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Chemicals

In various electronics repairs, you will eventually need some contact spray (both dry and lubricating) and flux for soldering. Those will get you very far. If you do any mechanical work, you'll want some some run-of-the-mill lubricants (ordinary oil and lithium grease will get you very, very far). A bottle of isopropanol can be invaluable to remove greasy or sticky stains or flux remnants, and some acetone for the really tough ones (but be careful you don't completely dissolve whatever you're working on).

I've been doing electronics (and various other mechanical projects) for a while, and will happily attack any other technical problem as well, be it a broken refrigerator door hinge, a seized-up sewing machine, or a stubborn bicycle shifter. Therefore I have accumulated a variety of service chemicals, with quite likely an unnecessary amount of overlap. But hey, most of them will last forever. (And, being a chemist by training, I can hardly help myself, can I?)

The following is a (likely incomplete) list of what awful, smelly poisons I have in shelf. Yes, they all have their uses:

What's still missing? Beer. Finnish swamp mead I make myself. (Suomalaisten suosima, pyydä resepti tarvittaessa.)


Antti J. Niskanen <uuki@iki.fi>