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Ask Slashdot: How To Safely Saw Up Motherboards?
James-NSC writes "I like to do arts and crafts. I've been saving up motherboards for a while as a new medium and I started working on it last night. I wore the same gear I wear while painting – fine particulate respirator and safety goggles. I just cut some templates out of some motherboards and when I was done I used the shop-vac to clean myself & workspace up before removing my mask. Even after 5+ minutes, in a well ventilated area (not as well as it should have been apparently) my first breath was pins and needles. I'm looking into containment and exhaust solutions – ala baby's first iron lung, but seriously, am I nuts? Are these materials just too toxic to work with?"
Motherboards are essentially epoxy bound fiberglass. If you are going to be sawing it up, you need gear that is designed for extremely fine stiff fibers. You need filtration equipment suitable for removing fiberglass, or better yet asbestos, particles from the air.
Good luck. Try not to give yourself lung cancer.
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Or things even worse. You can do this, but you're going to need pretty hefty realtime dust collection; I suppose it's possible that a Rainbow water-curtain vac might be enough, but I'm not sure.
I'll bet someone else will be sure. :-)
And I'm not sure if you can finish off the cut edge of a board to a point where it won't unravel -- or at least, how you would do so.
People *do* do this: I have a favorite notebook whose covers are circuit boards. But it's non-trivial.
Even after 5+ minutes, in a well ventilated area (not as well as it should have been apparently) my first breath was pins and needles.
Your first breath? Try breathing more often?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Don't breathe that stuff in. You might catch a virus.
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
When cutting things that make lots of dust, its best (if possible) to cut them underwater, or submerged in a fluid. This way none of the particulates become airborne.
Asbestos on the other hand is a bi-product of a fungus
quack alert !
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Once it gets into the air, fine fiberglass dust is going to remain there a good while. It's light enough that it will effectively never settle in any useful amount of time, and your typical house probably doesn't completely recycle its internal atmosphere nearly fast enough to solve the problem that way.
If you are going to be doing much of this, you might want to consider building a negative-pressure work area large enough for your tools and workpiece to be comfortably manipulated:
Basically, a reasonably adequately sealed box(doesn't need to, and won't, be airtight, because of the negative pressure) with a slot for you to stick your hands in, a plexiglass window to see what you are doing, and a shop vac or similar pulling air out of the box and through a HEPA filter. Because of the suction, air will continually be flowing into the box(preventing the egress of most dust, even though the box isn't fully sealed) and the dust-contaminated air will be filtered before it leaves to ruin your day. Still probably not a bad idea to have the outflow vent outdoors, rather than into the room; but the filter should scrub most of it.
First off, you need the correct saw blade.
Most motherboards (all? I've never seen one on phenolic), are G-10 fiberglass.
G-10 Fiberglass is nasty stuff. While it will not give you cancer (this has been studied because people thought fiberglass seems similar to asbestos, but it isn't) it's definitely an irritant. Your lungs will expel the fibers.
That said:
Wear a dust mask. A full nose-and-mouth mask from the hardware store is fine. You don't need to go overboard.
Use a vacuum pickup.
Use the correct saw blade. A silicon carbide blade (particles bonded to a steel band saw blade) is ideal.
You also might want to try using a tile cutter saw that uses an abrasive blade and flood water cooling.
Don't try to cut with a steel blade.
--
BMO
You are using neither the proper tools nor proper containment nor proper suit nor respirator for machining fiberglass. It is dangerous, it can damage your lungs, eyes and other parts of your body, it can give you cancer.
Can you maybe score one or even both sides with a razor knife, then snap it ?
Unfortunately, there will be more to it than that, with a finished motherboard: solder, quite possibly pre-ROHS and whatever other components are left on the board are going to be getting the saw treatment as well.
We can only hope that no beryllium copper is present in any of the components requiring excellent conductivity and spring properties...
I'm surprised that you didn't mention subluxation once. Don't you need a Doctorate in Chiropracty to discuss cancer?
Asbestos is a rock you idiot. From peridotite mostly - you know the damn mantle where funguses are not exactly common.
10cm carbide blade table saw: http://www.bastli.ethz.ch/index.php?page=bastli_circularsaw including vacuum attachment.
Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTVCvn05nYQ&feature=player_embedded
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Just hold your breath for the duration of the sawing + another five minutes just to be sure.
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It ain't friendly to flood your neighbours' airspace with fiberglass particles.
don't use a saw. Use pressure.
The way they cut the motherboard safely for notebook covers is by using multi-ton presses. The even use presses to punch out the rivet holes for attaching the hardware to the cut motherboards. There will be no particulates to speak of but the only drawback is that you can only cut straight lines. If he is wanting to cut out anything more than a straight edge he might have to experiment with nibbling away small sections until he gets the shape he wants.
With a little thought he could probably design an adequate press using commonly available bottle stye hydraulic jacks. A few things he needs to be aware. Since the cutting time will be slower than a industrial press, it is possible he will splinter the board along the edge being cut. This can probably be avoided using a sharp cutting edge, or possibly a scissor type cutting action.
After the piece is cut, a little urethane should be enough to seal the edges to keep them from unraveling.
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Easy - just do it outside on a real windy day. The wind will carry all the nasty junk away.
Correct me if im wrong, but doesnt the velocity of the blade influence the debris cloud. You'd probably still have a few airborne particles, but it seems that using some industrial scissors would produce less dust-like debris; instead you might get chunks of on leftover mobo. It might be a poor analogy, but consider slicing through a wood plank with a table saw. Then cut that same piece of wood using a well placed swing from a heavy axe. The table saw would produce a pile of saw dust while the heady blade would cut straight or produce wood chips.
OP has very good advice. Take it. Understanding what negative and positive pressure can be very important in circumstances like this.
Ever wonder why dust collects so badly inside your PC? It's a negative pressure environment - the main power fan at the back blows hot air OUT of the computer, causing air to rush into every crack and orifice in your case, making your expensive electronics into a poor quality air filter. The dust collected is a byproduct of this fact.
I once was called in to deal with a computer in a very dusty environment. (they raised pets) Their computer required extremely frequent cleaning and despite this, they had numerous hardware failures. The CD ROM drive was pretty much always useless no matter how often it was replaced. Using a medium-sized box, a cheap 8" fan, and HEPA air filters and lots of duct tape, I made a large, low-pressure air filter that blew large amounts of HEPA purified air into the computer, creating a positive pressure inside the case of clean, filtered air. A year later, the computer had only traces of dust and was working perfectly, including the CD ROM drive!
In PPs example, you want to create a negative pressure environment to keep dust from getting OUT.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
In a 'shop making telephone boards in the '60s, we heated the sheets in ovens before the big presses hit them. Put our pies for lunch in those ovens too. Then, open drilling and open flow-solder. Citric acid for drinks came from the (gold) plating 'shop - "other bottle, boy, that one's the cyanide". Never did *me* any harm.
I see what you're saying and it sounds like, "MOM i'll be up for food LATER i'm listening to a speech by AYN RAND she's so COOL!"
No, we don't want to be in a world where idiots die. Nor do we want to be in a world where people offering good advice are shouted down by angry impotents like you who have no real power so instead assert your superiority over the most vulnerable.
Let's instead live in a world of balance, where those who are less able receive a degree of support which doesn't put impossible burden on others but which does lift them up to the point where they are safe and able to join in.
At least remove the electrolyte capacitors and the cmos buffer battery before cutting.....
I understand that you use a complicated technological product, which is considered to be special waste, without having read the necessary documents on ho to process (if that is possible) this product.
that would be the same as the instructions for a ShopVac bong.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Everyone understands that asbestos is not fungus derived.
Everyone might NOT understand, however, that bullshit in one part of a post is contagious and infects the rest of the post.
They are a pretty recent invention and not many people know about them. They are made to cut glass and can cut intricate curved shapes. They use water for cooling the blade and all the debris ends up in the tank. There is no airborne dust at all, and its relatively quiet for a saw. I have one and it's a fantastic tool. You can hold and cut tiny pieces by hand and even run your fingers into the blade without fear, yet it will easily cut cleanly through metal, glass and ceramic. I found a nice demo video of one at http://www.gryphoncorp.com/index.php?p=ringsaw. (I own a similar ring saw made by Taurus). They are the perfect tool for cleanly and safely cutting circuit boards into artistic forms.
Well, if you put a lovecraftian angle on it, maybe asbestos is the fossilized crap of the Mi-Go, the fungi from Yuggoth? I have to admit, though, that if this is the most rational explanation I can up with, there might be a problem with the whole argument...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I use G-10 to make circuit boards at home and the best way I have found to cut it is with good metal shears. This does not produce dust or particles in the air. You can even cut curves with a wide arc using an aircraft type left or right cut shear or use lots of short straight cuts to cut a pretty tight outside curve. I have also used a "Nibbling Tool" to nibble away small chunks. Most of what I have done is on single or two sided boards and mother boards are multilayer, but it should work. You could seal the cut edges with either some epoxy or perhaps a "super glue".
As the owner / primary crafter of girlgeekboutique.com, where we make jewelry and accessories out of circuit boards, I have tried various methods. I'll start with the one I currently use.
1) Ginormous guillotine paper cutter bought cheap off craig's list: cheapest, safest, fastest method I have found -- but with some significant limitations
Upsides:
* Cheap, easy to find, easy to use
* Chops straight through the boards with (almost) no fine particulates escaping into the air. Very little to clean up.
* If you can hold the board steady (with pressure and sometimes with the aid of high-friction material between the circuit board and guillotine surface to help prevent slipping), you can cut very nice straight lines
Downsides:
* You can only cut thin circuit boards -- well, unless you have a newer, sharper, larger guillotine than I have and/or are much stronger
* You can only cut straight lines
I also use a sander (in front of a powerful window fan that takes the particles out of the house) with fine grit paper to smooth the edges.
NOTE: I use thin, component / solder-free circuit boards found at an electronics surplus store. Dealing with cutting lead solder and components, I have decided, is just a bad idea in many ways. I will sometimes pry the components off and make them into jewelry separately (see http://girlgeekboutique.com/ for examples), but I do not use circuit boards with solder on them. It is sad to see them go to waste (though, of course, you should always recycle them!), but there are simply too many toxic materials in them for me to feel comfortable cutting them up and giving / selling them to others. Most other crafters feel the same way, and use circuit boards without components.
Having said that, some other crafters are more hardcore and *do* use recycled circuit boards (with, at least, the large components removed), solder and all:
2) Scroll saw
Upsides (second hand):
* One of my fellow Etsy sellers uses one with "metal/plastic blades" and she creates very unique circuit board jewelry, sometimes in curved shapes like hearts (Clone Hardware)
Downsides:
* She goes through many blades just for one circuit board
* I tried one and, though I was probably not using the "right" kind of blade, it kept catching on every raised contact or bit of solder, making it impossible to smoothly run the board through
* All of the above warnings about toxic particulates being thrown into the air
I have also had several people suggest dremmels to me, but those also solve none of the problems mentioned above.
3) High powered sander
Upsides:
* With the right grit sizes and sander power, you can sand straight through a circuit board relatively quickly and then swap to a finer grit to take care of details and smooth off the edges
Downsides:
* EVERYTHING is being turned into dust. I only tried this outside on a windy day with a mask on, but it was still just a very bad idea -- even with solderless circuit boards.
I appreciate the ideas in the above posts and plan to try some of them. I am particularly interested in the ring saw. Does anyone have actual experience cutting circuit boards with these?
Sincerely,
"Captain Girl Geek" of girlgeekboutique.com
(a long-time slashdotter who just created a new account because she hated her old username >^-^ )