On Mon, Dec 04, 2017 at 01:54:08PM -0500, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Caution: the lithium batteries used in various computers to keep time-of-day running, and to retain other information (as in "Mac PRAM battery"), have good odds of *leaking* and emitting hydrogen or other gasses. The results are very, very damaging, and often not repairable.
There are other materials that also will cause damgage during decay. Certain foams will do that. The black antistatic foam that was commonly used for storing IC's break down and eat the IC legs away. A HP digital scope board I have used some double sticky foam to attach plastic rails to the board. It ate the traces under it and rusted steel that was an inch or so away. I attempted to jumper the bad traces but it still won't pass self test. I have seen some plastics that when they break down also cause corrosion. Other foam will break down and loose sticky foam bits will spread and are a pain to clean after they spread but don't seem to do damage. May be good to try to keep track of what should be checked when conserving an artifact. That information would be useful to other collectors. What other stuff have people run across?