Suggestions for cleaning hundreds of socketed chips?

[Vincent Slyngstad]

From: "Patrick Finnegan" 
> On Thursday 11 September 2008, Jim Battle wrote:
>> You mustn't have read the thread.
>>
>> This machine is wire wrapped.  Replacing the sockets would be
>> tantamount to building the boards from scratch.
> 
> You're right that I haven't been following this thread... Still, my 
> comment stands.  I don't think I'd consider it any more work to replace 
> WW ones and re-wrap them than if they were soldered onto a PCB 
> (especially if it has multiple layers), as long as you have some sort 
> of schematice/wire list.  If you wanted to be creative, you could 
> probably cut the pins off the old sockets (or disassemble the sockets 
> to get the pins out), and figure out how to replace the sockets 
> (soldering new ones onto the old pins) without having to re-wrap 
> everything.

This is similar to a thought that I had.  Couldn't you just pop off 
the plastic bit, insert a machine pin socket into the WW socket, and 
add a bit of solder to secure electrical and mechanical connection 
between the the machine pins and the WW socket?  (You'd have to make 
sure the WW pins are anchored firmly to the board first.)

You could try just inserting the machine pin socket (without the solder), 
but I don't know that it would make much better contact than your chips 
are doing.

    Vince