Disclaimer: This post is rated VS (very sad); continue reading at your own risk.
Extreme temperature testing is nothing a hobbyist is normally even thinking about. The 94V-0 flammability rating that is printed on most production PCBs basically states that the PCB (and only the PCB) would stop burning within 10 seconds after being subjected to vertical combustion. For more detailed reading about this topic, I recommend IEC 60695-11-10 and 60695-11-20 and ISO 9772 and 9773.
I had the opportunity to test all (ha!) my PCBs for flammability and wanted to share some results.
First up is a panelized small board. The disintegrated weaved fiberglass layers are nicely visible. Copper traces are totally gone, the green hue might be oxidized copper or leftovers from the blue soldermask. Colours behave funny in heat, I found a glass orb that used to be stained blue and now was completely clear. Original pictures of the small panel for comparison.
And here is one of my Pixi analog boards with holes, pads and traces still visible. Yes, this is an Arduino Uno shield, again with the original boards for comparison.
Components also seem to be somewhat fire retardant. A unidentified board with visible skeletons of resistors and a TSSOP-20 chip. Not sure if they make good Halloween decorations.
Other interesting stuff:
A wire clipper, which btw won me a Rock'n Roll speaker to start my lab again.
Enamel coated cups and ceramics survived the best. Tools like pliers and tweezers, even stainless, not so much. And a dishwasher safe ceramic bowl in a not so happy dishwasher.
Exact temperatures are not known as the test setup was rather random. But I have fund Pyrex bowls melted into blobs of glass or fused together in shape. Things like my beloved Metcal GT-120 soldering iron and 858D hot air pencil did not stand a chance and the trusted Tek MSO2024B simply disintegrated during the event.
GT-120 and 585D 
:
This all happened to me earlier this year during the Tantallon wildfire in Nova Scotia, which burnt down 150 homes including mine.
Kids, listen. Data back-up is important, but it only works if it is off-site either on somebody else's computer (the cloud) or diligently managed by a swarm of carrier pigeons. Here is an ASUSTOR 1102 NAS drive with 2x 4TB hard-drives. I doubt any data recovery service is going to find any '1's and '0's in the correct order on this one.
If you are wondering why I even wrote this post; talking about it is part of the processing of the events and dealing with the aftermath in a (sort of) lighter way helps me moving forward. The old projects needed some sort of closure before I can move on, recreating some of them again or using this as an opportunity for doing something completely different. Thanks for reading.
- W.
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