Wait, which side was I on?
Anyway, excuse me while I go hook up my new 24K Gold, Quad Shielded, Oxygen Free, Silver-coated conductor, Nitrogen (N2) Gas-injected dielectric, HexMesh Jacketed Monster HDMI Cable so I can truly enjoy Tinker Bell: Secret of the Wings. Everyone knows how badly digital signals degrade without Oxygen Free Quad Shield 24K Gold! Almost got Triple shield by mistake!
By the way, having a real hard time finding a similar optical audio cable. I’d be happy with just Oxygen Free at this point! Can anyone hook me up?
Yeah, gold contacts on optical cables or magnets on digital cables are nonsense. But so far none of you has sad anything intelligent about RAM heatsinking being useless, so.. whatever. ;)
Never tested ram cooling, I don’t overclock.
I was just saying that I could see how the bare top surface of the ram chip, along with sides, pins, pcb could provide better convection (transfer to air) then flat shinny “heat spreaders”.
The surface of ram is lightly textured. Any fins, knurling or texture helps convection.
The way some heat spreader clamp on and nearly enclose the ram module.
Add interface resistance, I could see how they might not really help.
I’d go for finned heatsinks if I overclocked my ram. I’d still have an urge to stick a thermocouple to the edge of a chip to check it.
But I need to get back to the Secret of the Wings! Where did I put my 4D glasses… 8)
Is that what was going on? :~
Apologies. Seems I have trouble not getting off topic. Guess disney can’t make everything better.
To me, for 7135 drivers, it seems better to run bare solid core copper wire around the perimeter. So Its soldered to the 7135 ground tabs & press fits against the pill. Filing it if needed. I don’t bother with components that shouldn’t be producing heat. Target the hotheads, pull the heat off them and the rest will stay cooler.
4Wheelr? Why do you want potting to be reversible in the first place? The whole point is to protect and make it more reliable, or so I thought. Get it where you want it, pot it and forget it. Change your mind? Build another.
1700+ posts and you haven’t figured out that folks here get off topic? If you can’t take a bit of ribbing while getting the answers to your question, how reliable are the answers likely to be? Might I suggest a little patience, it can go a long way…especially here. And remember the forum rules. No rudeness. It’s provocative and seldom accomplishes much towards positive solutions. Just trying to be helpful.
As far as your question goes? If it’s removable it’s not really potted. I see potting as making it water proof, shock proof, reliable in extreme situations. Like as a gun mount. Or police/search and rescue type operations where a light might get submerged, rained on, dropped in mud and even beat things…human, animal or otherwise. Any potting compound that’s capable of protecting in such environments is likely to damage components if an attempt to remove it is made.
Comfy’s suggestion with the JB Weld is sound. Aside from that, it’s going to be really easy to kill the pcb instead of protect it.
I want reversible because I change my mind a lot and am cheap. I want to be able to crumble off the potting, mod more, and repot.
1700+ posts and you haven’t figured out that folks here get off topic? If you can’t take a bit of ribbing while getting the answers to your question, how reliable are the answers likely to be? Might I suggest a little patience, it can go a long way…especially here. And remember the forum rules. No rudeness. It’s provocative and seldom accomplishes much towards positive solutions. Just trying to be helpful.
My tone may have been a bit stronger than necessary, but it seemed appropriate to me. I'll apologize to everyone for that, but not for trying to get my thread back on track.
Are your saying it's ok to derail member's threads, but it is not ok to say enough is enough? Seems like you're effectively defending folks that are going off topic. Taking a ribbing is one thing. I go along with that type of stuff all the time. Look earlier in this thread. The discussion going on was not ribbing me, it was degrading to the posters them selves. It was also making it more difficult to follow the thread. That is rudeness.
Speaking of rudeness. You may want to drop the holier than thou attitude and look in the mirror.
Only defending the family forum policy, all for keeping it civil and being nice to each other. Yes, we should try to stay on track. But you and I both know this place is legendary for going off topic. It’s funny when you’re just watching a thread, can be frustrating when your’e trying to get information for a build. Been there. Got frustrated. Went elsewhere for my research. Ended up getting some good stuff here too.
I’m wondering why you can’t do some of both…use the wax to keep the potting compound from going in/under the components and use your alumina oxide to gain some thermal passage. I really don’t know though, as I haven’t thought about removing something I always figured to be permanent. I have, however, totally killed a Malkoff drop-in trying to get that white stuff outta there so I could rebuild the pill. Totally killed it.
And modded a light this evening that could have used some of these pointers. Totally forgot about them! Ended up doing a lot of time-consuming work shaping copper. And re-flowed some things together that would have been much easier with JB Weld. Maybe I can do the Permatex thing and do some filling in……
Screw the aluminum oxide (BTW, you can get it at ceramics supply stores) and go with silicon carbide. Much better thermal conductivity. Search Ebay for “silicon carbide powder” and “silicon carbide media”. You can also get it at lapidary suppliers.
I dont quite get why you want it to be fully reversable. If you pry the whole thing out and let the wires attached, you can use the driver again. Maybe Fujik, cheap enough, brittle when cold, doesnt stick too tough.
Screw the aluminum oxide (BTW, you can get it at ceramics supply stores) and go with silicon carbide. Much better thermal conductivity. Search Ebay for “silicon carbide powder” and “silicon carbide media”. You can also get it at lapidary suppliers.
Thank you texaspyro. Buried up above I linked to the following thread where you have some great info on it. I was trying to is if it is time proven now. I was going to post in that thread but it was about a permanent potting. In retrospect, I should have. Actually, I will because it would be good to see that thread get followup in it. It seems to be where you originated the idea:
I dont quite get why you want it to be fully reversable. If you pry the whole thing out and let the wires attached, you can use the driver again. Maybe Fujik, cheap enough, brittle when cold, doesnt stick too tough.
Thank you NightCrawl. Here is the driver and pill I want to try this in first. Actually, I want to do a 9 amp version driving an MT-G2. I think potting will be needed to push that driver that hard. As you can imagine, It has pcb's going in 3 dimensions and is surrounded by curved walls. It would take a good amount of Fujik to pot. Maybe I should consider it more closely. My experience is that it is kind of expensive and can be hard to remove from detail, delicate areas like drivers. Am I wrong? Sounds like I might be.
My 6 year old loves flashlights, and is proving to be a very adept reader. He not only see’s the pics of lights, he can read these messages almost at a glance. We don’t all sit in a cubicle or other private/semi-private area.
That vertical board sure increases the level of difficulty doesn’t it? I looked at one like that for my own build with an MT-G2. Perhaps the wax or wax paper could be used to split the potting compound into sections? Such that it would “break away” if you wanted to remove it? Then maybe you could pull a section for an upgrade, recast only that section. Just looking at the potentiometer there and going off that.
The silicone carbide idea seams great to me. I was on ebay to get some of that 1500 grit, and it even comes from Texas, but while they say they can ship it cheap, the shipping in the cart is much higher. 1 1/2 lbs were going to cost $12, with $10 shipping. Back to square one.
Would this silicone carbide work embedded in JB Weld? If not, what would be a good carrier epoxy for it?
ImA4Wheelr I have also wanted to be able to remove the potting if necessary. So I know where you are coming from.
What I did was use the fujik glue and add a little artic silver cpu paste (non conductive) in to the mix. Should improve the thermal conductivity, I have no idea how much though. The artic silver added in makes the mixed compound a little more crumbly, easier to remove. It still doesn’t just peel right off, but it can be removed easy enough given enough patience. It does take time to get back to a clean driver, so I try not to do that no more than necessary. There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread, just giving my experience with the fujik glue.
I have used silicon carbide mixed into epoxy for a potting compound. But that is not reversible
It appears to work good.
One thing to consider, you may not need to pot the driver into its driver cavity. Considering when a driver dies, normally one component burns, you may just need to glob the compound over the driver to help spread heat. Maybe grease the inside of the pill and then pot the driver to fit inside, touch, but be removable after it dries.
Thank you DBCstm, moderator007, and bdiddle. Good info. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
I searched for some silicon carbide too and found shipping to be a bit high in each case. I will search more later. If I find a good deal, I'll post it here. Please do the same if you find a good deal DBC. Thanks man. I'll also try to keep some of your other above advice in mind.
I ordered the first 2 listed above. Now I need to find some silicone mix that won't harm the driver. Worst case, I can get sensor-safe RTV (recommended by Comfy), but that is expensive.
Everyone knows how badly digital signals degrade without Oxygen Free Quad Shield 24K Gold! Almost got Triple shield by mistake! 
