TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:[...]
and I remember someone blithering on about the "heavy metal supports inside Trinitrons"
Well you are able to play Fade to Black on it, I suppose that counts as 'support' 😉
Apart from some serious clearing up here (basically piling all my individually unsaleable modems, ISDN adapters, RTL8139, USB card readers, crap 1MB PCI and TNT2-M64 AGP VGA into one big lot and dumping it onto the local Craigslist-lookalike, and separately also listing a nice but hopelessly surplus to requirements Compaq 15" CRT for free pickup) I've been trying to clean the Case From Smoker Tar Hell. It's a Packard Bell Squarius II uATX minitower I posted here a while back, literally dripping with tar from almost two decades in the filthiest smoke I have ever seen. Any other case I would have thrown away (indeed I did throw away two other generic miditowers from the same batch, keeping only a motherboard, CPU and a nice Yamaha PCI sound card), but this one I specifically wanted. What I did not want was the tar and the smell. I really cannot overstate how bad it was. Just moving the case around left my fingers stinking so badly it didn't go away after washing my hands.
So, what to do about it?
Basically I went down the list of options one by one:
- baby wipes. Normally great for removing dust and slight encrustation, but not even remotely up to this job.
- vinegar in hot water. Managed to move some mess, but wasn't able to make a serious dent in the situation.
- methylated spirit (i.e. alcohol). This - combined with a lot of scrubbing and continuously replacing paper was actually effective, at least on reasonably accessible areas. Unfortunately it did not remove the smell.
- dilute ammonia mixture. Normally removes any fatty residue. Here a trial run on a corner seemed to somehow remove the top layer of paint without actually getting rid of all the tar first. Couldn't smell the smoke anymore either, but that could have been my nose being blasted by ammonia vapour.
End result of about an hour and a half of this was a case with relatively clean large areas, but all the nooks and crannies were still filthy and even after all this work it still reeked. If I couldn't improve that, I'd have to bin it anyway. So I did the one thing left to try: chuck it all in the dishwasher. I was concerned this might corrode the steel and melt the plastic bits, but in the end it did neither and was remarkably effective at both removing the tar and the smell. Not sure I would ever consider this in cases less severe, but if it's the only alternative to having to throw it out, it's worth a shot.