Curious about the quality of my new ESD earth bonding point plug

Joined
Nov 16, 2021
Messages
5
I recently acquired an ESD mat to place on my worktable. As the mat itself has a 10mm stud built into it for connecting it to a ground, it came packaged with a bonding point plug. Said plug is rated for 10⁶Ω and has two 10mm studs and one banana plug.
I've taken and attached a photo of the interior of the bonding point. As I'm inexperienced, I'm wondering if anyone else sees something potentially amiss that I don't?
 

Attachments

  • esd.jpg
    esd.jpg
    353.3 KB · Views: 0
Haven't seen the inside of one before, tbh. Is it actually 10M Ω resistance to ground when set up properly?
 
  • Like
Reactions: travm
like this
It's cheap plastic garbage. Since the resistors are sleeved, it's not known how they're connected to the studs, but I'd imagine they're just looped around and press fit into the plastic, which is a terrible way of doing it.

As the plastic ages, the pressure from the rivet is going to cause it to warp and cause a bad connection. On the other side, it looks like the resistor leads are just wrapped around one single wire and not soldered, yet another connection problem.

I'd also hope those aren't carbon composition resistors, because those can drift in value and eventually go open circuit with age.

Unless you have some exceedingly sensitive electronics, you don't need an ESD mat. But since you already have it, I'd redo all of those connections because it's cheap garbage destined to fail.
 
It's cheap plastic garbage. Since the resistors are sleeved, it's not known how they're connected to the studs, but I'd imagine they're just looped around and press fit into the plastic, which is a terrible way of doing it.

As the plastic ages, the pressure from the rivet is going to cause it to warp and cause a bad connection. On the other side, it looks like the resistor leads are just wrapped around one single wire and not soldered, yet another connection problem.

I'd also hope those aren't carbon composition resistors, because those can drift in value and eventually go open circuit with age.

Unless you have some exceedingly sensitive electronics, you don't need an ESD mat. But since you already have it, I'd redo all of those connections because it's cheap garbage destined to fail.
Thank you! I probably should have mentioned that I'm using this mat for soldering work as well.
By the way, I went ahead and had a little fun dissecting it so you might have something to chuckle and/or sigh at. The resistors used do seem (correct me if I'm wrong) to be rated as advertised, and... I don't have anything else to add that reflects positively on the product. 🤭

Oh, and regarding the third photo: One of the three wires, which was longer than the other two, was attached to the earth pin using about one Planck length of solder. The other two wires merely had their ends lazily twisted around the first one (see the first attached image in this thread for a "before" comparison).
 

Attachments

  • ohm_my_god_the_quarterback_is_toast.jpg
    ohm_my_god_the_quarterback_is_toast.jpg
    269 KB · Views: 0
  • bananarama.jpg
    bananarama.jpg
    436.1 KB · Views: 0
  • ground.jpg
    ground.jpg
    210 KB · Views: 0
Last edited:
Yeah, those are crappy carbon composition resistors.

And again, unless you're working on super sensitive electronics an ESD mat isn't needed unless you're in a room of van de graaff generators and tesla coils, but then you'd have an entirely different set of problems.

I've been doing electronics repair for 25+ years, and I've never used ESD mats or those stupid shocker bracelets if I wasn't forced to. Back in high school we had those cheap trash "ESD bracelets" that I called shocker bracelets because the ground was right over the nerve junction on the underside of your wrist and would bite you constantly. In all of those years, I've never killed any electronics with ESD. Not to say it doesn't happen, but the scare mongers in the industry probably have stock in the companies that sell those garbage products, which is why they recommend them.

To put it into perspective how much people don't really care about ESD, CuriousMarc and Mr. Carlson on Youtube both work with hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, including vintage equipment that's 30-90 years old with no ESD mats or shocker bracelets and they're just fine.

Just touch something grounded, or the device ground itself to equalize out the potential difference, and don't rub your feet on the carpet while you're working on something and you'll be fine.
 
I've been doing electronics repair for 25+ years
same but only killed one thing, a k6 2 450. dead of winter, working on carpet, should have known better....

mats and these straps are silly. put a steel screw in a psu, plug it in but leave it off and its a ground point, touch it.
 
The only close call I had was an S3 something AGP video card decades ago. Again, in the dead of winter and I had touch it for some reason. Had a couple of 1" long electrostatic discharges directly into the legs of the GPU ASIC while it was running.

It kept on trucking for years after that. Still have that thing in a drawer somewhere, probably need to get it out and see if it still works.
 
Last edited:
Woah, woah, I didn't want to start some sort of debate on ESD or whatever. At this point I'm mainly interested in stuff like being able to easily clean up random crap such as stray solder droplets, having catchment areas built into the mat for placing crap related to whatever I'm currently working on in (as a nice addition to the usual compartmentalised sorting containers I use), et cetera.

Also, the stud that's part of the mat itself is removable by unscrewing it with a flathead. :sneaky:
 

Attachments

  • do_you_are_have_studid.jpg
    do_you_are_have_studid.jpg
    100.1 KB · Views: 0
Now I'm very confused. Is that mat made out of conductive plastic? If it's just regular plastic, it's not going to do anything.
 
Now I'm very confused. Is that mat made out of conductive plastic? If it's just regular plastic, it's not going to do anything.
Electrically conductive silicone. The surface resistance alleged is 10⁶Ω.

I don't plan on making use of any its ESD-related features any time soon, and I definitely don't plan on dropping several grand on an ANSI/ESD S20.20 compliant surface resistance test system (or what have you) to find out if it really does live up to its claims.
 
Back
Top