Instrumenticide

Don't get me wrong. I love test instruments, but I'm going to tell you how to kill them. Why? Well, instrument sales are a little slow right now, and it's your patriotic duty as a consumer to boost our economy.

Besides, it's often easier and more cost-effective for a chronically troublesome or stubbornly intermittent piece of test equipment to undergo a little "accident."

Available everywhere, gravity doesn't always kill instruments. An ad from the 1970s showed a frequency counter that almost took flight but fell off a small aircraft's wing near the runway's end. After a technician reseated a circuit board, the severely scuffed and battered counter ran fine. More commonplace gravitational accidents occur when someone drops an instrument or trips over a power cord or test leads, so go ahead—when the bench gets cluttered, prop that $10,000 scope on a lab stool. It's worth a try.

As an instrument killer, water doesn't work well unless it's loaded with chemicals. Another 1970s ad featured a crawfish-decorated RF instrument that survived immersion in a freshwater irrigation canal. Cleaned and dried, the instrument worked fine. After all, refurbishers routinely wash, rinse, and dry test instruments.

Salt water and chemical fumes encourage dissimilar metals and electrolytes to form corrosion cells. A friend who leases instruments once showed me an oscilloscope that a customer had positioned near a plating tank. Exotic crystals bloomed everywhere in the scope's innards, and its metal components crumbled at a touch. If you want to kill a soaked instrument, don't rinse away chemical residues with fresh water.

For more subtle damage, try biological warfare. When spilled into an instrument, a soft drink or coffee with cream and sugar promotes mold and fungi whose waste products chew through insulation and metal plating. Add doughnut crumbs to attract mice and roaches, and don't forget to leave a panel loose to let the critters in.

We humans are our own worst enemy, right? Well, the guys in the next lab certainly are. To guarantee an instrument's destruction, lend it to a specialist in another discipline without including a how-to lesson. Volts, amps, ohms—the DMM knows the difference, right? Oops . . . where did that smoke come from?

While you're at it, have you tested your ESD generator lately? See how well an instrument's designers ESD-hardened their product. Maybe they didn't, and you can charge the dead instrument off to "competitive research."

When you perform elevated-temperature measurements, put an expensive instrument or its pricey probes in the thermal-test chamber together with your UUT. Along with ice cream and other substances, scope probes melt at 85°C—but who knew?

If pure instrumenticide is too strong for your taste, make a zombie. Lose your least-favorite instrument's software, break its probes, misplace that fancy interconnecting cable, and you've created another denizen of the Shelf of the Living Dead Instruments.

Killed any instruments lately? Tell me about it.

Contact Brad Thompson at brad@tmworld.com