I used to use 91 to clean flux and it works fine, might have to do a few passes though
If you clean flux regularly I highly suggest getting a cheap ultrasonic bath and some branson EC solution. It comes concentrated so a bottle lasts forever and solution can be reused a few times. If you only do a few projects a year it’s way overkill but I do a lot of rework stuff and it’s soooo much easier to just drop stuff in the bath for 20m when I’m done. A used decent sized one was like $80 and the solution was like $40 for a quart which has lasted me 2 years so far because I only change the bath once a month and it’s like 2% per gallon. Also super handy for cleaning corroded pcbs, stuff like that if you do repair work
"Denatured" alcohol is just alcohol with undrinkable junk in it. Electronics grade alcohol doesn't need to be denatured, you need at least 99.5% purity instead (i.e. 0.5% or less water).
If you can't find it whatsoever, you can make it at home, from 96% (azeotropic) alcohol. Just add quicklime and let it soak that humidity. Warning: the reaction produces heat and alcohol is highly flammable, so only add a tiny bit of quicklime each time.
Source: I've worked in a lab owned by cheap fucks who expected us to conduct organic chemistry reactions with 96% alcohol. Had to improvise.
You can not really have 100% alcohol. It's really hard to get the last few percent of water out of it. Destillation is useless at that percentage and drying agents are used, but even they can't get all water out. Denatured just means that there is a bitter tasting chemical mixed in so it won't be drunken by those wanting to avoid alcohol taxes.
That's mostly correct but I don't think it's entirely accurate. Distillation is useless at the azeotropic point but ternary mixtures are used to break the azeotrope. Once you move past the azeotrope you can continue distillation to high purity. You could also do pressure swing distillation but my guess (even though I'm not exactly a chemical engineer doing unit operations for a living) is that it wouldn't be economical. Of course, getting "100%" pure anything is really a different story...
I think the point that it's not 100% is fair. It's just hardware store denatured alcohol and I assumed it was 100% since every other alcohol bottle either says proof or %, which was a mistake on my part regardless of whether it is actually 100% or not. It has always worked better for me than 91% isopropyl though and was the only other thing available.
that's fair enough. It's my bad for assuming it was 100%, I just assumed that if it wasn't 100% it would have said so on the bottle. it's just denatured alcohol as you would have(in the past) bought from the hardware store.
Often you'll get people just writing GA which is ambiguous since it could equally apply to Gabon (Africa) or other places. A bit of a pet peeve of mine. It's a good habit, in my opinion, to always prefix the country code.
It's still in stores by me, but for some reason they changed the name to "fuel" or "marine stove fuel". I had to ask last time I went because I couldn't find it either.
Just think about the most average person you know, and then remember that 50% of the population is dumber than that person. Yes someone has tried to drink it, and that is part of why its behind the counter.