Meaning of Widlarize | Babel Free

Definitions

To destroy (a defective electronic component) using a hammer.

slang, transitive, uncommon

Examples

“Now, when I have finished my inspection, and I am still mad as hell because I have wasted a lot of time being fooled by a bad component—what do I do? I usually WIDLARIZE it, and it makes me feel a lot better. How do you WIDLARIZE something? You take it over to the anvil part of the vice, and you beat on it with a hammer, until it is all crunched down to tiny little pieces, so small that you don't even have to sweep it off the floor. It sure makes you feel better. […] And the late Bob Widlar is the guy who showed me how to do it.”

“Abuse of them by people who don't care about the RF they generate is leading certain people to buy up and Widlarize ones floating around hamfests.”

“[…] I recommend that you join me in doing this "Widlarizing" when a bad component fools you. You will feel a lot better.”

“I decided to "Widlarize" the failed drive, first dropping it 4 feet onto the floor (1/2" thick carpet with concrete underneath). To my surprise, about half the chips popped off the PC board! […] Close inspection of the failed joints seems to indicate a failure of the bond between the solder and the copper of the PC board.”

“A diode-like interconnect once cost me, another engineer and a tech 3 days once – we narrowed the fault down to a resistive divider that didnt work linearly. replacing the protoboard fixed the problem; the old one got Widlarised.”

“[Bob] Widlar's intolerance for defective parts and malfunctioning prototypes was so intense, he was in the habit of destroying them with a sledge hammer. This came to be known as "widlarizing" them.”

CEFR level