Here’s How Computing Museums Care for Rubber Parts - 30pin

ComputersMobile and Pocketable

Caring for Rubber in Vintage Devices, the Curators’ Way

5 years ago<br>by<br>Yuri Litvinenko<br>• 6 min read

Many retrocomputing enthusiasts have to deal with decayed elastomers. Here’s some advice from museum professionals and lab members.

Hard drives in old Macs, like this one kept by a Kyiv-based company MacPaw, are affected by rubber degradation. Oleksandr Rupeta / NurPhoto / Getty Images<br>The author of this article would’ve loved to claim that he was targeted by Big Rubber while reporting; alas, it was nothing more than a chemical process. It all started with an attempt to restore a Macintosh computer from the early 1990s, during which it was discovered that many of those Macs came with hard drives which turn faulty due to a degrading rubber dampener. Then, as I started working on this piece, rubberized sides of my vintage HP iPAQ handheld were discovered to be cracked. Newer devices were prone to degradation, too: this Christmas, I have inadvertently gifted a Nixon watch with a soft-touch coating which turned oily and sticky.

Rubber does decay—even more so if we’re talking about old electronics and other vintage devices kept as collection items or objects of personal nostalgia. Amateur collectors do not usually have access to the same resources and expertise as specialized conservation institutions, and treating pieces of personal tech as things worth preserving doesn’t span as many generations as with many other artifacts.<br>With decades of institutional research, it would be strange not to ask professionals for some advice applicable to home collections. 30pin has surveyed several museum professionals and people in academia about preservation of rubber and rubberized materials as applicable to old consumer electronics.<br>“Disgusting Tar-Like Substance”<br>Mesoamerican people processed rubber thousands of years ago, and further experimentation by Europeans and Americans led to an explosion of applications in the 19th century. Conservators hence had to devise ways to preserve rubber artifacts well before the modern enthusiast community was formed. In a 1988 study published in AICCM Bulletin, Sharon Blank of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art noted that rubber “is already posing problems in museums,” and listed several conservation practices. More research followed, with some compiled into guidelines—like the one by Canada’s heritage department—for use by accredited museum professionals.<br>Meanwhile, retrocomputing enthusiasts were forming their own takes on conservation which largely focused on the looks and ignored professional standards. Many people in the scene are still keen on de-yellowing old plastics with homemade peroxide-based gel (dubbed “retrobright”), a process which alters the structure of the material and does not prevent it from turning yellow again. The community is filled with stories which would make a museum curator gasp, such as the one a high-profile YouTuber using a Dremel saw to open a rare computer.<br>Dissolving an old floppy drive motor wheel from a 1980 HP-85 computer. Dennis van Zuijlekom / Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0What gives rubber and other elastic polymers their key capability—to return to an original form after being stretched or pushed—is their molecular structure. Building blocks which these polymers are made of are connected by carbon-carbon bonds to each other. When these chains are broken, rubber gets softer, noted Blank in his study; when they are linking together, the material gets more rigid and brittle.<br>Buttons, grips, and other rubberized components of many old electronics tend to turn into a sticky goo under uncontrolled, real-life conditions. “It seems to happen to different degrees depending on the material, and it crosses many industries,” says Gravis, a US-based pseudonymous vintage electronics enthusiast behind the Cathode Ray Dude YouTube channel. He describes having to deal with the rubber decay on old laptops, PDAs, and weatherproof broadcast cameras: “Sometimes it just becomes unpleasant to touch but doesn’t really leave much on your hands; other times, it’s a disgusting tar-like substance that melts like peanut butter as soon as you touch it and leaves hideous black streaks on your hands that are hard to wash off.” Several mid- to late-2000s devices became sticky after a year or two of keeping them away outside a climate-controlled environment, Gravis notes.<br>Museums, especially ones which focus on consumer electronics, face the problem on a wider scale. Will Wood, content director of the newly opened Mobile Phone Museum, says they had to recycle some cellphones from their collections because “they are so sticky, and they are so disintegrated.” Registered in the UK, the museum lists over 3,500 devices including duplicates—and, per Wood’s estimates, “about 5 to 10 percent of our phones have some sort of cosmetic issues—with plastic, battery, that kind of thing.”<br>That’s how bad a...