Hey guys,
following a lot of the suggestions on the forum about cleaning a battery spill with Isopropyl alcohol, I decided to be a bit more aggresive (in the past I cleaned the regions attacked by the spilled battery contents, acid in crystalized form, as far as I can tell, but it didn't do any good, my A3000 was still dead and showing a green screen. I replaced the soldered Chip RAM with sockets, but still no go).
So I poured copious amounts of isopropyl on the various 'infected' areas and then let it sit for a few minutes, then took the board and shook it to take the large amounts of alcohol off, and then used a blow drier (in cold-air mode) and had it blow on the board for a few hours to dry it out. Anyways, the most weird (to me) thing happened: there's various sediments, white in color, over various pins, both on the upper side of the board, but especially visible on the underside of the board, even in places where I wouldn't think the acid has crept to (Chip RAM area).
Has anyone seen this before? Is it what's left after the alcohol reacted (if it did) with the acid or acidic crystals? Could it be something else? According to some searching results isopropyl + sulfuric acid = propylene gas, but I doubt NiCD batteries contain sulfuric acid, as the name suggest Nickel and Cadmium.
I tried adding images in the Hardware section, but they don't seem to appear
Let's try here... OK, can't do it either
The 'image manager' button doesn't really draw properly, and neither does it have a way to load a photo. Can someone help with photos/images ?
Observations:
1) it comes off easily with an old toothbrush
2) it seems to be like fine dust, like a white salt (not the kind you put in your food)
3) it's almost always around pins (or rather where pins stick out from the bottom of the motherboard), but also (less often) around pins going into the motherboard, from the top side
UPDATE:
Photo 1:
And a link:
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=1821=11