Cursitor Doom wrote:

One of the books I picked up on faultfinding and troubleshooting whilst
in London the other day (title escapes me but I can find it if anyone
cares) states that:

a) A bipolar transitor may be permanently damaged by dropping it on a
concrete floor from a height of over 4'. (I'm paraphrasing but that's the
gist of it).

Elsewhere it states that:

b) static sensitive components can be damaged by careless use of air
dusters, which can build up a static charge, in their vicinity.

Whilst I'm prepared to place some faith in assertion b) I'm reluctant to
do so in the case of a). However, I'm more concerned with b) because I
recently purchased a fair sized air compressor for blowing dust out of
the insides of test equipment which is of course considerably more
powerful than the aerosol cans the author was thinking about when he
asserted b).
Has anyone ever caused damage to static-sensitive components through the
use of compressed air? Is this something we really need to be mindful of?

The original, point-contact trasnsistors from the 1950's were quite fragile
devices, basically a pair of etched hair whiskers on a Germanium speck.

Supposedly, it is the tiny dust particles in an air stream that create the
triboelectric charge. So, clean air should be better. I live in Missouri,
so we have enough humidity that ESD is a fairly rare phenomenon. I have
used vacuum cleaners to clean old computer gear, and never had damage,
although I was concerned about the possibility.

I have seen a fat spark produced when firing off a CO2 fire extinguisher,
which seemed like a pretty big design defect. They should have made the
hose and nozzle with a static dissipative material.

Jon