Hellerman sleeves turning to goo?

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I always called it Weepy British shrink because of the Neves and SSLs it was found on. I have seen quartersized holes burnt through the circuit boards due to its interaction with power rails. I spent many hours removing it from SSL 9000s. The Aux section was very prone and it would drip onto logic and routing. It would break into little pieces an fly every where on the module. Hellerman it was!
 
All of these petroleum based products can suffer the same fate..Sennheiser 409 and 509 foam turns to goo all over the capsule,
The latest is the Sonnex on the wall in a vocal booth for ten years, falls off in a pile of crumbley goo.. the fella at sonnex seemed to think it was part of it's normal life cycle.. both, a real mess.. they go back to from whenst they came...
 
transient said:
Hellerine is still available, although I still have the 10 fl. ozs. bottle bought from Future Film Developments. The MSDS describes it as "Gliding Oil on the basis of vegetable oil and ethanol". The oil is "ricinus oil", better known as castor oil, so it's quite benign. The problems we are encountering seem due to the decomposition of the chloroprene.
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Yep, I still have the bottle of Hellerine that I bought in 1987, it seems largely unchanged (color, consistency etc.) so probably pretty stable stuff.
 
Update! In thinking about how to approach this, I thought I would start with checking the resistance across Pins 2 & 3 in the output XLRs. I did...got some weird readings, different between Ch-1 and Ch-2 (like around 10-12k for one and around 2.5k for the other). Then, I un-soldered the 2 conductor shielded cables that run from the motherboard to the i/o boards, at the motherboard end. Just for laughs, I repeated the measurements and I was seeing around 110k across 2 & 3, with just the cable connected. Then I removed the three cracked, sticky Hellerman sleeves and measured again...open circuit! So, these particular sleeves have definitely become conductive. Just metering a sleeve reads about 1.2 Mohm. Hopefully re-dressing the cables and cleaning up the board where the sleeves dripped goo will set this to rights. Will report back. Edit: One thing I neglected to mention; the motherboard ends of these cables have a Hellerman sleeve over each of the three leads, and then these are all tucked under a piece of heatshrink. Its the point where they all come together under the heatshrink that they are making contact. Just did the same exercise with the Line inputs with similar results.
 
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...and a bit more follow up...I also had to remove and replace all of the rubber sleeves in the AC wiring. I actually got a shock through one of the sleeves on the fuse holder when I accidentally brushed against it.
 
Ike Zimbel said:
...and a bit more follow up...I also had to remove and replace all of the rubber sleeves in the AC wiring. I actually got a shock through one of the sleeves on the fuse holder when I accidentally brushed against it.
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Be careful out there! There is a thread in the Brewery for logging shocks - I believe @CJ started it or is the most frequent poster. o_O

EDIT: Electrical Shock Log Book
 
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I was installing a huge 8068 in Stockholm.
We decided that, as we were leaving at the end of the first day, we would switch off the power supplies,
just in case. Loads of smoke from one of them. I switched it back on, and the smoke stopped....
Watching my two assistants get their heads round that one was the most entertaining part of the day....
 
Hellerman sleeves are great. But like anything have to be changed. Cleaner look than wire ties.
 

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