VOGONS


First post, by treeman

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I have been watching a bit of YouTube videos on motherboard repairs to do with soldering.

I saw one guy using green epoxy to paint over and seal traces he fixed, it looked really good almost original.

This gave me the idea to use nail polish which apparently people use to water proof electronics.

I was thinking after tinning traces or even running small jumper wires neatly it would look really nice to blend it with green nail polish or clear if you want your repair visible but sealed.

Its such a simple idea alot of people must be doing this, or did I miss something and its not recommended?

Reply 1 of 10, by dkarguth

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I don't see anything wrong with it, other than you might get looked at a little strange buying nail polish (if you're a male) 🤣

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Reply 2 of 10, by Jo22

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Hm.. I think: Why not ? 😀
My father used to use nail polish to "fix" little screws (so they wouldn't turn by themselves).
It was much cheaper than that overpriced, red paint on the electronics market..
Personally, I also saw such red paint on trimming screws of electro-mechanical relays, coils and
trimming potentiometer/variable trimming capacitors before.

Edit:

dkarguth wrote:

I don't see anything wrong with it, other than you might get looked at a little strange buying nail polish (if you're a male) 🤣

Haha, good point! Gratefuly, I can ask my sister buying such things for me. Err, for my electronics projects, of coursse. Hah. 😊

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Reply 3 of 10, by gdjacobs

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Why use nail polish when you can buy conformal coating?

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Reply 4 of 10, by cyclone3d

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Just make sure to get the high quality stuff. Cheap nail polish will just flake off.

The nail strengthening stuff might even be better as I think it doesn't get super hard like the normal nail polish if I remember correctly.

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Reply 5 of 10, by Nprod

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You can use nail polish or varnish (its been used on very oldschool boards sometimes), but why bother when you can get a tube of actual green solder mask and a UV LED flashlight to cure it for literally 5$

I feel like i've been spamming aliexpress links for the past few days now... You gotta look up how much the proper solution costs before considering a cheap alternative.

Reply 6 of 10, by brostenen

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Nprod wrote:

You can use nail polish or varnish (its been used on very oldschool boards sometimes), but why bother when you can get a tube of actual green solder mask and a UV LED flashlight to cure it for literally 5$

I feel like i've been spamming aliexpress links for the past few days now... You gotta look up how much the proper solution costs before considering a cheap alternative.

Cool. Thanks for the heads up. From now on, I am done using clear nail polish on my PCB repairs.

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Reply 8 of 10, by 0kool

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I used to do it myself, but then I read that some nail polishes could actually be (somewhat) conductive due to various admixtures, especially with higher voltages (10+). Better safe than sorry. Get the real thing 😀.

Reply 9 of 10, by meljor

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0kool wrote:

I used to do it myself, but then I read that some nail polishes could actually be (somewhat) conductive due to various admixtures, especially with higher voltages (10+). Better safe than sorry. Get the real thing 😀.

You shouldn't use the nail polish with the glitter! 🤣

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Reply 10 of 10, by treeman

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thanx some good info guys, looks like getting the kit from Amazon is the way to go, but when don't have it using clear polish to prepait jumper wires before installation is probably something I will do in the future if I need to, and possibly painting big fat traces with color polish to match making sure it doesn't overlap to anywhere else incase there is some conductivity hence using the color so can see where it goes.

I guess I was thiking it would look cool to have different colours for traces that are repaired but then probably they got all the colours on Amazon too.

I tried my wife's blue polish on some jump wires on a 386 board I repaired a while ago and actually looked worse then the original Cooper color.

I tried gold next, that looks ok not much better or worse then original cooper, for the sake of insulation and protection ill. keep the gold coating on.

So yeah, conclusion? Was one of those days wasting too much time thinking how to improve something thats not broken, but got the info about the product on Amazon from all this so wasn't totally pointless, thanx