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 transistor 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?


We had a pair of large (160 gallon) three phase air compressors at
Microdyne. They ran the crimping tools, as well as supplying compressed
air for two leased air nozzles with a radioactive element to prevent
static buildup when cleaning flux from new circuit boards.


--
Never **** off an Engineer!

They don't get mad.

They don't get even.

They go for over unity! ;-)