"It's dead, Jim." ...worst corroded radio I've yet seen.

[Elroy Jetson]

I get a VERY nice condition VHF Saber I R in for repair. Reported problem: "The chassis is stuck in the housing."


Make a long story short:

No wonder.





It was frozen into the housing by all the CORROSION DAMAGE.

The control top got thrashed in efforts to pry it out. So did the mouth of the housing.

Externally, the radio looked almost new. Before...

It sort of looks like the point of entry for water (probably sea water) was around one of
the rear panel accessory contacts. But it's hard to tell. There was a little corrosion
around the rim of one of those contacts.

What's salvageable?

Well, the knobs are OK.

So't the battery latch and the bottom plate and its hardware.

MAYBE the reference oscillator could be functional.

But otherwise...no way. NOTHING else has a prayer.

The only reason the tops of those ICs are dark is because in handling
it to take it apart, I rubbed off the thick white layer of corrosion.

Even if the housing weren't now badly chewed up, the flex circuit is partly GONE
from corrosion. Salvage value is...the decals on the back of the housing.


Just thought you might want to see this.

No damage at all was visible on the exterior of the radio. NONE.


Elroy

[FireCpt809]

The bypass module looks ok???

You can always put it back to gether and put it on E-bay.. Unable to test..worked when removed from enviroment..LOL

[jackhackett]

Nice one!
I've seen some mobiles that were pretty bad, seems that on some school buses, when it rains water leaks from under the dash.. right where a lot of people mount the radios. The best were vertically mounted Maxtracs/Radius.. the water goes in the front, seeps down into the PA and has nowhere to go, the PA fills up and turns into a rather nice electrolysis tank.

[HLA]

that didn't make the housing bulge out?

[smokeybehr]

The only one that I've seen that was worse was a mobile that had been stored in a garage where there was a leak that filled the container it was in with water. It sat in that container for an unknown period of time, submerged in the water until it was discovered, full of corrosion. Not a pretty sight.

[wavetar]

Yep, I've seen some Sabers in similar condition. The worse one I saw was an old OKI 230 cellular transceiver...similar in size to a Spectra radio. Most of the components had turned to powder...had a pile of it about 8 inches square & rising to about 1/2" in the middle where I had poured it out!

Todd

[Bruce1807]

I had an Astro Spectra that came from a police boat.
The boat sunk in 16 ft of water and was submerged for a week.
i never even opened the radio as when you shook it it sounded like a half empty bottle of sprinkles.

[Do-Anything]

I'm still laughing at the Title! I'll post a few pics of some radio soaked in battery acid.

[Elroy Jetson]

No, the housing wasn't bulged to any noticeable degree..but then again, this was a Saber R radio housing we're talking about. If it
were any tougher, it'd be rated for containing small hand grenade explosions.

However, I did have to get it several quite decent whacks with a hammer to break the corrosion adhesion to the inside of the housing,
to get it out. And I still managed to do a good job of wrecking the control top, which is too bad as I'd have salvaged it if I could have.
(Just the plastic part.)

Just for fun I dumped the board into my ultrasonic jewelry cleaner/parts washer to see how it would clean up. The motherboard actually
cleaned up pretty well, considering. But there's no chance it would work again as there's clearly some swelling of the PC board ITSELF
around the PA module, and some traces are gone, and a lot of components have pretty much evaporated.

Elroy

[mike m]

Ive seen some messes but yours is at the top of the mess list.

I remember a tech describing a Ge Phoenix SX that came into the shop with problems.

When he removed the cover of the radio he found that the entire board was coated in a brown substance and that he smelled chocolate coming from the radio.

To make a long story short the driver would drink hot cocoa throughout his shift and he would spill his drink on the face of the radio and of course it worked its way into the radios inside and eventually made it stopped working.

After heating the radio up the tech was able to sift out all the cocoa and he eventually got the radio working again.



Mike

[Eric R]

While it was no where as bad as your example, I did open a radio to find some parts missing and a pocket new testament in their place. I guess that was the only thing the previous tech could do for it.

[jackhackett]

I used to get Spectras now and then that had something spilled on the front panel that actually appeared to eat away at the plastic, the display bezel would be clouded, buttons starting to deteriorate. I'm not positive, but I think it was McDonalds milkshake.

[WB6NVH]

I once had a Pulsar II IMTS phone come in which looked very nice from the outside. Inside looked just like that Saber. It had apparently been in a truck which had wound up being stuck on a beach when the tide came in, was submerged overnight, and after being towed out, sat in an impound yard for about a year. There wasn't a board which was salvageable in the whole thing, so the entire drawer went in the dumpster.

[kb4mdz]

It's not as bad as some you guys have described, but I was working in Seacoast area of New Hampshire in '88 & '89. Man came in from the construction company working on the lift-bridge between NH & Maine; brought in a STX.

Story was, couple boys dropped it in the water. These boys remember someone telling them 'just keep it in a bucket of water til you can get it to the shop'. So they did; got a 5 gal. plastic pail, & scooped up some river water & left the radio in it.

Major problem number 1: Shouldn't have listened to this 'authority';
Major problem number 2: If they had left it in water, it should've been CLEAN water; de-ionized, distilled, whatever.
Major problem number 3: River is the Piscataqua (sp?) river, just inside the mouth to the Atlantic; so no way it's fresh water, it's SALTY TIDAL WATER!!!

Major problem number 4: It was 3 days before they handed the bucket to their supervisor when he returned to the jobsite.

Major problem number 5: Radio was turned On when it went into the drink.... ewwwwww, extra, extra, current- & voltage-enhanced corrosion!! But the colors were pretty.

Ugly way for a radio to die.

Hmmm, what was the list price for a STX in 1988??

(months later the company had a workplace accident in which a worker who was riding the counterweight of the bridge reached out and got quickly ummm, separated. Permanently. Irrevocably. Irreparably. OSHA,-etc.-got-involved-ably. I concluded their treatment of radios was just a small sign of their treatment of everything else; especially workplace safety.)

[Glen W Christen]

The local railroad dropped an HT100 (yes, 100) from a bridge into the river about June. Late September, someone saw it lying on the mudbank and took to to the yardmaster in a bucket of water. I drained the water and let it dry. When I applied power, it had squelch noise but I gave it last rites anyway.

[mancow]

I used to get Spectras now and then that had something spilled on the front panel that actually appeared to eat away at the plastic, the display bezel would be clouded, buttons starting to deteriorate. I'm not positive, but I think it was McDonalds milkshake.

I spilled one of the vanilla McDonalds milkshakes on my work car's floorboard one night and had no time to clean it up. That :o turned to something like epoxy resin. There was no way to get it out. I soaked the floorboard in hot water for hours and it didn't budge.

It's truly caustic and should be illegal.

[firefighter105]

I used to get Spectras now and then that had something spilled on the front panel that actually appeared to eat away at the plastic, the display bezel would be clouded, buttons starting to deteriorate. I'm not positive, but I think it was McDonalds milkshake.

I will never have another one of their milkshakes after learning that from mr. hackett.

thanks for that. Another vice of mine taken away LOL..

JK

Jason

[N7LXI]

Slightly off topic, but along the same line.

I work in broadcast radio and one evening while in my office, I heard the station suddenly go silent.

I ran into the studio and saw the jock staring at the console, white faced.

Mind you, said console was a brand new Pacific Recorders & Engineering BMX-III, pretty much the Lexus of radio consoles back in the early 90's. Cost more than that jock made all year. Including bonus pay.

He was pointing silently at a mostly empty 2 liter bottle of Grape Crush. The majority of the contents of this bottle were now inside the console merrily eating away at the channel cards. The chief engineer got the jock on the air in the backup studio and pulled the cards, sloshed 'em in distilled water and then put them in a bucket of 99% Isopropyl Alcohol. (We kept bottles of the stuff on hand to clean tape cartridge and reel to reel deck heads)

After a few days, and some vigorous scrubbing of the frame, we slotted the cards and all worked fine. Had we not caught the spill quickly, that console would have been toast.