Wow I just realized that I did not practice good safety years ago when I used to solder stuff. Now I have p100 filters for working with solvents and de-lead soap and all that.
But that picture of the solder scourer made my brain tickle in that really uncomfortable way when you realize you fd up.
Now I should go look up whether or not smoke from melting/burning diodes is really bad for you. Probably it is :(
Good analysis. That said, this is one of those things where, yeah, if I soldered more than a few times a year, I'd probably worry about it. As it is, cumulatively speaking I probably breathe in more hazardous crap when I'm driving than when I'm soldering with a fan blowing the smoke away from my face.
Leaded solder just way easier to work with, unfortunately. I agree. I’ll stick with it because some simple precautions make just about every “danger” involved moot.
This and don't eat, drink or smoke in the lab. I remember my material sciences professor relating the story that blood lead levels for a certain group of pieceworkers dropped considerably when they banned smoking at the workplace.
It's better for you if you aren't breathing the rosin smoke which comes out in greater quantities at the higher temperature you have to use. Since there are an awful lot of people breathing rosin smoke maybe there's still a place for lead solder. (Pragmatically, vents are not very common, and few people will buy a vent when switching to lead free.) Rosin smoke is a serious danger and the number one cause of occupational asthma.
I hadn't heard about rosin fumes being dangerous until this thread. I'll definitely have to learn more and work on some better ventilation in the future. I do love that smell though!
> people breathing rosin smoke maybe there's still a place for lead solder
This statement is what the author is trying to shoot down. "Thoughts that sounds safe" when in reality they aren't and hurt people along the way.
There are times when pragmatism isn't the way to go. Pragmatically, leaded gasoline was everywhere, it's too difficult to change. Pragmatically, emissions are so expensive to deal with, we shouldn't.
If you are exposed to rosin smoke, you need good ventilation, not switch to leaded solder which is what you're implying here because when you switch to solder you've got a whole host of other problems to deal with that are way worse.
For those do this regularly to gain asthma, OSHA (or equal) needs to step in.
Articles like these and activists push us towards better legislation when pragmatism does not.
>If you are exposed to rosin smoke, you need good ventilation, not switch to leaded solder which is what you're implying here
That's not what I'm trying to imply. I'm saying that you should buy a vent before you switch to lead-free because even though you need a vent or a mask for any kind of solder, your need increases when you switch. If you switch and don't buy a vent your total health might actually go down.
Tin whiskers are a fact [1] and a reason why military and space applications only use leaded solder. I want my electronics to be reliable and last a long time, which is why I'll never use lead-free solder. Leaded solder is safe as long as you take basic precautions (e.g. use a fume extractor, wear gloves, don't lick the solder [2]).
No, lead vaporizes at much higher temperatures than ones used for soldering. But the flux/rosin fumes are major lung irritants and can exasperate or even cause asthma.
Skin contact if you don't wash your hands. But more seriously, ingestion of small pieces of solder. Little balls of solder get everywhere in the surrounding environment.
I wonder why new "we will all die to tin whiskers" articles stopped appearing 5 years ago. It used to be a really big thing, but now even all the new military projects are RoHS without any issues.
Did not get your link to Jim Williams article. Care to elaborate?
In my (limited) exposure of products failing in the field due to whiskers, the mitigations included coating the entire board in some kind of film, and changing layout to make the board less vulnerable in the first place. Probably designers just got good enough at that to the point where it doesn't matter
Conformal coating is not related to whiskers, it's to prevent condensation damage in certain applications. Used where it is called for regardless of solder type.
Some of the linked articles in this comment section claim that conformal coatings mitigate whisker shorting because the whiskers can't pierce the coating.
A lot of it has to do with the platings on component leads/terminations. Within the last 10 years it's become clear just how well component manufacturers have dialed things in. They had to go pretty far to do that, though. I know the amounts used are miniscule, but it still amazes me that cheap commodity ICs have leadframes plated with palladium and gold, and dirt cheap resistors have ruthenium in them. (All very, very expensive noble metals!)
Jim Williams used to lick solder as he was soldering as did other old-timers. Another observed behavior was licking the thumb and wiping the joint immediately after soldering.
Later he developed Parkinson's disease (probably related [1]) and died of a stroke.
For casual hobbyists I don’t agree it’s safe (I used to think so though)
A professional is usually working in a dedicated workspace completely separate of a working area, and that distinction alone is important.
Everyone is aware they should wash their hands after working with lead solder, but if you’re working where you live, it’s all too easy to contaminate areas that you often come in contact with.
I remember trying to clean out my solder sucker one day and realizing the sucker was literally atomizing solder. Just cleaning that thing probably contaminated a good radius around my desk.
And I mean you can say “just wipe down the desk”, but that’s where the hobbyist aspect comes in, a lot of people will do this on a desk with a keyboard and a mouse, maybe a carpet, a ton of places for little bits of solder to hide.
They’re doing things that a professional probably wouldn’t do too, accidentally getting solder balls all over the place and stuff.
I’ve decided it’s not worth the risk. 99% of my soldering is through hole components you could solder with your eyes closed.
Most hobbyists are not doing the volume of soldering that any extra work with non leaded solder is going to be terrible anyways. And they’re also often not going to take precautions like wearing gloves and buying a fume extractor for the same reason
If you're doing this in your kitchen, stay far, far away from lead.
If you're doing this in your commercial building's electronics lab, where food and drink is prohibited, and there are only electronics people around... leaded solder is going to win.
If you're doing this in your factory, where your processes are tightly dialed in and you're moving mountains of product... now you can use either one just as easily, so there's no reason to risk lead unless the customer or application demands it.
Applications in the military and aerospace sectors are exempt from EU RoHS regulations. Some medical devices may also be exempt, but this is rare. (None of the medical devices I've worked on have been exempt.)
(The US generally follows the same pattern, by industry alignment rather than law. It's actually nice for the US: we get all the benefits of industry-wide RoHS adoption, but with the ability to painlessly "opt out" for any reason at all.)
I realized that I never took precautions when soldering, I mean soldering on my main computer desk, not cleaning it afterwards, not cleaning my hands, and doing it in a closed room without opening the window.
I should be more careful in the future, fortunately I rarely solder and for short periods of time, like 5 minuts just to fix a wire that got disconnected or change a capacitor, so I don't think it will do any harm, still better to take precautions in the future.
I need to research this more, but my impression is it should be fairly easy and affordable to get tested and, if necessary, get chelation therapy to remove heavy metals from your system.
Anyone with knowledge on the topic that can weigh in?
On the flip side, lead-free solder has gotten my last 3 GPUs on the cheap as 'non-working" when all they needed was 15 minutes in the oven to help reflow the solder.
Remove all the heat sinks and anything else you possible can, preheat an oven to 385 (might want to use a thermometer and some thermal mass if your stove kicks on real hard so you don't overheat), make some tinfoil balls/pyramids and use that to elevate your card above the board, make sure most of the mounted components face up, cook for 10-15 minutes, VERY CAREFULLY remove it, or just turn the oven off and let it cool down again so you don't risk knocking anything while it is semi-solid, reapply heatsinks with new paste and install and test.
Sometimes they need a bit more time or a few degrees or to be done more than once, but it works most of the time. Do not get your oven too hot or you risk causing components to fall off, it isn't actually reaching full melting point, just close enough for solder cracks and tin whiskers to self-heal.
I probably don't need to say this but don't do this with a card that works because it is a small risk. The key is keeping a stable temperature and not rushing it. Ive never had it fail on me, but that could just be luck of the draw.
Tin whiskers aren't the result of lead free solder. They are a result of the tin coating on component leads. If you take a close look at that nasa page you'll see that every photo is of just a component lead/termination.
Tin plating has largely been replaced by tin alloys at this point which has more or less solved the whisker issue at a large scale.
I never heeded much caution when soldering using lead solder growing up. When I got to university, the department employed a long-time soldering professional, with NASA certifications, etc. She was very knowledgeable, but visibly suffered from what I assumed was chronic heavy metal poisoning - hair loss and visible skin problems. It was a pretty big wake up call for me that I needed to treat solder with more caution.
Especially for people introducing children to electronics, make sure you're using lead-free materials. If for whatever reason lead is unavoidable in a project, make sure you're using good ventilation and wash thoroughly before going around your kids after you've handled lead.
>If for whatever reason lead is unavoidable in a project, make sure you're using good ventilation and wash thoroughly before going around your kids after you've handled lead.
I worked for a welding company and a significant portion of the engineering training involved attending welding school, which also included classes about the chemistry and physics of welding. They drilled into our heads the dangers from long term exposure to elements and chemicals in the fumes such as manganese and cadmium, and I even recall them mentioning lawsuits brought upon them that the company won, which I guess somehow disproves the danger. Anyway, if there's one thing I learned it's that I'd never allow my family members to become professional welders if I have a say. That stuff is nasty and a dirty "secret". Not to mention, a huge number of welders develop cataracts, but that could be due to incorrect shade usage and one one's fault to blame but the weldor....which I guess you could point back and say that's a result of improper training. Either way, I think welding is fun and a great skill to have, but I'd never do it for a living regardless of the pay.
edit - I should add this mostly applies to flux based welding such as stick and FCAW
I was a welder for two years and after the first year I already started to notice a mental and physical decline in my health. Unfortunately, I was not a union welder and the company that I worked for did not educate or enforce proper use of safety gear. It was an eye opening experience for me and I’m glad to have experienced it, but knowing that my health was being put at risk is frustrating.
> Unfortunately, I was not a union welder and the company that I worked for did not educate or enforce proper use of safety gear.
That's just infuriating. How bad of a human being do you need to be to knowingly expose people to health hazards and still only offer basic safety training if an union gets involved?
My dad is a welder, and he's always been a stickler for his own health; at his previous company (which went under, unfortunately, he had worked there for 40 years) he had a strong extractor (on a hose so it could be moved close to his work) and a positive pressure / filtered hood - always on.
He's had 'welding eyes' (basically sunburn?) and he's had metal splinters in his eyes, but besides that he seems to be in good health still.
He did have to insist on better ventilation and a positive pressure welding mask at his current job though; he's been complaining about fatigue, which cleared up right when he started using that one. If I had known he was made to work like that I would probably have bought him one myself, but OTOH it's a matter of workplace safety / worker health so he could've kicked off about it himself.
Like a more concentrated sunburn. A welding torch will create much higher intensity UV than you're typically exposed to, and you're staring right at it. So instead of your skin, it burns the cornea directly. I've always heard it called "flash burn" after the flash caused by welding.
I don't claim to be a welding expert, but the immediate and obvious answer to "why don't they simply do X", where X is more expensive and more complex than the current solution, is that for those reasons X isn't going to catch on.
True. Also if I was 3M or Bosch and going to invest in a project like this I would want exclusive IP. There is already an incredible tech demo of this that may inhibit corporate investment: https://hackaday.com/2012/09/11/augmented-reality-welding-ma...
Using computer vision, it looks at the flow rate and arc of the weld and turns any mediocre welder into a good welder.
Having been in a power plant factory in China (which is to say a factory that makes power plants) - bad welds are still very much a problem and a system like this could go miles to improve the craftsmanship of medium skill work there. In the US or Germany a headset like this may cost a few grand (going by Dräger Xplore 8000 prices) but even if China finds a way to get them down to $200 (as with the Shanzhai AR headsets) it's still nearly a months salary for a worker - questionable if an operation would spring for it if they're cutting costs so many other places.
Welding is a highly-skilled precision process. Welders look at the color of the molten steel, the color and brightness of the arc, the flow of the steel, and even the smell. No video feed will have high enough resolution, latency and refresh rate, or color reproduction and brightness fidelity for the task.
Maybe it doesn’t need to? If a computer can simply look at the weld with sensors and detect attributes it can overlay them on the video feed for a welder to see. Then you can turn welding into a lower skill process and create more job opportunities.
>Welding is a highly-skilled precision process.
And, yet, every automobile on the roads today has had some portion or it's frame welded by a robot. Not just spot welds, full on GMAW, and for hundreds/thousands of vehicles a day.
>No video feed will have high enough resolution, latency and refresh rate, or color reproduction and brightness fidelity for the task.
Counter example: robotic surgery.
Sure, there's fewer UV, IR and X-rays, but it's only a matter of time before a better CCD/CMOS sensor and lense comes along.
There is a difference between welding the same part automatically millions of times with exact, very tight known constraints that are always the same, and doing small batches and one off custom welds.
Welding masks already block UV. People get arc flashes when they make mistakes in using the equipment -- striking an arc with their helmet up, or someone else in the area striking an arc when they're not wearing theirs. Video goggles would suffer from the same weakness :)
”I even recall them mentioning lawsuits brought upon them that the company won, which I guess somehow disproves the danger.”
I would guess they won the lawsuits by showing that they had good safety rules and made all reasonable efforts to have their personnel obey them, not by convincing the court/jury that these jobs are risk-free.
> mentioning lawsuits brought upon them that the company won
Perhaps something like "Please follow the safety rules. If you don't follow them and you hurt yourself, you won't get a huge payday, just bad injuries that your brought on yourself"?
I am much into hobbyist work, like 3d printing/welding (mig/tig/stick welding/grinding), laser/CNC cutting.
I use a fume hood, I made it myself using Centrifugal fan and filters.
I thought about using scuba gear for welding, but I was worried about explosion from oxygen in case of leak?
Then I wear a respirator.
Is there anyway to respirate using a pipe placed elsewhere? Thinking about having a respirator attached to 20meter long pipe and put other end of the pipe outside to get fresh air instead of breathing the welding fumes.
The sickest I've ever been was cutting/torching galvanized pipe and fencing in our poorly ventilated machine shed. I opened the doors to let most of the smoke out, but geez is that stuff aggressive.
We hammered milk afterwards to try to get rid of some of the symptoms, but that sticks with you. It's hard to describe, because it's an illness that isn't really like anything else. It sucks.
Do you find the dangers and precautions biologically or medically implausible, or do you find it implausible that the social danger of appearing to be weird is worth the risk of sharing?
Depends on whether you breath in and breath into the pipe (which is not ok), or just breath in from the pipe, and breath out elsewhere (you will need some valve that will regulate the flow here).
I find it funny that trying to be safe, the alternative is to do something that will probably kill you. Respirator/Ventilation should work perfectly fine
3M makes masks specifically for welding (3M 8515). Due to current circumstance, they can't be had for any price (they are also N95 rated), but normally that would be the solution to your problem.
Scuba(normally) does not use any higher concentration of oxygen than air. The compressors used just pump high pressure air into the tanks.
Using a scuba tank filled with air does not pose any additional explosion risk due to oxygen. The only additional explosion risk is due to the relatively high pressures involved (2000-5000psi) and the risks surrounding the use of any compressed gas.
There are blends of gasses available that do present an additional explosion hazard, but those are generally not available to someone without the training required to safely handle. For that matter a scuba shop following the rules won't even fill a tank of air for you without verifying your certification.
I thought about using scuba gear for welding, but I was worried about explosion from oxygen in case of leak?
FWIW, it's way overkill, but you'd want SCBA (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus)[1] not SCUBA (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) unless you are, indeed, underwater. Of course the technologies are similar (and can be swapped to a limited degree in a pinch) but SCBA is used when you're not underwater. Those are what firefighters use while attacking fires, or performing trench rescue / confined space rescue / etc. and handling hazardous materials calls.
Note that SCBA do not used bottled oxygen... it's just plain air, but under pressure. I'm not a diver, so I don't know as much about SCUBA, but I know they aren't using pure oxygen either, but I think there may be times when they use a mix that is slightly different from plain old atmospheric air.
An additional note: SCBA are expensive, require maintenance and need to be refilled with air. All of these things would be a challenge to using one outside of an industrial setting. The "refill with air" part is especially tricky, because you might think "I can use a regular air compressor", but you actually can't, for at least two reasons. One, the pressures needed to fully refill an SCBA tank are higher than a standard shop air compressor. Two, the air also needs to be filtered to remove any contaminants - including, for example, oil used to lubricate the pump on the compressor. As you might guess, fire departments and other SCBA users buy special compressors that are very expensive.
And unlike SCUBA, I don't know that there are many, or any, commercial shops where you can walk in and get a bottle filled. If you had a buddy on a local fire department, they might be able to get a bottle filled for you, but no guarantees. Oh, and the bottles also need hydrostatic pressure testing every few years to make sure they are safe to use.
And some small rural fire departments don't even have the ability to refill their own SCBA tanks, and instead bring them to a larger department to get them refilled.
Yes, exactly. Those compressors are expensive. Back in my firefighting days, of the 21 or so departments in my county, I think maybe 3 had their own compressors. A few more had cascade systems, either at their station, or on a truck. So every couple of weeks or so, the other departments would haul all of their bottles to one of the departments that had a compressor, and refill them all (including the cascade bottles).
It really is a bit of a hassle, but it's worth it for an application like firefighting where SCBA are an absolute requirement.
I wonder if, or why, SCBA gear would use different tank valves than SCUBA gear such that any dive shop couldn't fill one.
Good point. I don't actually know for a fact that they are different. It may actually be the case that a dive shop would have the capability to fill an SCBA bottle. Now, whether or not they'd be willing to do it is a different question.
FWIW, nitrox use is pretty common among recreational divers as well, and mixed gas diving is all but a must for tech diving. 32 and 36 percent O2 are most common and up to 40 is ok without taking extra equipment precautions.
>Is there anyway to respirate using a pipe placed elsewhere? Thinking about having a respirator attached to 20meter long pipe and put other end of the pipe outside to get fresh air instead of breathing the welding fumes.
Yes, sort of. Supplied air respirators are masks or helmets fed with compressed air and are widely used in paint spray booths. You'll need a compressor capable of supplying a sufficient quantity of filtered, oil-free air.
A less cumbersome option is a powered air-purifying respirator (PAPR), which uses a belt pack containing a battery, fan and filter unit to supply purified air to a mask or helmet. PAPRs are the most widely used respiratory protection option in commercial welding, with several manufacturers offering PAPRs with an integrated welding helmet.
Both these options have the advantage of being positive-pressure, which means that no fit testing is required to ensure safe use - even if the mask or helmet leaks, the constant supply of clean air at above ambient pressure will prevent the ingress of contaminated air.
An example of PAPR application: I know of a professional woodturner who uses one, a 3M system IIRC. Beyond potential issues with long-term exposure to wood dust, turners tend to use material with unusual provenance compared to commercial timber. That in turn often means "spalted" – i.e. it's got fungal growth in it. It produces some lovely patterning and coloration in the wood, but which you definitely do not want to be breathing. The PAPR effectively combines breathing protection with a common turner's face shield; it's a compelling combination for that kind of work.
She might have been a "lead licker" who was an earlier generation soldering expert who used to literally lick the solder. This was forcibly stopped in approx 1980 here but I noticed people doing it when I was working on a line as late as 1995. They were older folk and yes they had the skin problems.
I myself have done a lot of work with leaded solder and have 20 rolls of it in the cupboard and it's most likely zero risk if you take the relevant precautions which are keep it away from eating surfaces, clean your hands afterwards properly, keep things out of your mouth and use a fume extractor.
I noticed analogue "legend" Jim Williams also used to lick the solder and had serious neurological problems when he got older and wondered if there were any links.
Ah, Hacker News, where you get downvoted for making a joke.
(to be truthful this comment didn't really add anything, which makes it fair game to downvote, but I still got a bit of surprise seeing a decent joke grayed out)
People downvoting this as a joke, it could also bring up a point. Lead acetate was used as a sweetener occasionally in US food products up until the FDA was established. People have been somewhat aware of its poisoning effects since the Romans ("mad painters disease") but still used it in food and water systems. Pretty sure it is still used in some lipsticks as well.
I never understood it either. It was usually silver bearing multicore solder so it had flux, had no issues with flow. The stuff was an absolute joy to work with.
Wash your hands and lead is fine for hobbyists and far more people enjoyable to work with. The problem that ROHS solves is landfills full of manufactured goods not full of lead.
That's what I always figured. I do so little soldering that I doubt it wouldn't make any difference for my health. And lead based solder saves a lot of time and frustration.
Depends on the iron. If you have a powerful one with temperature sensing in the tip (instead of the heating element), the lead free is not worse, just different.
If you have a beaten down cheap soldering iron, leaded is still much easier to work with.
tin-lead eutetic is light years ahead of any ROHS stuff i've used with regards to flow performance, regardless of my iron -- a cheap 12v automotive unit or my hundreds of dollars hakko.
I've always used ROHS stuff no problem for bigger less sensitive things. Whenever anything gets near SMD level the hakko and the tin-lead eutetic kester solder come out. It makes the work so much easier for me; not because of the tips on the hakko either, but because eutetic tin-lead flows where you want and locks when you want. I've yet to find a good ROHS solder that works with me for smd stuff without a LOT of brute force and pcb over-heating.
8 times out of 10 if I don't have lead-tin solder when attempting SMD work, i'll just say 'screw it' and use solder paste and a reflow gun or oven. ROHS solder paste acts fine, but reflow soldering sucks when you can normally just zip components on easily with an iron.
I am quite happy with Felder Iso-Core "Clear" for SMD work, but admittedly I also had a lot of bad lead free solder. I think the differences in lead-free solders are bigger than in leaded stuff. Trying to stay open and experimenting with new things once in a while makes sense there.
Also: lead free in my experience needs a little more heat and is more sensitive to temperature dips from the tip when soldering. So if you have a cheap and weak iron or a good one with the temperature sensing in the heating element (and not in the tip), your lead-free experience might be worse than it should have to be.
Lead-free also needs better cleaning – but that is something one should usually do painstakingly anyways.
Maybe your iron needs some inspection — older and less powerful irons don't manage to prevent temperature dips as effectively as new ones where the temperature sensing is integrated in the tip.
I solder lead free mostly for over a decade now and getting a good modern soldering station was hands down the best thing ever for lead free
Just because you can get solders both leaded and lead-free having the same flux, does not mean that is usually the case. Your typical lead-free alloy will have a nastier flux. Is this a big effect? No.
The real reason to stick with leaded is simply that it's much, much easier to use. If you get a joint done in half the time, that's half the exposure to nasty stuff. For hobbyist stuff, it doesn't really matter. A moderately skilled operator can do the job about as quickly with either type of solder. For the really hard stuff, like fine-pitch QFNs and 0201s or worse... give me 63/37 any day. (But only if I can't have a skilled soldering technician instead!)
Am I the only weirdo who prefers lead-free solders because they don't flow as much?
They dry almost as soon as you take the heat off, which keeps parts from moving off their pads while it dries. And the iron doesn't seem to "pull" globs of the stuff around as much. I get really frustrated doing finicky work with leaded solders, but I'll happily do 0.5mm pitches by hand with lead-free.
Try 63/37 tin/lead instead of 60/40. 63/37 alloy is eutectic, meaning its melting and solidifying temperature is the same (183C). 60/40 has a semisolid state around its melting point (~=190C).
I use kester 66/44 eutetic tin-lead solder on anything I care about.
It's said that light-dark auto helmets make someone a welder nearly overnight; I think that same way about eutetic solder and soldering, it makes the job so much easier that the quality of the work skyrockets.
Any idea why, if the parts don't add to 100, they don't reduce the fraction in the solder name from 66/44 to 3/2? Un-reduced portions are handy if they're percentages, but if they're not going to be percentages, why not reduce the fraction?
Same here. Learned on Pb last century, but have not touched it much since the industry made the shift (2006). It is so much easier to make bad joints that look good with leaded solder. Bad joint with SAC305 or SN100C looks like a bad joint.
What has evolved a lot since the pre-RoHS lead-free panic (2002..2006) is synthetic flux. Hardly see rosin based fluxed in industry nowadays (where performance matters).
For DIY stuff I mostly use SAC305 solder with synthetic mild flux (REL0) like LF4300 (water soluble, in theory no clean, but you do not want to leave this working in very humid environment) or SMD291NL (true no clean). In production different ones depending on the end product and components. Activity and cleaning requirements are main characteristics to choose by.
In the custom keyboard hobby you often have people desoldering 160+ through hole joints. With good tools (Hakko FR301) and good solder (Kester 63/37) that's a 15 minute job, but the frustration level and time commitment increase significantly as your tool quality or solder quality declines.
How would doing a whole keyboard of lead-free compare? Especially if you don't have $300-500 invested in gear.
Another question is, how's quality of life on surface mount components in a home/DIY setting? Obviously industry has no trouble here, but sometimes you need to do 0602 or a TQFP by hand.
No, I am the same as you — lead free is different, but not worse. Just like you I started using pretty much both from the start. I think the perception of lead free solder as beeing worse or harder to solder is mostly due to braking with one's habits. A bit like a subtle version of driving your car in the UK as a continental European: all the signs seem to be at the wrong side.
Lead free behaves differently for sure (although how exactly also depends on the mixture, iron power, temperature), but as you I actually find it better and not worse.
I used both leaded[1] and lead free. Only thing with lead free is needing a little more heat and making sure everything is clean. Anything tinned or with a flash of silver/gold solders just fine.
And I think I've seen tin whiskers once in 20 years. I'm dubious it's a problem for 99% of commercial applications. Unlike mil spec the temperature extremes are less, IC's are encapsulated[2]. And I suspect lead free alloys aren't as problematic as pure tin.
Either way industrial production, processing and eventual disposal of lead is bad news.
[1] Nicest solder I've used is lead/tin/antimony. Stuff was the shit.
[2] Early papers I read were all about pure tin solder causing problems inside hermetically sealed packages.
> Maybe it's just because I learned with the stuff?
Quite possibly. I learned to solder last century, using leaded solder, which was available in copious amounts in my dad's workshop for a long time, throughout my high school and university years. It took me a few weeks to get used to lead-free solder and it was days before I could solder anything correctly. I pretty much re-learned it. I sat for two days and did nothing but solder stuff at random until it started coming out right again.
Same here. I started soldering with lead solder and found it utterly frustrating, it constantly felt like the solder ignored gravity.
Then a few years later I picked it up again with lead free solder and suddenly it was super easy and the solder flowed exactly how I expected. I'm not very proficient at it but since then I never messed up a pin.
There are people who have been using lead solder for years who swear by it and refuse to use lead-free because it produces crappy joints. I tend to be on their side. What you need is proper filtering for air and you'll be fine.
Specifically, rather than fighting over which type of solder is less dangerous to inhale, I'd focus on promoting the use of solder fume extractors.
Even basic models purchasable on platforms like aliexpress, which are as you'd expect inexpensive, do make a world of a difference on exposure to fumes.
I’m surprised by the number of commenters who believe lead-free solder is difficult to work with. When it comes to soldering, it being easy comes down to:
1. Using good soldering techniques and practicing a bit.
2. Using good quality flux.
3. Using an iron with consistent temperature control and a tip that isn’t corroded.
I think the iron part gets overlooked a lot, cheap/old irons see a huge temperature dip when soldering. Leaded solder handles that a little better and this is what people perceive as "the difference". Once you use propper technique and a decent iron lead-free isn't worse, just different
I struggled with soldering for years, thinking I was just bad at soldering. Then I got to use a basic Hakko iron and it was infinitely easier. I immediately threw away the Radio Shack iron I had and bought my own Hakko.
The cheapo irons are such a waste of time and money. Unfortunately, I think they tend to set-point people for what to expect for iron prices. Going from $10-15 for a junky iron to $65-80 for a good one seems like a big leap. But this is a tool that should last you forever, if you take care of it, and the productivity improvement is well worth the cost. Consider, you’ll spend hundreds on components for a hobby project of any moderate size. Just buy a good iron already.
It reminds me of how much I hate the phrase, “it is a poor Workman who blames his tools”. Yeah, yeah, skilled people can get good results out of junky tools. But you won’t actually ever see it happen, because skilled people care about their work enough to only use good tools. The only time a skilled person uses junky tools is when there is literally no other option (and no, having to wait for a delivery is not one of those cases).
There are bad tools, and then there are tools that just aren't fit for purpose. If you are trying to melt metal with a machine and that machine cannot translate energy into the required amount of heat fast enough, it might just be the wrong machine to begin with.
Soldering with a bad iron is the equivalent of trying to chisel wood with a flat screwdriver: sure you can do something to the wood – it just might not be the thing you want.
Yep. And honestly, leaded solder is far more forgiving and less sensitive to technique. If someone is just barely able to solder with leaded, they're definitely NOT going to have a good experience with lead-free.
I do think hobbyists should switch to lead-free, but it will involve getting rid of marginal equipment, refining technique through practice, and following instructions. The best way to make this switch, IMHO, is simply to make leaded solder unavailable to the consumer market.
So what's a good soldering iron for a hobbist? Is the TS-100 that was much hyped on the internet some time ago a good choice? Or the TS-80 one? Or should one go for more traditional irons?
I bought a Hakko FX-888D a few years ago and immediately regretted all the time I had wasted using crappy irons for a decade and a half. Suddenly, soldering worked as easily as it did on all those YouTube videos.
I solder so infrequently that it felt like spending $100 on an iron was overkill, and I couldn't have been more wrong.
Same! My first iron was a shitty radioshack one. Shelling out the $100 for a Hakko is absolutely worth it for the time and frustration savings. I actually really enjoy soldering with it because it works so smoothly.
My only regret is not getting the analog version because Hakko kinda sucks at making digital interfaces.
It's hyped because it's small and good enough. Great to bring it to a friend to fix their headphones. I'm also planning to buy something like this as a secondary.
If you want some good primary iron, buy a Weller or a Hakko. They are widely available and have a good value/price ratio. Weller WS81 or Hakko FX-888D are both great starter irons. Most likely serve you for life if you don't need it to do any specialized thing.
Lead free solder is better for your health, that's clear. It requires new tools (solder iron) as lead free solder has a higher melting point than lead free.
In Europe lead free solder is the standard since many (10+) years, you can't get leaded solder as an option to buy.
Wow, I was going to post some trivial links to common national shops that were full of the stuff last time I looked, but ... nothing.
It seems to be due to a EU regulation that became active March 1 2018 here in Sweden, it's no longer legal to sell metal alloys containing more than 0.3% (!) lead to individuals [1].
Actually, yes, it looks like I didn't have the full truth either: as recently as 2 or 3 years ago you could still buy leaded solder in most places (in Europe), but the store in Germany where I used to order it, doesn't sell any anymore.
I last bought some 2kg of Fluitin 1532 leaded solder in Switzerland back in 2017. They still offer the leaded version in the online shop I got it from. Definitely still easily available.
That stuff will last me for a few years. However, once it's used up, I guess I'll try switching to lead-free as well.
Just a few months ago I bought my first soldering iron. Not only was the little bit solder included with the iron of the Sn60Pb40 variety but also almost all of the solder products on the shelves at my local "Bauhaus" (a home improvement market chain).
For anyone that cares: brand of iron and solder was "Rothenberger Industrial". Relatively cheap but looked like a good and sturdy tool which from my yet limited hobbyist experience it seems to be.
The article makes it seem like lead-free solder is indisputably healthier, but in reality the conclusion seems to be based off of just the MSDS of the products. I presume these are generated simply based on the chemical composition of the solder, but do not take into account the actual exposure that really occurs when one is soldering.
You can still buy leaded solder in the EU. Lead is restricted in most consumer applications, but it's still perfectly legal in a lot of industrial products.
It's not just bad for the solderer.
It will contaminate areas around your solder area (do your kids ever do a project on your workbench?)
And at end of life, lead is a problem in land fill sites and in e-waste recycling.
I'm a little surprised someone with as solid a reputation as Ben Hencke wrote all that and didn't bother to dedicate a single solitary sentence to supporting the claim that leaded solder represents an actual threat to its user. Here I was, getting ready to point out flaws in his sources but not only doesn't he have sources he doesn't even have claims. The whole article is him disproving the myth that lead-free solder is more dangerous than leaded, which, granted, is a good point but he forgot to back up his thesis at all.
Leaded solder is not even slightly dangerous to its user unless you make a daily habit of soldering for hours and then eating without washing your hands. Leaded solder does represent an environmental threat. Fortunately most manufacturers have switched to lead-free solder and the amount of lead put into the environment by hobbyist solder is best described as "fucking infinitesimal".
Maybe you're so used to the safety warnings that you always skip them when you encounter them? Here, extracted just for you:
> Compare that to the leaded version with the same rosin formulation. This also creates fumes that are not great to breathe (the same fumes), plus a bunch of really bad stuff because of the lead:
> [Long list of bad stuff]
> I think most of this speaks for itself, but I’d like to point out a subtle upgrade from P261 to P260 for the leaded stuff. It goes from “avoid” to “don’t” and I think this this is worth calling out specifically. Remember leaded paint? The stuff we banned in ‘78? The primary cause of lead-poisoning isn’t eating paint chips, it is breathing lead laced paint dust. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...
> “But solder dust? ‘Cmon, really? How can that even be?” I can hear someone typing already… Have you seen one of these?
Putting aside the need of a citation or at least an explanation as to how tip cleaners create lead dust, that's a reason to use sponges with leaded solder, not a reason not to use lead solder at all.
With pathogens, my standards go the other way: I prefer proof they're not spread before using them. It is very reasonable to assume that grating metals against each other will create dust. That's what happens in a tip cleaner.
And as for the sponges, I can see very small balls of solder on them. And I would call balls smaller than I can see "dust". Should I just assume that there is a lower bound to their size? That they're not there because I can't see them?
There were some studies a few years ago that claimed lead free was actually worse for the environment due to a much higher joint failure, resulting in more disposal of electronics.
There were also a lot of studies a few years ago that people like to invent unnamed studies to support any inane idea that they just thought of to support their preconceived views.
Question: if you have some solder around and don't know if it's leaded... and you don't have enough practice to be able to tell the difference from the way it flows... is there an easy way to tell?
By mass is probably the easiest way - if you also have some that is known lead-free and it's 'significantly' lighter (per equal volume), the other's probably leaded. If it's close, you could probably work it out by pouring over Wikipedia and making assumptions like 'if it's leaded, it will be at minimum 30% lead'... but at that point the 'easy way to tell' is probably to replace it with known solder (assuming the goal was not to use leaded solder inadvertently).
as aside, took me a while ( a while ago when the internet was a much smaller place) to work out the american pronunciation of solder actually meant "solder" which is said "soul der" around these parts.
There are a lot of different products in use which will cause health problems, if you don't take care (something that we should all have been taught). There have been some good suggestions in relation to the environmental situation to mitigate contamination.
I will add another suggestion to all of these as well. If you work with various heavy metals, you might want to consider adding beetroot to your diet on a daily basis. My father was a printer using lead type for many years. It got to the point that his health was being affected by lead poisoning. His GP told him to start eating beetroot every day. The reasoning was to stimulate the liver. Interestingly enough, his health improved and the quantity of lead in his system decreased till he was basically free of it after six months. A few years later, the printing works he was at dispensed with lead usage completely, but my father has continued to eat beetroot on a regular basis (not every day, but certainly a couple of time a week).
Now of course this is anecdotal and you can take it or leave it. But it can't hurt and for those who have a need, it may help. Of course, the beetroot mentioned is what we call beetroot in Australia, it may have some other name in other places in the world.
Seeing the replies in this thread, I’m wondering if the narrative that only incompetent people need leaded solder might not be quite powerful in convincing people. More so than any warnings about health risks.
Not at all. Simply that if you have had some previous contamination, this might help clear up the problem. I said it was anecdotal but as it worked for my father, it might work for you. Why would I want to convince anyone to follow this regime? It is there for you to make a judgement call and do your own research into the matter. If it helps just one other person then it was useful. If you are not at all interested then don't investigate. That is entirely up to you.
I actually find it funny that when any kind of suggestion is made that might (notice the use of the word "might") help with some pre-existing condition, people make the immediate assumption that the person making the suggestion is then advocating to continue the activity that caused the pre-existing condition. In today's atmosphere, it almost appears that people have stopped trying to think for themselves. All I can suggest it that people stop jumping to conclusions and if something is unclear then ask some questions. Sure, there are people who are "trolls" (so to speak). But there are also many who are not.
Just yesterday, I came across a youtube comment that, in the context it was written it was meant to be sarcastic, was treated as if the the person making the comment was supporting what they were not. Essentially, there were only two of us who recognised the sarcasm, the other participants essentially treated the person as if they were an idiot. Go figure.
As far as soldering with non-lead based solder is concerned, it has been a good source for my son-in-law's repair business. The most common source of problems he has found has been the solder joints failing because of non-lead solder. He has also received quite a bit of equipment that was essentially being thrown out because of some unknown failure, which he often found boiled down again to faulty solder joints due to non-lead solder.
Is this an advocation for using lead solder? No. It is simply recognising that the processes for using non-lead solder will be a bit different. There are always consequences for changing to using different materials if the former are found to have health problems. However, I have seen that people don't always take that a change in processes is also required and so we get other problems arising.
At any rate, during this time of isolation, everyone keep safe and take the necessary precautions for the health of you and your loved ones.
I was not asking you that question. I was not reacting to your suggestion in the slightest. I was responding just to KarlKemp's mention of convincing people about leaded solder.
Sorry that came out in not the way intended. I was simply using your post as a starting point for my comment to be to a more general audience. Your comment was nicely put and opened up the discussion for others as well. Your question was, from my perspective, a good pointed question which needed, in the general sense, to be asked.
Okay, so this link loads up to a blank page. You have to edit the CSS and remove the "opacity: 0" to see the content. Presumably there's some Javascript in there that does this after the page has loaded.
So, talking about a hill to die on - can we please stop doing this? There was absolutely nothing else in that web page that required Javascript to be able to view the content. It was completely unnecessary to pull a trick like that.
But I run a custom patched browser and turn HTML off for most sites, unless it is inserted by JavaScript. Can we please all cater to the quirks of my specific setup? I don’t trust HTML, because it is used by a lot of advertisements, and there were lots of security holes in HTML parsers in the 1990s.
Oh, come on. A sizable amount of undesirable functionality is implemented using JavaScript—ads, tracking, cryptominers, etc. It doesn't seem unreasonable to have some expectations about where JavaScript should and shouldn't be used.
Imagine if the majority of PDF authors started following the same logic. Would you really want to run arbitrary code just to read a journal article or ebook?
I'm using uMatrix, and I had to allow scripts from static1.squarespace.com to get the text to load, and assets.squarespace.com to load the pictures.
I'd prefer it if sites were written to be loadable and readable with only first-party scripts, but in my experience with uMatrix most services/tools offering aided site construction (blogger, wordpress, squarespace, wix, etc.) have required external scripts like this.
Another option if you're using Firefox is reader mode, which loads the content without images or other decoration. I forgot to try this first myself.
For mass production, most work is done with automated methods like wave soldering which spot methods like soldering irons (or lasers) can't hope to match for throughput or repeatability. The kind of hand work that's being discussed here is almost non-representative of most industry practice.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadBut that picture of the solder scourer made my brain tickle in that really uncomfortable way when you realize you fd up.
Now I should go look up whether or not smoke from melting/burning diodes is really bad for you. Probably it is :(
This statement is what the author is trying to shoot down. "Thoughts that sounds safe" when in reality they aren't and hurt people along the way.
There are times when pragmatism isn't the way to go. Pragmatically, leaded gasoline was everywhere, it's too difficult to change. Pragmatically, emissions are so expensive to deal with, we shouldn't.
If you are exposed to rosin smoke, you need good ventilation, not switch to leaded solder which is what you're implying here because when you switch to solder you've got a whole host of other problems to deal with that are way worse.
For those do this regularly to gain asthma, OSHA (or equal) needs to step in.
Articles like these and activists push us towards better legislation when pragmatism does not.
That's not what I'm trying to imply. I'm saying that you should buy a vent before you switch to lead-free because even though you need a vent or a mask for any kind of solder, your need increases when you switch. If you switch and don't buy a vent your total health might actually go down.
[1] https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/
[2] https://www.edn.com/analog-guru-jim-williams-dies-after-stro...
Did not get your link to Jim Williams article. Care to elaborate?
Later he developed Parkinson's disease (probably related [1]) and died of a stroke.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20807691
A professional is usually working in a dedicated workspace completely separate of a working area, and that distinction alone is important.
Everyone is aware they should wash their hands after working with lead solder, but if you’re working where you live, it’s all too easy to contaminate areas that you often come in contact with.
I remember trying to clean out my solder sucker one day and realizing the sucker was literally atomizing solder. Just cleaning that thing probably contaminated a good radius around my desk.
And I mean you can say “just wipe down the desk”, but that’s where the hobbyist aspect comes in, a lot of people will do this on a desk with a keyboard and a mouse, maybe a carpet, a ton of places for little bits of solder to hide.
They’re doing things that a professional probably wouldn’t do too, accidentally getting solder balls all over the place and stuff.
I’ve decided it’s not worth the risk. 99% of my soldering is through hole components you could solder with your eyes closed.
Most hobbyists are not doing the volume of soldering that any extra work with non leaded solder is going to be terrible anyways. And they’re also often not going to take precautions like wearing gloves and buying a fume extractor for the same reason
If you're doing this in your kitchen, stay far, far away from lead.
If you're doing this in your commercial building's electronics lab, where food and drink is prohibited, and there are only electronics people around... leaded solder is going to win.
If you're doing this in your factory, where your processes are tightly dialed in and you're moving mountains of product... now you can use either one just as easily, so there's no reason to risk lead unless the customer or application demands it.
(The US generally follows the same pattern, by industry alignment rather than law. It's actually nice for the US: we get all the benefits of industry-wide RoHS adoption, but with the ability to painlessly "opt out" for any reason at all.)
I should be more careful in the future, fortunately I rarely solder and for short periods of time, like 5 minuts just to fix a wire that got disconnected or change a capacitor, so I don't think it will do any harm, still better to take precautions in the future.
Anyone with knowledge on the topic that can weigh in?
Sometimes they need a bit more time or a few degrees or to be done more than once, but it works most of the time. Do not get your oven too hot or you risk causing components to fall off, it isn't actually reaching full melting point, just close enough for solder cracks and tin whiskers to self-heal.
I probably don't need to say this but don't do this with a card that works because it is a small risk. The key is keeping a stable temperature and not rushing it. Ive never had it fail on me, but that could just be luck of the draw.
Tin plating has largely been replaced by tin alloys at this point which has more or less solved the whisker issue at a large scale.
More info here: https://www.indium.com/blog/pb-free-solders-are-not-the-caus...
Especially for people introducing children to electronics, make sure you're using lead-free materials. If for whatever reason lead is unavoidable in a project, make sure you're using good ventilation and wash thoroughly before going around your kids after you've handled lead.
I worked for a welding company and a significant portion of the engineering training involved attending welding school, which also included classes about the chemistry and physics of welding. They drilled into our heads the dangers from long term exposure to elements and chemicals in the fumes such as manganese and cadmium, and I even recall them mentioning lawsuits brought upon them that the company won, which I guess somehow disproves the danger. Anyway, if there's one thing I learned it's that I'd never allow my family members to become professional welders if I have a say. That stuff is nasty and a dirty "secret". Not to mention, a huge number of welders develop cataracts, but that could be due to incorrect shade usage and one one's fault to blame but the weldor....which I guess you could point back and say that's a result of improper training. Either way, I think welding is fun and a great skill to have, but I'd never do it for a living regardless of the pay.
edit - I should add this mostly applies to flux based welding such as stick and FCAW
That's just infuriating. How bad of a human being do you need to be to knowingly expose people to health hazards and still only offer basic safety training if an union gets involved?
This looks like a quote from a Victor Hugo book, about working in the XIX century.
He's had 'welding eyes' (basically sunburn?) and he's had metal splinters in his eyes, but besides that he seems to be in good health still.
He did have to insist on better ventilation and a positive pressure welding mask at his current job though; he's been complaining about fatigue, which cleared up right when he started using that one. If I had known he was made to work like that I would probably have bought him one myself, but OTOH it's a matter of workplace safety / worker health so he could've kicked off about it himself.
Like a more concentrated sunburn. A welding torch will create much higher intensity UV than you're typically exposed to, and you're staring right at it. So instead of your skin, it burns the cornea directly. I've always heard it called "flash burn" after the flash caused by welding.
Using computer vision, it looks at the flow rate and arc of the weld and turns any mediocre welder into a good welder.
Having been in a power plant factory in China (which is to say a factory that makes power plants) - bad welds are still very much a problem and a system like this could go miles to improve the craftsmanship of medium skill work there. In the US or Germany a headset like this may cost a few grand (going by Dräger Xplore 8000 prices) but even if China finds a way to get them down to $200 (as with the Shanzhai AR headsets) it's still nearly a months salary for a worker - questionable if an operation would spring for it if they're cutting costs so many other places.
>No video feed will have high enough resolution, latency and refresh rate, or color reproduction and brightness fidelity for the task. Counter example: robotic surgery. Sure, there's fewer UV, IR and X-rays, but it's only a matter of time before a better CCD/CMOS sensor and lense comes along.
The two are not comparable.
You're supposed to use a welding mask
I would guess they won the lawsuits by showing that they had good safety rules and made all reasonable efforts to have their personnel obey them, not by convincing the court/jury that these jobs are risk-free.
Perhaps something like "Please follow the safety rules. If you don't follow them and you hurt yourself, you won't get a huge payday, just bad injuries that your brought on yourself"?
I use a fume hood, I made it myself using Centrifugal fan and filters.
I thought about using scuba gear for welding, but I was worried about explosion from oxygen in case of leak?
Then I wear a respirator.
Is there anyway to respirate using a pipe placed elsewhere? Thinking about having a respirator attached to 20meter long pipe and put other end of the pipe outside to get fresh air instead of breathing the welding fumes.
We hammered milk afterwards to try to get rid of some of the symptoms, but that sticks with you. It's hard to describe, because it's an illness that isn't really like anything else. It sucks.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fume_fever
Using a scuba tank filled with air does not pose any additional explosion risk due to oxygen. The only additional explosion risk is due to the relatively high pressures involved (2000-5000psi) and the risks surrounding the use of any compressed gas.
There are blends of gasses available that do present an additional explosion hazard, but those are generally not available to someone without the training required to safely handle. For that matter a scuba shop following the rules won't even fill a tank of air for you without verifying your certification.
FWIW, it's way overkill, but you'd want SCBA (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus)[1] not SCUBA (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) unless you are, indeed, underwater. Of course the technologies are similar (and can be swapped to a limited degree in a pinch) but SCBA is used when you're not underwater. Those are what firefighters use while attacking fires, or performing trench rescue / confined space rescue / etc. and handling hazardous materials calls.
Note that SCBA do not used bottled oxygen... it's just plain air, but under pressure. I'm not a diver, so I don't know as much about SCUBA, but I know they aren't using pure oxygen either, but I think there may be times when they use a mix that is slightly different from plain old atmospheric air.
An additional note: SCBA are expensive, require maintenance and need to be refilled with air. All of these things would be a challenge to using one outside of an industrial setting. The "refill with air" part is especially tricky, because you might think "I can use a regular air compressor", but you actually can't, for at least two reasons. One, the pressures needed to fully refill an SCBA tank are higher than a standard shop air compressor. Two, the air also needs to be filtered to remove any contaminants - including, for example, oil used to lubricate the pump on the compressor. As you might guess, fire departments and other SCBA users buy special compressors that are very expensive.
And unlike SCUBA, I don't know that there are many, or any, commercial shops where you can walk in and get a bottle filled. If you had a buddy on a local fire department, they might be able to get a bottle filled for you, but no guarantees. Oh, and the bottles also need hydrostatic pressure testing every few years to make sure they are safe to use.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-contained_breathing_appar...
It really is a bit of a hassle, but it's worth it for an application like firefighting where SCBA are an absolute requirement.
I wonder if, or why, SCBA gear would use different tank valves than SCUBA gear such that any dive shop couldn't fill one.
Good point. I don't actually know for a fact that they are different. It may actually be the case that a dive shop would have the capability to fill an SCBA bottle. Now, whether or not they'd be willing to do it is a different question.
Yes, sort of. Supplied air respirators are masks or helmets fed with compressed air and are widely used in paint spray booths. You'll need a compressor capable of supplying a sufficient quantity of filtered, oil-free air.
A less cumbersome option is a powered air-purifying respirator (PAPR), which uses a belt pack containing a battery, fan and filter unit to supply purified air to a mask or helmet. PAPRs are the most widely used respiratory protection option in commercial welding, with several manufacturers offering PAPRs with an integrated welding helmet.
Both these options have the advantage of being positive-pressure, which means that no fit testing is required to ensure safe use - even if the mask or helmet leaks, the constant supply of clean air at above ambient pressure will prevent the ingress of contaminated air.
Yes, a CPAP machine.
A long tube, remote air with a filter, heated and humidified if you like.
And they're designed to adapt to your breathing so you won't know they're on.
though to be honest it's more like 2-3 meters, not 20.
I myself have done a lot of work with leaded solder and have 20 rolls of it in the cupboard and it's most likely zero risk if you take the relevant precautions which are keep it away from eating surfaces, clean your hands afterwards properly, keep things out of your mouth and use a fume extractor.
I noticed analogue "legend" Jim Williams also used to lick the solder and had serious neurological problems when he got older and wondered if there were any links.
(to be truthful this comment didn't really add anything, which makes it fair game to downvote, but I still got a bit of surprise seeing a decent joke grayed out)
It's literally in the guidelines: >Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Presumably, it acts as a flux or something?
If you have a beaten down cheap soldering iron, leaded is still much easier to work with.
tin-lead eutetic is light years ahead of any ROHS stuff i've used with regards to flow performance, regardless of my iron -- a cheap 12v automotive unit or my hundreds of dollars hakko.
I've always used ROHS stuff no problem for bigger less sensitive things. Whenever anything gets near SMD level the hakko and the tin-lead eutetic kester solder come out. It makes the work so much easier for me; not because of the tips on the hakko either, but because eutetic tin-lead flows where you want and locks when you want. I've yet to find a good ROHS solder that works with me for smd stuff without a LOT of brute force and pcb over-heating.
8 times out of 10 if I don't have lead-tin solder when attempting SMD work, i'll just say 'screw it' and use solder paste and a reflow gun or oven. ROHS solder paste acts fine, but reflow soldering sucks when you can normally just zip components on easily with an iron.
Also: lead free in my experience needs a little more heat and is more sensitive to temperature dips from the tip when soldering. So if you have a cheap and weak iron or a good one with the temperature sensing in the heating element (and not in the tip), your lead-free experience might be worse than it should have to be.
Lead-free also needs better cleaning – but that is something one should usually do painstakingly anyways.
I solder lead free mostly for over a decade now and getting a good modern soldering station was hands down the best thing ever for lead free
The real reason to stick with leaded is simply that it's much, much easier to use. If you get a joint done in half the time, that's half the exposure to nasty stuff. For hobbyist stuff, it doesn't really matter. A moderately skilled operator can do the job about as quickly with either type of solder. For the really hard stuff, like fine-pitch QFNs and 0201s or worse... give me 63/37 any day. (But only if I can't have a skilled soldering technician instead!)
They dry almost as soon as you take the heat off, which keeps parts from moving off their pads while it dries. And the iron doesn't seem to "pull" globs of the stuff around as much. I get really frustrated doing finicky work with leaded solders, but I'll happily do 0.5mm pitches by hand with lead-free.
Maybe it's just because I learned with the stuff?
I use kester 66/44 eutetic tin-lead solder on anything I care about.
It's said that light-dark auto helmets make someone a welder nearly overnight; I think that same way about eutetic solder and soldering, it makes the job so much easier that the quality of the work skyrockets.
in racing, they say to drive 10/10ths. not 1's. for the same reason.
What has evolved a lot since the pre-RoHS lead-free panic (2002..2006) is synthetic flux. Hardly see rosin based fluxed in industry nowadays (where performance matters).
For DIY stuff I mostly use SAC305 solder with synthetic mild flux (REL0) like LF4300 (water soluble, in theory no clean, but you do not want to leave this working in very humid environment) or SMD291NL (true no clean). In production different ones depending on the end product and components. Activity and cleaning requirements are main characteristics to choose by.
In the custom keyboard hobby you often have people desoldering 160+ through hole joints. With good tools (Hakko FR301) and good solder (Kester 63/37) that's a 15 minute job, but the frustration level and time commitment increase significantly as your tool quality or solder quality declines.
How would doing a whole keyboard of lead-free compare? Especially if you don't have $300-500 invested in gear.
Another question is, how's quality of life on surface mount components in a home/DIY setting? Obviously industry has no trouble here, but sometimes you need to do 0602 or a TQFP by hand.
Lead free behaves differently for sure (although how exactly also depends on the mixture, iron power, temperature), but as you I actually find it better and not worse.
And I think I've seen tin whiskers once in 20 years. I'm dubious it's a problem for 99% of commercial applications. Unlike mil spec the temperature extremes are less, IC's are encapsulated[2]. And I suspect lead free alloys aren't as problematic as pure tin.
Either way industrial production, processing and eventual disposal of lead is bad news.
[1] Nicest solder I've used is lead/tin/antimony. Stuff was the shit.
[2] Early papers I read were all about pure tin solder causing problems inside hermetically sealed packages.
Quite possibly. I learned to solder last century, using leaded solder, which was available in copious amounts in my dad's workshop for a long time, throughout my high school and university years. It took me a few weeks to get used to lead-free solder and it was days before I could solder anything correctly. I pretty much re-learned it. I sat for two days and did nothing but solder stuff at random until it started coming out right again.
Then a few years later I picked it up again with lead free solder and suddenly it was super easy and the solder flowed exactly how I expected. I'm not very proficient at it but since then I never messed up a pin.
Specifically, rather than fighting over which type of solder is less dangerous to inhale, I'd focus on promoting the use of solder fume extractors.
Even basic models purchasable on platforms like aliexpress, which are as you'd expect inexpensive, do make a world of a difference on exposure to fumes.
Yet most people solder without these.
1. Using good soldering techniques and practicing a bit.
2. Using good quality flux.
3. Using an iron with consistent temperature control and a tip that isn’t corroded.
4. Lastly, the actual solder alloy.
The cheapo irons are such a waste of time and money. Unfortunately, I think they tend to set-point people for what to expect for iron prices. Going from $10-15 for a junky iron to $65-80 for a good one seems like a big leap. But this is a tool that should last you forever, if you take care of it, and the productivity improvement is well worth the cost. Consider, you’ll spend hundreds on components for a hobby project of any moderate size. Just buy a good iron already.
It reminds me of how much I hate the phrase, “it is a poor Workman who blames his tools”. Yeah, yeah, skilled people can get good results out of junky tools. But you won’t actually ever see it happen, because skilled people care about their work enough to only use good tools. The only time a skilled person uses junky tools is when there is literally no other option (and no, having to wait for a delivery is not one of those cases).
Soldering with a bad iron is the equivalent of trying to chisel wood with a flat screwdriver: sure you can do something to the wood – it just might not be the thing you want.
I do think hobbyists should switch to lead-free, but it will involve getting rid of marginal equipment, refining technique through practice, and following instructions. The best way to make this switch, IMHO, is simply to make leaded solder unavailable to the consumer market.
Every time I see a cheap ass or busted soldering iron I have the urge to smash it with a hammer and fling into the dumpster where it belongs.
(I personally have a Metcal PS900, very happy with it)
I've heard good things about the TS-100 as well but I've never tried one so I can't confirm anything about it.
I solder so infrequently that it felt like spending $100 on an iron was overkill, and I couldn't have been more wrong.
My only regret is not getting the analog version because Hakko kinda sucks at making digital interfaces.
If you want some good primary iron, buy a Weller or a Hakko. They are widely available and have a good value/price ratio. Weller WS81 or Hakko FX-888D are both great starter irons. Most likely serve you for life if you don't need it to do any specialized thing.
In Europe lead free solder is the standard since many (10+) years, you can't get leaded solder as an option to buy.
It seems to be due to a EU regulation that became active March 1 2018 here in Sweden, it's no longer legal to sell metal alloys containing more than 0.3% (!) lead to individuals [1].
I had no idea, thanks!
[1]: https://www.kemi.se/lagar-och-regler/reach-forordningen/begr...
For what I remember, the lead free had a higher melting temperature. At least back in the days.
Took one week to get used to.
That stuff will last me for a few years. However, once it's used up, I guess I'll try switching to lead-free as well.
Just a few months ago I bought my first soldering iron. Not only was the little bit solder included with the iron of the Sn60Pb40 variety but also almost all of the solder products on the shelves at my local "Bauhaus" (a home improvement market chain).
For anyone that cares: brand of iron and solder was "Rothenberger Industrial". Relatively cheap but looked like a good and sturdy tool which from my yet limited hobbyist experience it seems to be.
I remember the change, where I was not able to buy the old one. I remember that it had a slightly higher melt temperature.
Can you buy it in America?
Prototyping/R&D is excepted as well.
https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/MG-Chemicals/4884-227G?q...
Indians (including children) desoldering components from imported e-waste have high blood lead levels: https://journals.lww.com/epidem/fulltext/2011/01001/High_Blo...
Leaded solder is not even slightly dangerous to its user unless you make a daily habit of soldering for hours and then eating without washing your hands. Leaded solder does represent an environmental threat. Fortunately most manufacturers have switched to lead-free solder and the amount of lead put into the environment by hobbyist solder is best described as "fucking infinitesimal".
> Compare that to the leaded version with the same rosin formulation. This also creates fumes that are not great to breathe (the same fumes), plus a bunch of really bad stuff because of the lead:
> [Long list of bad stuff]
> I think most of this speaks for itself, but I’d like to point out a subtle upgrade from P261 to P260 for the leaded stuff. It goes from “avoid” to “don’t” and I think this this is worth calling out specifically. Remember leaded paint? The stuff we banned in ‘78? The primary cause of lead-poisoning isn’t eating paint chips, it is breathing lead laced paint dust. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lead-poisonin...
> “But solder dust? ‘Cmon, really? How can that even be?” I can hear someone typing already… Have you seen one of these?
> [Picture of solder tip cleaner]
And as for the sponges, I can see very small balls of solder on them. And I would call balls smaller than I can see "dust". Should I just assume that there is a lower bound to their size? That they're not there because I can't see them?
Otherwise you could see how hot your iron needs to be to make it melt.
I will add another suggestion to all of these as well. If you work with various heavy metals, you might want to consider adding beetroot to your diet on a daily basis. My father was a printer using lead type for many years. It got to the point that his health was being affected by lead poisoning. His GP told him to start eating beetroot every day. The reasoning was to stimulate the liver. Interestingly enough, his health improved and the quantity of lead in his system decreased till he was basically free of it after six months. A few years later, the printing works he was at dispensed with lead usage completely, but my father has continued to eat beetroot on a regular basis (not every day, but certainly a couple of time a week).
Now of course this is anecdotal and you can take it or leave it. But it can't hurt and for those who have a need, it may help. Of course, the beetroot mentioned is what we call beetroot in Australia, it may have some other name in other places in the world.
Seeing the replies in this thread, I’m wondering if the narrative that only incompetent people need leaded solder might not be quite powerful in convincing people. More so than any warnings about health risks.
I openly acknowledge that I'm incompetent at soldering. Are you encouraging me to use leaded solder?
I actually find it funny that when any kind of suggestion is made that might (notice the use of the word "might") help with some pre-existing condition, people make the immediate assumption that the person making the suggestion is then advocating to continue the activity that caused the pre-existing condition. In today's atmosphere, it almost appears that people have stopped trying to think for themselves. All I can suggest it that people stop jumping to conclusions and if something is unclear then ask some questions. Sure, there are people who are "trolls" (so to speak). But there are also many who are not.
Just yesterday, I came across a youtube comment that, in the context it was written it was meant to be sarcastic, was treated as if the the person making the comment was supporting what they were not. Essentially, there were only two of us who recognised the sarcasm, the other participants essentially treated the person as if they were an idiot. Go figure.
As far as soldering with non-lead based solder is concerned, it has been a good source for my son-in-law's repair business. The most common source of problems he has found has been the solder joints failing because of non-lead solder. He has also received quite a bit of equipment that was essentially being thrown out because of some unknown failure, which he often found boiled down again to faulty solder joints due to non-lead solder.
Is this an advocation for using lead solder? No. It is simply recognising that the processes for using non-lead solder will be a bit different. There are always consequences for changing to using different materials if the former are found to have health problems. However, I have seen that people don't always take that a change in processes is also required and so we get other problems arising.
At any rate, during this time of isolation, everyone keep safe and take the necessary precautions for the health of you and your loved ones.
I was not asking you that question. I was not reacting to your suggestion in the slightest. I was responding just to KarlKemp's mention of convincing people about leaded solder.
So, talking about a hill to die on - can we please stop doing this? There was absolutely nothing else in that web page that required Javascript to be able to view the content. It was completely unnecessary to pull a trick like that.
Imagine if the majority of PDF authors started following the same logic. Would you really want to run arbitrary code just to read a journal article or ebook?
I'd prefer it if sites were written to be loadable and readable with only first-party scripts, but in my experience with uMatrix most services/tools offering aided site construction (blogger, wordpress, squarespace, wix, etc.) have required external scripts like this.
Another option if you're using Firefox is reader mode, which loads the content without images or other decoration. I forgot to try this first myself.