Cursitor Doom wrote in
:

Gentlemen,

I have some old OC171 transistors from an old Eddystone short wave
radio I'm restoring. The problem is I suspect they've developed
whiskers, as the resistance readings from e,c and b to the screen
connection are all far too low (sub 10 ohms). A colleague has
suggested blasting the whiskers by tying the ecb leads together
and zapping them against the screen with a 500nF cap charged to
500VDC. Now this seems a bit counter- intuitive to me and I'd have
thought higher current lower voltage would be safer for these
delicate germanium devices, but WTF do I know? Is it feasible to
remove the whiskers by this sort of method or any other?

Thanks,

CD


Put it in your ten below freezer for an hour and let the cold
disintegrate the non alloyed tin.

Then give it a nice hard rap to break it all loosed like we used to
do to the old tube type TVs to get them going again.

Kidding of course... except for the TV thing. That worked. So
did taking the back off it and re-seating all the socketed tubes and
components. Worked every time. It is almost always a mechanical
connection.