It takes an idiot to use a random welding shop air hose to clean out computers (maybe i'd even pass it off as an honest mistake), but it takes a special kind of idiot to keep going after visibly destroying the first PC!

Not even a quick check to see if it still worked...

Stupidity should never be underestimated.

Qualifications don't often enter into the equation either. I've come across both PHD holders and people with no formal qualifications at all who appear to struggle with basic things like shoelaces or jacket zips.

Come on, you can say it, everybody's thinking of it : Boeing.

Yup. And at a senior level. Possibly very senior.

It would explain a lot...

I call bullshit on this.

Welding shop and workshop air is usually as clean and dry as it's possible to make it, if there's any oil or water in it then something has gone badly wrong.

I've cleaned *many* PCs in utterly filthy workshop environments like welding shops with compressed air and a blow gun, I've *never* blown chips out of sockets or damaged anything.

you need clean / dry air for things such as plasma cutters and painting

but for air tools such as grinders / drills / etc it is common practice to inject oil into the airline to lube the tool

the water in teh airline comes from not having an air dryer (and probably not regularly draining the air receiver tanks)

Fair cop, yes, oil injection is used for air tools, but as we both said, if there's water in the lines something has gone badly wrong.

One of my past jobs meant I worked on PCs and other electronics in hundreds of places that built things like narrow boats, bridges, repaired cars, HGVs, earth moving machines etc. and I have never damaged anything by cleaning dust and other crud (often mouse shit) out with shop air.

Maybe I got lucky but the numbers suggest not.

You were probably not stupid and used the air at an appropriate distance and not trying to find out if you can run the pc by back feeding it from spinning a case fan, or other such hilarious adventures. a small amount of oil and even water in a line is unlikely to actually damage most computers

15 percent water, and 5 percent oil ..... really?

Really.

The oil deliberately, to lubricate the tools being driven by the air (drills, for example).

The water because when a gas expands fast (like maybe when you blow it out of a hose), it gets colder. Google "Joule Thomson effect". Any water vapour in the air will, when it cools, condense.

IF you really really need the air to be dry (e.g. for a plasma cutter) then you can put a thing in the line to achieve that... but if you don't really need it, you just compress ambient air, which might be quite humid, depending on the weather that day. But if you're just driving a hand drill and you've got a bit of oil in there, well, the water isn't really a problem.

BUT... this is why you VERY CLEARLY label the (possibly) multiple air sources. You don't want to mix up the plant air and the breathing air, for example.

In 2017 I used a workshop to spin up a fidget spinner. Got it up to quite a few thousand rpm, made an excellent noise. I eventually dropped it when it started getting hot...

If you want to clean an object or area, never use compressed air. It just blows the muck somewhere else.

Use a vacuum with proper filtration.

Dust is often conductive, always abrasive, and in some environments, explosive..... Believe me.....

Also, never clean a fan with air - either sucking or blowing - without making sure that it can’t rotate first. You may very well break it. Speaking as that idiot that did do such damage!

At rather more than 45 rpm?

Back in the early 1950s TVs were the new domestic technology and few people had one. An aunt and uncle had one of the first in the area. My aunt looked in the back of it one day and found a lot of dust so she cleaned it out with the vacuum cleaner. They were given a loaner whilst it was under repair but it never got returned.

> Dust is often conductive, always abrasive, and in some environments, explosive..... Believe me.....

We need to know more, maybe submit the story

Normally there should be an air dryer installed downstream of the compressor. If powering an air tool such as an impact wrench, there may be an optional in-line oiler installed just before the connection to the tool

I've seen one oiler used to serve whole bench runs.

Not always: there are special types of oilers for compressed air in workshops, which provide lubrication for impact drivers and other pneumatic power tools.

It depends about the use of it. Normally even small air compressor have an air filter regulator with some oil. If the compressed air it's used for pneumatic control system, some oil it's needed to lubricate the valve. If one needs air without oil there are oil filter that block the oil.

Water on the other hand isn't a good thing on compressed ait, and there are water traps in filters for it, and of course one has to regulate the compressed air pressure used for different cases.

Also if you have air, water and oil together it can form an emulsion.

I wouldn't like to even place, let alone open a PC up in any metal-working environment. That is just asking for short circuits with all the inevitable metal fragments

If you think metal fragments are bad, try doing it in a composites workshop with carbon fiber

Or a reprographics shop with toner about. It was the floppy drive that suffered rather than the tape drive.

I once worked somewhere where there was a major fire (~10 fire engines). The laptops in the affected part of the building really didn't like inhaling all the smoke and whatnot and were all sent away for specialist cleaning. We wondered why they weren't just replaced as the cleaning was expensive. I think all the cleaned computers died after a few months anyway...

I've told this before, but it bears repeating.

Magna Science Adventure Centre (or whatever it's called these days) in Rotherham has areas named after the four "elements". In the "fire" pavilion there is something called the Fire Tornado*. A Copper dish has 100ml of kerosene dosed on to it, is heated from below by 4kW for a minute or so (the kerosene has to start vapourising) several large fans are spun up and a spark ignites the kerosene, leading to what can only be described as, ahem, a tornado of fire, coiling its way up the flue in the ceiling.

As you know, while you can get "low smoke" kerosene, even the best of it, in barely-controlled burning situations, is emphatically not no smoke.

In the same room as the fire tornado? Half a dozen (maybe more, I can't remember), projectors (also plasma TVs etc), merrily sucking cooling air in from the room through some utterly inadequate filters, designed to trap office dust, not carbon-black. The first projectors began to fail after just a few months and opening them up revealed circuit boards and optical components covered in soot.

We (or, rather, a colleague) fabricated some sealed ducting with air piped in from a cleaner part of the building. I think the installers helped towards the costs, but frankly it should never have been built like that in the first place!

M.

*last time I looked it was still there, but it's over 20 years since I worked there and things do change. The Fire Tornado was one of my babies and required quite a lot of coaxing into life in the early days. It was affected by atmospheric conditions (the weather), quite apart from all the usual problems you'd expect

It is surprising what a PC can put up with inside. Opened a PC controlling a CNC milling machine once... to find black oil had misted in. A nice old mess in there.

One of the best was paving slab manufacturing in an old barn. Even though the office was the other side of the building in a separate room, each horizontal surface was covered with half inch of fine cement dust. Piled up on each of the add-in cards. And as this was Pentium era, that was a lot of extra cards to pile the dust on. Hate to think how much of that had got into the hard disk. Or staff lungs. Could have done with an airline that day.

When I use airlines, I always blast the desk with them first to check power and water content. And remember to jam screwdrivers in the fans to stop them spinning and cover the HDD breathe hole. When used right airlines work well in industrial places - especially now we have SSD so no more dust in drives.

One of my clients was a polymer compounder, lots of nasty particles, tungsten was a good one - really fine particles and uber abrasive. There was a requirement to put a PC on the shop floor so we were coming up with a spec for the required enclosure, IP66 or IP67. Speaking to various potential suppliers one said "That's higher than a Main Battle Tank!" - not sure if that was true, but I certainly felt like I had my big boy pants on!

Speaking to various potential suppliers one said "That's higher than a Main Battle Tank!"

Back in the old days, the British Army's Challenger MBT serving in the UK and Germany was notorious for appalling reliability. Come the first Gulf War and it had fantastic performance, which was put down to the dryer environment, so perhaps they should have specified IP67 (or made it effective). Maybe it was IP67, but that wasn't enough - I'm sure there's somebody round here will know in more detail?

I need more coffee this morning it seems. It took me far too long to realize that when you said "jam screwdrivers in the fans to stop them spinning" you meant while the computer was off, so that the compressed air doesn't spin them, and not while the fans are actively running.

I once got a PC in for repair from a guy who carved gravestones.

Sensible guy, he realised the computer wouldn't like the dust, so he sealed up every hole in the case.

I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did before things started to burn out.

Needed a new motherboard and case and worked fine afterwards. When he got it back, he moved PC into the next room and ran the monitor, keyboard and mouse cables through a hole in the wall...

At around the same time, I was the engineering buyer for a factory that produced various liquid and powdered products. Occasionally, we'd have visits from prospective customers, who came in for a tour of our state of the art, automated production facilities.

Naturally, some of the production areas could get quite dirty, so the customer visits were always proceeded by a big clean up around the factory. One such day, a recently employed production assistant was tasked with cleaning up the office areas, including the process control booths.

Noticing the state of many of the keyboards attached to the various DEC VT100 terminals (I did say it was MANY years ago), she decided they'd all benefit from a good scrub and proceeded to do just that in the sink in the factory break room.

A couple of frantic phone calls, and several called in favours later, we had a taxi full of replacement keyboards on the way from the local DEC distribution centre. I forget the final bill for the episode, but it was well into four figures, not counting lost production time.

Given the price of VT keyboards I'm not surprised the bill was high, however from experience they could survive a scrub sometimes.

We had a keyboard that had been Tangoed so with little left to lose we disassembled it and gave everything a good scrub under warm running water. After leaving it all to dry thoroughly (which was possibly the key) and reassembling it we found it worked perfectly.

That DEC kit was fairly bomb proof, I'd left a VT220 in the computer room which then suffered a catastrophic fire due to an electrical fault in the room next door. The terminal case was heavily distorted and melted but just for the crack we did try plugging it in. The screen was a bit dim but duly came up, "VT220 OK"!

Legend had it that the old IBM model M keyboard could survive washing, even in a dishwasher. I can confirm that this is not true.

I once gor a frantic call from a friend who was wriring a book on the family's Fat Mac while her baby sat in her lap.

Her: "Help! Andrea just spilled orange juice into the keyboard and it won't work!"

Me: "Is your computer under warranty?"

Her: "No. It's too old."

Me: "Fine. Fill your bathtub about eight inches deep with cool water, letting the water from the faucet run through the keys. When you're done adding water to the tub, put the keyboard in, swoosh it around gently, and let it soak for four hours. Then, take it out, let it drain into the tub, and put it somewhere safe for three days to finish drying out. After that, plug it in and see if it works."

Her: "But that might ruin it!"

Me: "It's already broken, and there's no warranty left to void. If this works, then great. If it doesn't work, you haven't lost anything. Right?"

Her: "Yeahhhhh ..."

Three days later, my phone rings.

Me: "Hello?"

Her: "It works! Thank you!"

I use my leaf blower to clean my PC's every couple of years, but not from too close as it's a powerful tool and fans will spin rather fast when the air hits them.

I have been doing it for decades and it's never done damage though, the first time I ever did it (back in the 90's) I did blow the PC over. Fortunately no harm was done and subsequently I have supported the PC properly. I always run the leaf blower for a little bit first and give it a shake to ensure it is free from bits so nothing but air is going to hit the PC.

A leaf blower is definitely not an inside tool so I use it on the patio where it's very satisfying to see the big cloud of dust instantly emitted from the PC. GPU heatsinks do seem to be dust magnets but nothing large volumes of high speed air can't fix

.......YMMV

You might find your pressure washer is very effective for the keyboards.

Compressed air can be very dangerous to human health. There is a fairly well known case of apprentices who, for a prank, fired a blast from an airline at a lad who was up a ladder with his, er, back towards them. He died at once from intestinal shock. Another thing I would not do is use an airline to clean under my fingernails, due to the danger of embolism, in fact I would take care not to spray myself full stop.

It's why factories have signs all around compressed saying how dangerous it is. You're not even supposed to blow the dirt off your clothes using it.....but everyone does.

Hence the failure of the naval experiment to use ultra high pressure compressed air. Microscopic leaks proved almost impossible to prevent, & were ultrasonic. That wouldn't have mattered if those leaks hadn't also functioned as a highly effective scalpel on any meat-based material that came within range. Imagine walking down a service duct & your arm just falls off...

Otherwise, in 25 odd years in the car trade I never encountered an in-line dryer on a compressed air line except in body & paint workshops. Even in line oilers were rare as it precluded use of compressed air for "drying" cleaned metal parts. The best equipped workshops (so newer dealership 'shops in practice) had oiled & oil-free outlets at each bench. Everyone else just dribbled a few drops of oil into their air tool's inlet periodically, which was perfectly adequate.

> he blew memory chips and any other loose bits completely out of the motherboards."

Obligatory [1]Italian Job quote

[1] https://youtu.be/h5lJPvCJprE?si=Rq-sfHqNE43R018I

Wilson, Mr Wilson ?

An engineering degree with an idiot attached is about what one might expect were Dennis the Menace to survive into adulthood.

Became a structural engineer for Boeing — I am surprised that their aircraft doors don't pop out while in flight. :)