Cleaning your boards

Acetone works best. Just be careful with it around parts from ABS.

Hmmm, not sure if I'd feel comfortable using acetone.

Isopropyl alcohol and a stiff toothbrush to get the majority of the flux off followed by a few minutes in a heated ultrasonic cleaner (water with a little sugar soap).

Rinse in warm clean water, blow off excess water with compressed air followed by a hot air gun on medium to dry.

Boards end up shiny clean and streak free.

Smaller cleaner (2.5 litres)




Larger cleaner (30 litres)

Cool, thanks for the tips. Really just looking for a simple solution to clean my builds. I don't know about investing in ultrasonic cleaners and such, though the nerd in me totally digs that! I've read others use a mix of acetone and 99% isopropyl, but that sometimes acetone can eat through some plastics and possibly the coating on some PCB boards. That true?

Also, I've read some guys using denatured alcohol. Is there a difference between isopropyl and denatured? I thing that was annoying me last night when using a q-tip was that the cotton was getting snagged on the soldered leads, leaving little bits of q-tip cotton everywhere. Would wiping with a cotton cloth be as bad? Should I be dabbing instead of wiping?

I want cleaner builds but hate the residue streaks I'm getting now.

I've used acetone in 3 different jobs, and it's an industry accepted solvent.

It works well because it evaporates cleanly, and quickly. Clean acetone does NOT leave residue.

It also removes rosins really easily. Alcohols can move rosins slowly and don't evaporate cleanly, leaving films. Even clean impure alcohol(rubbing alcohol) WILL leave streaks.

You think the stuff I linked to above will leave streaks? It's 99.9% Ultra Pure Isopropyl Alcohol. 

I have a board cleaning spray that is meant for removing flux and resins of all kind, and it works pretty good.
It gets all residue off and leaves nothing on the board.
AND I would bet from the smell it has, that it contains loads of - simple orange oil - if this isn't even the only ingredient. I used pure orange oil before to remove really bad stains from burnt in resins, fat containing stuff combined with proteins that really have burnt in. It cleaned everything with ease after just a short time of leaving it react on this ugly stuff. Cleans pans that seem lost because of loads of burnt in stuff, even hardest burnt in bongs, lol, a friend of mine tested this after i told him about orange oil and he was totally surprised how fast and effortless it works.
In good quality it leaves nothing on surfaces and even smells really good. Also it is not nearly as toxic as the alternatives therefore it could be used in the kitchen, too. Bought it in litre bottles....

I have been using acetone since Svart mentioned it in another thread. Works great, though I will still use a little dish soap and water to remove the thin residue that happens sometimes.

svart, do you use 2 dishes, one with "clean" acetone and the other to clean the brush off in?

Pure orange and other citric oils are not corrosive per se.
It depends on the pureness. If mixed with water or citric acid it's a completely other story, though.
The stuff i used and still use is mostly etheric oil that evaporates pretty fast and therefore has some ideal characteristics to "wash" away the flux residues while leaving no residues itself and cleaning the board in most cases doesn't need any physical force on the pcb at all that could possibly stress solder joints. (Although i used the toothbrush and alcohol method myself in the past and never really cared about the mechanical stress on the solder joints....)

I ended up grabbing some 99% alcohol from the computer store and an old toothbrush. I'm finding that I need to take 4 or 5 passes at it to remove all of the stickiness from the board. Also, I'm finding it hard to wipe the board because when I clip the leads, they're usually sharp enough to snag on anything I use to wipe it down. That is, I'm soldering from the underside of the board, then trimming the leads after soldering.

Use some heat from a hair dryer or heat gun to warm the rosin/flux and it'll clean a lot easier.  Once it's hard enough to chip off, it's very hard to wipe off with solvents.

warm is better like svart said, try this, brush up the back of the pcb with your alc, then flip it onto a towel, put your thumbs and fingers in a position to control the pcb, then just make really tight and random circle actions while applying pressure, not enough to pull threads out of the towel, but big enough to get some action, you will be really surprised how clean you board will be when you flip it back over.

let us know how you do 8)