Post a nice crisp photo of the damaged area.

If the corrosion is bad enough it's undoubtedly eaten traces, vias, possibly damaged ICs and other general nastiness.

vinegar + water is my preferred method as well , I wouldn't go 100% vinegar though - but that depends on how "strong" it is. If it's super-market grade then go for it but if it is home-made I'd use also 70% water tbh
I usually leave the parts in the solution for several hours, allowing the vinegar to do it's thing. But in cases of heavy corrosion it won't be enough, sockets/slots need replacing and tracks repairing after the bath.

Behold the damage! 😀

keropi wrote:

vinegar + water is my preferred method as well , I wouldn't go 100% vinegar though - but that depends on how "strong" it is. If it's super-market grade then go for it but if it is home-made I'd use also 70% water tbh
I usually leave the parts in the solution for several hours, allowing the vinegar to do it's thing. But in cases of heavy corrosion it won't be enough, sockets/slots need replacing and tracks repairing after the bath.

Do you just submerge the entire motherboard in the solution then let it dry out afterwards?
How long do you let it dry out?

^ yes, the whole board is submerged and everything that is socketed is removed prior to that.
As for drying I first use compressed air to get water out of holes/sockets and then leave the whole board under the sun for 4-5hrs just to be sure. Usually the whole board becomes very hot after 30-40mins so any moisture left just evaporizes. For more complex things I prefer to leave them overnight - just to be 101% sure there is no moisture left.

@Half-Saint
the board is not that bad, you might need to replace some sockets afterwards though ... I say vinegar it already! 🤣

Do you folks think this one is savable?

This should be handled like an arcade PCB, neutralize the battery damage first and then do resistance tests with a multimeter to look for broken traces. Always check what kind of battery did the damage, some are alkaline and some are acidic.

Woo good luck with that mess.

That's gonna be tough to get working again...

Well, just submerged the whole board in a 30% vinegar solution. The only problem is, it's gonna smell like pickled cucumbers because I used vinegar for pickling 😀

I don't intend to spend a lot of time on this and certainly won't be replacing any sockets. After I'm done cleaning things up, I'll check the traces. If it's worse than I think, I'll salvage what I can and bin it.

After about 2 and a half hours of sitting in vinegar, I gave it a good wash down with plenty of water. Blasted it with compressed air for good measure and now I'll leave it to try for 24 hours. I can already see one trace that's seriously damaged and potentially broken. Let's hope for the best.

Here it is all cleaned up. Let's hope it works!

Unfortunately, it looks like the board doesn't work. It doesn't produce any beeps and there's no video output. However, keyboard LEDs light up when Num Lock, Caps Lock and Scroll Lock keys are pressed. Interesting.

Any suggestions?

You would have to spend a day or more to get this working, and even then the corrosion will continue to eat away at the board.
It could have some of the through holes open circuit, and the area around the isa slot and cpu socket looks horrible.
If the board was worth $500 or so maybe worth it, but not in that condition.

The only other way to know for sure is to get a multimeter, set it for resistance testing (20k ohm works for me on mine) and see if the bad traces are truly disconnected.

As just a plain 286 board though, it doesn't sound like anything special. Is there anything useful on it? Now if this was a Neo Geo MVS board, that'd be worth trying to resurrect, or at least save for parts.

There's a nice gold plated AMD 286-16, four RAM modules, BIOS chips and that's pretty much it. Nothing special.