Gadgetory

today we're going to be showing how to clean liquid metal and thermal interfaces off of components like CPUs IHSS and other components like this one here as you can see this one has a little bit of thermal paste that got into the socket not too much but we can solve this problem fairly easily fortunately and that is done just by we recently did a video on how liquid metal interacts with different other metals like nickel plated copper this for example it's been lapped on one side sanded down so you can see that it's copper the other side is just nickel plating and this is common for any integrated heat spreader getting the crude metal off of this isn't too hard but as many of you have asked us in the past there is definitely some left behind material and the question is often how do I get rid of it so I'll be talking about that today then there are just straight copper heat sinks like this or you could apply the same tricks for cleaning this one to something like your actual heat sinks a cold plate a laptop cool or anything like that the CPU would be silicon so you'd be cleaning liquid metal off of silicon and everything else is gonna be some variant of a metal we're looking at today so this video will help you with removing liquid metal safely from your devices so that it doesn't short anything in the future or so that you can reapply liquid metal or some standard thermal paste instead because it is something that moves around it can cause problems and sometimes it's not so easy to get rid of but we talked about this a bit in our liquid metal corrosion test video before that this video is brought to you by the thermal take level 20 VT micro ATX case the level 20 VT takes the high quality at level 20 design and makes it more affordable and shrinks it down to a micro ATX form factor at that with fully modular paneling it's possible to rearrange this case into whatever configuration you prefer for a micro ATX case that can be a discussion piece in a home theater system click the link in the description below let's start with the nickel plated copper IHS because this is the most standard thing you're cleaning off other than silicon itself you shouldn't really ever have to reapply liquid metal but if for some reason you do maybe switch systems and remove it honestly you can just take something like we like the blue shop towel is a little bit more structurally sound than standard white paper towel from a shopping like any food store so you take that put some rubbing alcohol on it and that'll kill a lot of it immediately you have to be careful with dropping any liquid metal onto small surface mount devices and potentially causing shorts now sometimes this doesn't work so well so for example if your liquid metal had been sitting there for a lot longer than this solution was you could move on to something like just a clean q-tip and we use these frequently for applying liquid metal you can see that they have a lot on there but if you take a clean one and dunk it in rubbing alcohol that's great for getting some of the more stuck pieces but if you look at this you'll see there's still some black marks and some of that is going to be permanent but it doesn't impact on all performance in any meaningful way we've we've tested it we talked about it in the previous video about liquid metal corrosion impact and not really big concern so as you see most of it's gone we get some of it on the outer edge you can either wipe it off with a shop towel or get a q-tip and clean it off with that you can also by cleaning kits so this comes with the cool labs solution and it's it's overkill you don't need this stuff but I suppose if you wanted it all in one kit you could grab it it's just it's not necessarily worth it this is just 70% rubbing alcohol that's all it is it's the same thing we just used except it's pre applied so not really anything special you'll see it still gets pushed around and that's where q-tips come in but otherwise it should just pick it up and more or less disintegrate a lot of the liquid metal that you see so we're just going to push a lot of this over and then if you wanted to you can technically reclaim that by siphoning it up how useful it is at that point I'm not sure if we were doing testing we just get rid of it and used some new stuff but also for working with cracks if you end up with liquid metal and anything small like maybe it falls off the IHS and into a small socket or something you can grab a brush hobby brushes worked great these are just cleaning brushes and these will reach into those sockets and pin holes and you can hopefully hopefully get some of it out with because otherwise it will cause an electrical short and cause problems so that's fairly cleanable just a q-tip with rubbing alcohol on it will do the trick that'll pick most of this stuff up you can push a bit harder and just get as much of it as you can just so there's no electrical shorts later and you're good to go so that's most of it as you can see just picks up like that there's a bit more we can do here you get the idea you just keep working on this until you get all of it and that's that's pretty good so we're in pretty good shape here now there is this black marring left and there's not a lot you can do about that it just know that it doesn't really impact on all performance what you can try to do is you can grab some acetone which is just if you pick up some nail polish remover at the store it should have acetone in it do not use this on silicon because sometimes nail polish remover has not not friendly chemicals for silicon so you don't need much of this stuff doesn't smell great careful when using it all that stuff but you can get nail polish remover or acetone and apply it same shop towel in this case and it will take some some pressure but you can get a bit of the black marring off so here's after just hitting it a few times with acetone you can see that we're definitely getting some of that material off that's what's left over of the gallium indium and tin so that makes it friendly with nickel-plated materials like nickel plated copper but every now and then you'll get some permanent staining like that we can keep going here you can keep applying you're not going to get all of it you'll get a lot of it but it's really not important now the cleaning kits do include sort of sponges or steel walls sometimes this is something we don't recommend you're better off just cleaning with rubbing alcohol if you want to get stains as much as you can acetone but the end of the day you'll have some stains on there and if you start using basically a sanding material you will strip some of the finish you'll strip some of the nickel plating you'll strip out if it's on the top side which obviously we don't have but if you have names or right now the top side will strip that off so we don't recommend this solution because all you're doing is scratching up the surface and yeah you'll get the liquid but you'll get everything that is on - and there's no performance hit - having that there so just just ignore it if you get it to this point you're fine you don't need to worry about anything else this we would consider this clean and then just start reapplying liquid metal I mean to the touch it's completely flat and smooth so this is staining and the reason this happens is best described with this thing so what's happening here is there is a difference in potential between the liquid metal which is a gallon sand compound and the surface of the IHS in this case it's copper so there's no nickel plating and what we're getting is ion migration where the liquid metal as applied to the CPU die which is under this thing this sort of leg that sticks up the liquid metal will slowly have some ion migration into the copper surface which causes a stain functionally your performance pretty much the same you've just plated it and it's still a smooth surface can't feel any unsmooth this it's not like it's not level and it thermally it's fine performance isn't really any different we've tested that as well so if it bothers you you can try and clean it off but just the chemical properties of this stuff mean that it's it's pretty permanently plated at this point however we can't do a bit of work on it and if you want more details on some of the chemical processes of this stuff check out our liquid metal corrosion testing video which is on the channel or we'll try and link it below so this is rubbing alcohol and you'll see that it's not really doing much we've get some up every time but not really a good choice for this so let's move on to some acetone so with acetone on here same process you can just kind of try and rub some off and you'll get a bit of it but end of the day this is pretty permanent so and this is where you could if you wanted to cause some damage and start scratching the surface he needs kind of a rougher sponge or a steel wool but it is going to cause damage so it's not worth it because it's just there's no gain from it for you so we would not recommend taking this approach it'll rough from the surface up and yeah get some of it out but to what end there's no benefit so that's how you clean that stuff let's get a CPU a piece of silicon as well just to show that that's pretty straightforward so let's find a CPU we can clean so we have a few here we have we have quite a few CPU options I'm just gonna grab this is all from our fans thank you to those of you who sent them we haven't turned them into art yet but this is just an AMD turion CPU not something you'd really be putting liquid metal on today but you could so let's do that and then we'll clean it off all right so number one thing that happens if you've seen the the first time we ever use liquid metal and also every time Linus uses liquid metal you'll see that anyone who uses the plunger on these things and even if you just do the flick of the wrist method which is what happens here if you use the plunger you might end up with a scenario where the liquid metal just sprays everywhere and that kind of sucks so best way to clean this up and beat this is the the most common thing a beginner will run into you is to get hopefully an empty syringe but you could hope you could also reuse the one that you just used and just pull the plunger and siphon it back into the tube so pretty cool how that works that's the best way to clean a liquid metal spillage if you spray a lot of it all over the device you're working on if however you actually just spread it on properly and you now want to clean it afterwards we can show that as well so in this setup presently we have some liquid metal over here we need to get that off use a q-tip with rubbing alcohol on it and just go over the area hopefully you're already pre coded this with nail polish or something so that you don't have to worry about the liquid metal but you can also go over the area with a q-tip and a and just rubbing alcohol and you'll see a lot of it's picking up right there so that's pretty clean there's one more piece of liquid metal over here I'm just gonna push that out alright so here's an example of a liquid metal application where you might want to remove it it's a little patchy it's not perfectly flat consistency is poor so this is a good time to remove it and try again if you're applying liquid metal for the first time or something and for that again rubbing alcohol blue shop towel or paper towel as much of it as he can with going over the edges and onto the SMDs you can see that we're not spilling past just the border here because I'm staying right over the middle of the dye and that will get most of it then for the rest you pull out the q-tip again wet one side with rubbing alcohol clean it off and it will be good to go then you just go over the SMDs and make sure there's no liquid metal left on those that could cause any shorting electrical shorts couple small flakes here and there but that's that's more or less done that's how you clean them so if you've been wondering how to clean liquid metal off of a component once you're done working on it that's how you do it cleaning the IHS is I think is probably the biggest question people have had and the answer to how do I get this off is you can you can get a lot of it off but not all of it the rest of it stains there and if you are like neurotic about cleaning it just try not to be because using stuff like this you start sanding down the surface and like I said it'll get the liquid metal staying off but it'll also get the metal off so that point you line up with worse performance cuz not smooth anymore and the most important thing is smooth so as long as you touch the stain and it's smooth it's not like it's a bump on the surface leave it alone reapply your liquid metal you'll be fine everything's good to go copper will stain naturally because of ion migration from the gallon stand solution into the copper that's fine if it needs more liquid metal just apply more but it's it's effectively plated so it's not causing any damage it's not corroding it you might have some pitting depending on the exact solution you're using it's certainly something that's been seen before but that would be different than the stain that I showed you today so that's it for this one as always subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow stops that directly go to store documents nexus net if you'd like to pick one of the mod maps like the one I was working on today you saw it in all the footage where we were working on the CPU component it is a an excellent modding service you can grab it on our store and thank you for watching I'll see you all next time you