Strange Frame Corrosion

[SDUBjed]

Strange corrosion on the case frame - thick white powdery surface you can see in the first picture around the CPU.  White corrosion uniform to the whole frame.....thinking i'll need to completely strip it down and clean it... maybe there's a metal cleaner i can use?

No spill damage I can see....HDD, RAM, and CPU tested good on another machine.  Screen is dead.

Keyboard is in Japanese I think?

 

[tanaquil]

Wow, never seen that before. From the looks of the screen, could it have been caused by leakage of some compound in the screen? Do passive or active matrix screens use a chemical component?

That is definitely a Japanese keyboard, neat. 

 

[techknight]

Stored in a salt-air acidic environment. 

Its of no surprise. 

 

[Franklinstein]

I have seen at least four PowerBook 5x0 series machines with corrosion like that, complete with ruined LCDs. Two (both 520 models) came from Okinawa, so the salt/humid air thing is easy to believe as the cause, though the only corrosion is to the chassis/case stiffener; the other metal, to include the hard drive bracket which I assume is steel, is fine. I'm not sure what the chassis is made of that causes it to do that. Maybe a weird aluminum or magnesium alloy?

I disassembled one machine (a 550c) and soaked the chassis in CLR for about 15 minutes. All of the powdery corrosion is gone now except in a few crevices. The display is still ruined though.

 

[techknight]

Those frames are magnesium. Dell was a heavy user of the same thing. 

 

[Franklinstein]

Have you heard of them or any others (I think VAIOs were also often Mg) corroding like this? I haven't seen anything anywhere before except perhaps on old aluminum things that have been left in a poor environment for a long time. Even then it's mostly just along the surface; it doesn't fuzz up in huge mounds.