At 03:38 PM 11/25/09, you wrote: >Hi Mike, > >Thanks for the info. > >Yes, I've cleaned it up good... I use a q-tip with >a baking soda/water combo, then wick solder on >the pad till it flows... sometimes gotta scrape a >shiny spot first. Then soldersuck the pad & >clean up with wick. Then another qtip with >lacquer thinner (contains MEK) - does great job >of cleaning the flux. Nice & sparkly clean.
The dried capacitor poop occasionally seeps under an adjacent component (capillary action) . Sometimes you have to lift an adjacent resistor or two to get access to all of it. >The smell of the solder on the corroded pad >reminds me of some solder I have that has >a water soluble rosin. Kinda smells like fish. > >It's probably the audio amp, but it's not >objectionable enough to make me want to >change it out. > >It's amazing how many dead radios are coming >back to life after re-capping! I agree! From the emails that WA1MIK (the author of the recapping article) and I have received over 70% of the problems in surplus Spectras are cap problems. >Of course some of >the problems were traces that had disappeared! Which is why Will Martin KA6LSD of Echo Communications wrote (in the recapping article) "There have been cases where the corrosion has eaten away so much of the pads that I have had to use leaded components and solder to other locations on the board to restore the functionality." I saw one radio that Will fixed where he soldered one cap lead to one of the two original pads but the other lead had no pad... so he left the lead long, sleeved it and ran it a few inches over the components on the board and soldered it to another component. The guy is a genius at Spectras. He even found the manufacturer that made the audio module for Moto and buys them direct for a lot less than Moto sells them for. Things like that allow him to be more reasonable on repair pricing. I was over at his shop a while back and he had radios (awaiting service) on the shelf from a dozen 2-way shops and police agency shops in 7 states and 2 European countries - radios they couldn't fix. The outgoing shelf had radios from 4 states plus Canada and Mexico. The first thing he does is recap the radio. Then he starts working on the problems the customer complained about. >Thanks, > >Tim Mike WA6ILQ
