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Picked up a tip about cold solder joints from a retired TV repair guy
He told me to always hit suspect joints with freeze spray before testing. I tried it on a power supply board that was acting flaky and found two cracked joints I'd missed with my microscope. Has anyone else used that trick for intermittent faults?
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hayden_rivera3mo ago
My cheap freeze spray can is the only tool in my box that's dumber than me.
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jessec393mo ago
That freeze spray thing reminds me of something an old radio guy told me once about tapping components with a wooden stick while the board was running. He said the wood wouldn't short anything out and you could hear the bad solder joints crackle or pop when you tapped them. I tried it on a monitor that would lose vertical deflection after warming up for like 20 minutes. Tapped around the flyback transformer area and found a resistor that had one leg that was completely loose but looked fine visually because the solder had just cracked under the component. The weird part is that I had checked all those joints under magnification already and they looked solid. Something about how the heat cycles make the cracks open up only when the board is hot I guess. That freeze spray trick is probably doing the same thing but in reverse by making the metal contract and exposing the bad connection.
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