for those in the US anyway since the brands listed
are US brands) when one wants to find a substitute for a product once
the active ingredient is known.  Thanks for actually taking the time
to go to it.  As I mentioned in my previous message, I found it
strange that Scrub Free wasn't listed with the other products in the
sulfamic acid listing.  Perhaps they've changed the formulation
considering that they apparently don't list sulfamic acid on the label
any more.  Too bad, since the stuff I have cleans PCBs quickly, evenly
and effortlessly but the bottle has only about 1/3 of its contents
remaining.  BTW, I used to use Lime Away for soap scum removal, but
moved to Scrub Free because it smelled better!  Now I may have to go
back to Lime Away because it cleans PCBs better than the "new, not so
improved (for PCB cleaning)" Scrub Free. I'll have to check out the
labels on the even cheaper generic house brands to see if they contain
sulfamic acid.

WB