The Case for Lead-based Solder

[sark02]

This thread is gold.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

plasmo wrote:

Oh, yes, I used lead solder ever since my teenage days building Heathkits. I continue to use lead solder to this day.

For me, it was the Knight kits sold by Allied Radio (now Allied Electronics), the first kit being a VTVM. I used it for almost 10 years after I built it. Lots of soldering in there, all lead, of course.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

sark02 wrote:

This thread is gold.

Yep! We turned lead into gold.

[kernelthread]

Well, I must have breathed in quite a lot of lead from leaded petrol in my first 30 years. Of course you can never prove a counterfactual but it doesn't seem to have had any obvious bad effects.
I think there's a missing sense of proportion in a lot of this stuff these days - like people trying to ban tobacco smoke outside. By the time it's been diluted in outside air the amount of smoke inhaled by third parties must be absolutely miniscule and incapable of any measurable harm, but that doesn't register with the zealots. I don't smoke myself, but I get annoyed by the knee-jerk reflex of just wanting to ban things for spurious reasons.

[barrym95838]

I think the point the "zealots" may be trying to make is that smoking bans and other things like motorcycle helmet laws are designed to reduce the burden on the health care and insurance systems, to the benefit of all. I don't have the statistics to validate the significance of those measures, but it should be obvious that the burdens they attempt to address are not exactly zero. Cigarettes are a diabolical addiction ... believe me, I know. I started at age 19, quit at 32, started again at 45, and am struggling to quit by 58, to complete the second 26 year cycle. By the time I reach 71, maybe California will have done me the favor of placing them beyond my undisciplined reach.

[floobydust]

I also grew up working with gasoline, engine oils, other fluids, lead-based anything and everything and IBM gold-can cleaning fluid (trichloroethane, 1,1,1), not to mention their purple cleaner (similar to Formula 409) that was an extreme alkaline based concentrate (would dissolve your skin).

Ensuring that the appropriate warnings are included with any hazardous substance/material is always a good idea. Common sense should always be exercised when using any such products. Sadly, common-sense has become anything but common these days. People do stupid things, then expect others to compensate for their lack of discipline and self-control... who knew.

As for soldering... just take basic precautions and you'll likely die from something other than lead poisoning... preferably old age, but the powers that be will ensure your death certificate shows it was something else

[BillG]

barrym95838 wrote:

Cigarettes are a diabolical addiction ... believe me, I know. I started at age 19, quit at 32, started again at 45, and am struggling to quit by 58, to complete the second 26 year cycle. By the time I reach 71, maybe California will have done me the favor of placing them beyond my undisciplined reach.

Have you ever considered vaping instead?

Still a habit, but one that many consider less objectionable. Probably not as bad for you healthwise.

I say probably. Anyone remember two and a half years ago when people appear to be dying left and right from e-cigarettes if you watch media reports. It was a public health menace second only to fentanyl! Then came a suspected virus outbreak in Wuhan and the world turned upside down. I cannot recall any news about vaping since except for the government going after Juul.

The news was zeroing on the problem possibly being people buying cartridges "on the street;" no telling what they may contain.

[AndersNielsen]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

AndersNielsen wrote:

So far everything points to ANY amount of lead in your system is bad.

I don’t know if that is an entirely accurate characterization.

Lead occurs naturally in ground water and all living things have been ingesting water with trace amounts of lead in it for millennia. At the risk of being Captain Obvious, it’s likely evolution has caused organisms to adapt to and tolerate lead content as a matter of survival. It’s also highly likely you are regularly ingesting small amounts of lead each time you drink water, consume coffee and/or tea, eat food cooked in water, etc. While in-your-system lead above a certain level is definitely harmful, few of us are exposed to that much lead from casual sources.

Quote:

And no matter what you use: Slightly cranking a window won’t cut it - flux fumes are bad for you too and a carbon filter fan isn’t that expensive.. your health might be.

I’ve been building electronic gadgets since childhood (I built a very simple radio when I was eight, which involved soldering) and have probably had more flux fumes enter my lungs than most could imagine. They must not be that bad, seeing as how I’m 77 years old and still fully cognitive (although my wife might not be 100 percent on-board with that claim). Jus’ saying.

Weeeeell, those people ingesting lead for millennia also used to die at half your age so I'm not sure that argument ages well I'm not saying lead vs health is completely linear but the amount to statistically steal IQ points will probably surprise most people.

"Veritasium" made a rather good video on the subject, with very very thorough source material.
https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA - "The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History"

[GARTHWILSON]

AndersNielsen wrote:

the amount to statistically steal IQ points will probably surprise most people.

The vapor pressure of lead at soldering temperatures is extremely low; and that lead vapor is not going to go in a direction that's any different from that of the flux fumes which we keep out of our faces, even if only to be able to see what we're doing.  I'll repeat: At the boarding school I spent years at as a child in another country, our water was brought to us in lead pipes, yet a very high percentage of those kids went on to become doctors and engineers.  As long as you're not eating chipped-off paint with lead in it, you'll be fine.  Your brain is in greater danger from fluoride in your water and toothpaste.

[sburrow]

AndersNielsen wrote:

Weeeeell, those people ingesting lead for millennia also used to die at half your age so I'm not sure that argument ages well I'm not saying lead vs health is completely linear but the amount to statistically steal IQ points will probably surprise most people.

I don't want to be antagonistic, but I want to state a point or two:

1) Folks back in the day lived quite longer than a lot of folks do today, but we are *told* that most people died early by "the experts". We do have antibiotics and other things keeping us alive longer than expected, and honestly just better hygiene in general (i.e. we use soap/disinfectants before surgery). But people back in the day were eating real foods and herbs, and didn't have pharma drugs. The human body is amazingly adaptive to the surrounding environment.

2) IQ is so relative and subjective it's not even funny. I have no clue where I would place (I don't care though), but anyone who totes themselves as some 'smart guy' with a high IQ completely misses the point. We all have talents and build up skills, and if they are not used, they become wasted, degenerate, and forgotten. If you were implying "IQ points" as a pop culture version of saying "brain cells" then sorry for my misunderstanding.

GARTHWILSON wrote:

the flux fumes which we keep out of our faces

Well, I don't keep it out of my face, and my windows are not cracked much. I know that if I am soldering for about 2 or 3 hours straight I start getting dizzy, my eyes and head hurt a lot, etc. But that's not from lead, that's from flux fumes. WHICH would be present in both leaded or lead-free solders!

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

Yep! We turned lead into gold.

Haha! Yes.

Thank you.

Chad

[AndersNielsen]

sburrow wrote:

AndersNielsen wrote:

Weeeeell, those people ingesting lead for millennia also used to die at half your age so I'm not sure that argument ages well I'm not saying lead vs health is completely linear but the amount to statistically steal IQ points will probably surprise most people.

1) Folks back in the day lived quite longer than a lot of folks do today, but we are *told* that most people died early by "the experts". We do have antibiotics and other things keeping us alive longer than expected, and honestly just better hygiene in general (i.e. we use soap/disinfectants before surgery). But people back in the day were eating real foods and herbs, and didn't have pharma drugs. The human body is amazingly adaptive to the surrounding environment.

"Folks" most certainly did not "live quite longer than they do today". Malnutrition was one of the biggest parts of that statistic.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-globally

Edit: Of course I don't mean this in a confrontational or aggressively argumentative way, in case it unintentionally came off that way

[BruceRMcF]

kernelthread wrote:

Well, I must have breathed in quite a lot of lead from leaded petrol in my first 30 years. Of course you can never prove a counterfactual but it doesn't seem to have had any obvious bad effects.

The lead gets into the bloodstream from breathing in aerosols from the exhaust that contain lead. It was shown quite clearly to result in higher lead blood levels and neurological damage in areas with higher than average levels of car exhaust, such as near busy urban intersections where traffic was idling waiting for a stop light.

[wayfarer]

when I was about 10 years old or so, my dad worked for a plumbing place, Shepherd and Cushman, and as I was very small I would get sent under a house to inspect or make repairs.

All copper plumbing I have ever done in my life, was with lead free solder.
When you solder pipe, you turn the water off, make the 'weld' and turn it back on.
That water is under 50 lbs of pressure and will shake those pipes like a storm when it refloods the system.
If the lead free solder was weak, it wouldn't hold to those kinds of forces.


I remember the first time they sent under a crawlspace. They gave me a flashlight and a blowtorch.
I was 10 and was "there are spiders down here the size of my faaaace!"
and they were like, "we gave you a blowtorch..."

[GARTHWILSON]

wayfarer wrote:

If the lead free solder was weak, it wouldn't hold to those kinds of forces.

I think the difference here is the type of forces.  Pipe joints would be more soldering component leads into thru-plated holes, rather than the situation with surface-mount.  I wonder if also the mixture of metals is different, since electronic components probably can't handle temperatures nearly as high as what pipes can handle.  We have definitely had trouble with lead-free solder cracking with SMT, and the cracks are always fixed by again melting the joint (by hand, with a soldering iron, and applying a tiny bit of leaded solder with rosin flux in it).  We get boards with parts falling off of them even in shipment from the assembler in Taiwan.  I guess they just get in too big of a hurry to make things cheaper-cheaper-cheaper and don't read instructions, or maybe they think we won't notice.  We read the riot act to the supplier since we've made such a big deal to emphatically state that our stuff must not be RoHS.

Along similar lines, only partially related but this thread seems to have run its course, we also specify that they are not to use water-soluble flux when assembling our sensitive analog circuits.  I put it in bold in the readme files, and Richard, the office manager who also does the purchasing and communicates with the supplier, also makes a big deal of it, and last month we got a batch of boards assembled with water-soluble flux, and half of them failed.  Richard sent me some of them to try to figure out why there were so many failures, which I did.  The boards looked clean, but there was a film of water-soluble flux that was slightly conductive, causing very high resistance connections between adjacent parts and upsetting bias points on the op amps.  There wasn't time to send them back to Taiwan and say "Do it again, this time the way we told you!", so our people had to take the time to use a strong solvent and scrub those boards and then use compressed air to blast the liquid out from under the SMT parts where there's only something like a thousandth of an inch space.  They all came to life.  I wonder if they would read the readme files if I named them dontreadme instead!

[wayfarer]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

wayfarer wrote:

If the lead free solder was weak, it wouldn't hold to those kinds of forces.

I think the difference here is the type of forces.  Pipe joints would be more like thru-hole soldering, rather than surface-mount.  We have definitely had trouble with lead-free solder cracking with SMT, and the cracks are always fixed by again melting the joint (by hand, with a soldering iron, and applying a tiny bit of leaded solder with rosin flux in it).  We get boards with parts falling off of them even in shipment from the assembler in Taiwan.  I guess they just get in too big of a hurry to make things cheaper-cheaper-cheaper and don't read instructions, or maybe they think we won't notice.  We read the riot act to the supplier since we've made such a big deal to emphatically state that our stuff must not be RoHS.

Along similar lines, only partially related but this thread seems to have run its course, we also specify that they are not to use water-soluble flux when assembling our sensitive analog circuits.  I put it in bold in the readme files, and Richard, the office manager who also does the purchasing and communicates with the supplier, also makes a big deal of it, and last month we got a batch of boards assembled with water-soluble flux, and half of them failed.  Richard sent me some of them to try to figure out why there were so many failures, which I did.  The boards looked clean, but there was a film of water-soluble flux that was slightly conductive, causing very high resistance connections between adjacent parts and upsetting bias points on the op amps.  There wasn't time to send them back to Taiwan and say "Do it again, this time the way we told you!", so our people had to take the time to use a strong solvent and scrub those boards and then use compressed air to blast the liquid out from under the SMT parts where there's only something like a thousandth of an inch space.  They all came to life.  I wonder if they would read the readme files if I named them dontreadme instead!

Im trying to tool up here, if there is something Wayfarer Technologies can do for you, let us know and Ill add it to the list and the business plan. All my people including you all here say 'build an mvp, find a customer'.