Easy mamejay, Arkhan maybe be strongly opinionated, but hes a good guy. He was not personally attacking you either so try not to make it personal. Nice work on the retrobright. Its the bromide in the plastic, a fire retardant, that makes it yellow. Supposedly eventually the amount of bromide in the plastic will get used up and stop yellowing. Keep it up.
Fair enough.
@ Arkhan
You method is the first I have heard of it. I will give it a try but its just strange that no where on the web do they talk about using just straight bleach and sunlight. I thought the retro guys wouldbe all over this. Anyway
I will suck it and see
Uh, I did
NOT say to use bleach. I hope you haven't tried it already.
I said use clear peroxide developer. It's
peroxide. I said this in my post that you quoted to gripe about. If you investigate the ingredients in retrobright, you will see you are basically playing bathroom chemist. You add a bunch of junk to the peroxide to make it a paste. Xanth gum and glycerine don't do anything else really. The result of this paste is that you often get uneven/inconsistent results. You will not get this if you fully submerge the plastic in clear peroxide solution. I suggest 40 volume clear developer. You can get it at basically any beauty supply store.
I've covered this a few times here. It's also been covered on Amiga and C64 forums. If people don't want to listen for whatever reason, that's not my problem. I'm not the one with yellow or unevenly de-yellowed hardware.
A friend has gone as far as to put a C128D in a plastic bag full of peroxide, vacuum sealed (with a shopvac), and left out in the sun. It works. You don't have to mix a bunch of stupid crap together either.
Also, the oxyclean anyone may suggest you add to the process is another waste of time/effort/money.
Anyway, the method works. If you don't really believe it, keep in mind: Girls have been combing peroxide through their hair and going out in the sun to achieve highlights for like, 50+ years now.
That, and all of the crap some of us C= people have bleached over the years is proof it works.
The ingredients needed in a successful de yellowing of plastic are:
Strong peroxide
Sunlight
That's it. Sunlight = UV rays. If you have no sun because it's winter, go buy a tropical lizard UVB bulb. They're the same thing. A 5.0 UVB bulb will do the trick. Stick it in a reflective dome to increase the output of the bulb.
