Repair of remote control contact pads

Hard to say without looking at it. I have never seen worn contacts - the usual cause is the "conductive" pad that is pushed down onto the contacts when a button is pressed. Rubbing the face of that with a very soft pencil usually works a treat and lasts a fair time before needing to be repeated.

Conductive paint does what it says on the box. But you may find a soft pencil works as well, in a very low current situation such as this.

There was a pretty long thread on this on sci.electronics.repair a few months ago - should be findable with google groups.

bud--

I did rub the conductive pads with a Q-tip moistened with rubbing alcohol, which may not have been a good idea. Your soft pencil idea sounds great, so I'll try the graphite rub. Thanks for your suggestion, Sue.

- Dugie

Thanks bud, I found at least a few threads on Google. Here's one quote; conductive paint was used, but with results I expected:

"Had a JVC remote, used alcohol to clean the rubber pads and the board. This worked 5 or 6 times, although remote never worked as well as when it was new.

"When cleaning stopped working well, bought a bottle of conductive paint from a local electronics supply house, and re-coated the rubber pads, cost something like $10. This worked amazingly well at first, like-new performance. But this stuff apparently is not as durable as the original conductive coating. 3-4 months and I was having problems with the remote again."

Sue's graphic idea sounds good.

Dugie

Oops, that should be GRAPHITE. Sorry!

Dugie

I tried an 8B, the softest graphite pencil I could find. To my multimeter, that graphite is totally conductive, but didn't help. :-( Have you had success with this method, Sue?

BTW, my mistake re: the "worn contacts." The contacts are of course fine; the conductive pads are the worn parts.

Dugie

I have never found it *not* to work. Only that it may need repeating every few months if used "continuously".

Of course, there are many reasons why it might not work, including that the problem may have been elsewhere all the time - eg the contact tracks may go to a connector joining them to the main board and there might be a bad contact there, a pcb track may have a hairline crack, there may be contamination somewhere, shorting out all or part of the switching matrix, etc, etc.

The way the switch circuit works is that buttons are wired up in sets - with one "supply" line feeding, say, 4 buttons, a different line feeding another 4, etc. If you do have a break or bad connection in one of the "supply" traces, it will affect *all* the buttons using it but not the others. If that sounds familiar - it may not be a problem with the conductive pads but the ciruit traces/ connectors.

I've rubbed the pads gently at first, then used more pressure. The graphite hasn't worked once; maybe a 9B pencil isn't soft enough. Or it doesn't adhere.

Using a known good pad from the same remote, and pressing the pad to each contact in turn, all functions of the remote work. That could indicate the circuits etc. are ok, but I'm unsure if that's an accurate assumption.

Thank you for the interesting information. I'm learning that a "simple" remote control is quite a marvel, and quite complex, thus a lot can go wrong. It's a challenge now to me, one I'd like to solve, not a necessity, so if this is frustrating, I'll drop the thread.

Dugie