silver conductive pens

[phreak97]

today i was at my local shopping centre (westfield marion) and decided to look in dick smiths electronics, because i still had a $50(aud) voucher for them. once in there, i looked for their pong kit, which comes with a pcb and all the components required to make a little pong tv game. but i didnt see one, and figured i probably want something more useful anyway. i remembered seeing a conductive silver pen at a different store, so i asked the guy behind the counter and they had one, i dont think it was as good as the one from the other store, but i didnt have a voucher for the other store so i got it anyway (it was AU$35!).
i did my first repair with it just a couple of minutes ago, practiced on a dead md2 mobo to begin with, then moved onto the nes cart i had which has a trace eaten right through by some mysterious corrosion. i drew a line (it's not as easy as it sounds.. it works the same as a liquid paper pen, so it's not brilliantly accurate) accross the gap in the trace (after scraping off the green mask) and then tested the resistance, it was about 4 ohms.. which was probably made up partly by the wire resistance in the meters leads. so im impressed. it works brilliantly once you get past the whole accuracy problem. wish i had this yesterday when i was kicking a hole in my door after accidently breaking through the traces on the stupid fucking plastic crap in the ps2 controller. too late now, i got ultimately pissed off and massacred it with a craft knife.

overall i recommend these silver pens to anyone, even for the price (i mean, they use real silver in them, so what do you expect from the price?) also it says it can be soldered to at low temperatures.. i dont really have access to low temperatures, my iron is magnetic temperature controlled, so it has 360C or room temperature (off:P) but im gonna try anyway.

[kendrick]

I want to add that this stuff is equivalent to solder for conductive purposes only, and it's no good for anything structural. The goo in which the silver is suspended is a sort of clay with bits of aluminum and cellulose in it. It you want to reconnect traces like Phreak did, or if you want to permanently join a jumper like I did, it's perfect. If you want to firm up the circuit board connection for an RCA jack, you're probably out of luck and should be using real solder.

Good stuff, though. Great for import mod work. :)

-KKC, taking bets on how long before the Xbox 360 gets modded. I say, two months?

[phreak97]

yeah, i guess i assumed people knew that.. thanks for that addition.

[Akir]

I do suppose that they're cheaper then the gold ones though.

[phreak97]

lol i didnt know you could get gold ones.. they'd cost a billion dollars lol