Electronics > Beginners
Life expectancy vs Lead exposure?
Mr. Scram:
--- Quote from: maginnovision on August 20, 2019, 12:23:38 am ---I worked in electronics manufacturing for years using leaded processes. Never got sick or had problems and I'm an asthmatic. Only time I took precautions was cleaning dross from the wave solder machine. I'd wear a mask and gloves(mostly due to the heat). Even if you're just using a soldering iron and a fan you'll be fine. If you didn't use a fan I'd just recommend taking a break before you get a sore throat, drinking water at regular intervals, and taking a shower at the end of the day(with lots of steam) to help cough up anything you managed to get in your lungs.
--- End quote ---
What's being asthmatic got to do with lead poisoning?
maginnovision:
Nothing it has to do with irritation from flux fumes.
SkyMaster:
According to Thomas Midgley, lead is inoffensive.
Thomas Midgley was an engineer. He was then probably right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
Wait, he also invented Freon...
:)
Nominal Animal:
You don't want to eat and drink from lead (or uranium) platters and goblets every day for years, but doing it once hurts you less than breathing in in any densely populated city.
If you do not have open wounds or sores, handling heavy metals like lead or mercury is safe. Just wash your hands afterwards, so you do not end up ingesting them.
(If you do have wounds or sores, it depends on the material structure. Usually it does not matter. The risk, really, is getting some lodged in the wound, so your immune system tries to slowly digest it. You wouldn't want to deal with heavy metal powders with your bare hands, if you have cuts in your hands. Just use gloves then.)
Welding and soldering generates fumes. Welding generates metal vapor (zinc vapor being particularly nasty) and small metal particulates, and both welding and soldering vaporizes some of the flux. These are most chemically active when hot, so you don't want to breath them in fresh. If the small particulates are still hot when they get in your lungs, they can embed themselves in the tissues, and since there is a lot of blood flow there, it is not far off from getting them directly in your bloodstream. So that's bad. Venting the fumes cools them down, making them much, much less chemically active and thus much less dangerous, and mixing them to the ambient outside air reduces their density to safe levels. The fumes are much more dangerous in closed spaces: that's why you should always weld outside or a special room with fume extraction and/or air filtration.
If say a factory or a hack lab has welding or soldering stations, they should have an air filter unit. However, this too is a balance: making such air filters takes resources and generates pollution, so such an air filter really should be used enough to warrant itself, or it will be a net loss for the environment.
Environmental risk management is something where you need both rational thinking, and a wide range of facts to rely on. (For example, like 238U being a heavy metal and dangerous due to its chemistry, like lead and mercury, and not because it is radioactive.)
It truly is pity that leaded solder is considered dangerous, as the amounts used are minuscule compared to other industries, and the way they are used means the lead is in environmentally pretty safe alloys. The chemically harsher fluxes needed with non-leaded solders probably negates any benefits anyway.
Anyway, the small bit of 60/40 solder I just ate, didn't taste of anything. Explains why the Romans used lead in their dinnerware. Stainless steel has much more of a "metallic" taste. If I get sick, it would be because of the flux in it. I won't, though.
janoc:
--- Quote from: John B on August 19, 2019, 10:19:25 pm ---I always use disposable gloves. When cleaning out the brass wool, there's a lot of fine lead, almost powdered. I would imagine that poses the greatest risk, as it puts a lot of particles in the air, and they would dissolve the easiest.
--- End quote ---
Lead really doesn't dissolve easily, not even in acids or strong bases. So no need to panic over that - you most likely don't have anything on or near the bench that could cause it to dissolve in a meaningful time frame. If you put that lead somewhere into a landfill and let it sit in an acid rain or leach into water for years, that would be a different matter.
And those shavings that you clean out of your tip cleaning wool are way too large and heavy to fly far by air (assuming you are not waving the wool around). Those particles would need to be order of magnitude or two smaller to be a meaningful hazard.
--- Quote from: Mr. Scram on August 19, 2019, 10:03:47 pm ---Just bear in mind that children are especially susceptible to lead ingestion and may suffer irreversible developmental issues. Unless you lick your fingers after soldering you'll probably be fine but keep it away from children. Also note that while washing your hands with water and soap to remove lead is effective it isn't quite perfect.
--- End quote ---
If you are afraid that small kids could put it in their mouth and such - if the kids can get to your solder, they most likely can get also to the hot iron or sharp tools on your desk. I would consider that a much bigger issue than a kid licking a solder wire once or twice or touching the wire and then licking their fingers. You really don't die or turn into a babbling drooling vegetable from a tiny exposure like that. Unless that kid is doing that every day for a while, they will likely be fine.
Also, if someone is worried about lead poisoning from a leaded solder - we have lead-free solder too :-//
--- Quote from: bjdhjy888 on August 20, 2019, 12:02:59 am ---
--- Quote from: Gyro on August 19, 2019, 08:59:13 am ---Normal soldering temperatures are far too low to cause any lead vapour to form.
--- End quote ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead
I just looked up the boiling point of lead on Wikipedia, where it says it's 1749 °C. Does this mean that we can only inhale lead or absorb lead through our skin when our soldering iron's tip reaches a temperature of 1749 °C?
If yes, then I feel super safe now..
;)
--- End quote ---
Boiling point of a substance has literally zero to do with vapor forming. Water also doesn't start to evaporate only once it reaches the boiling temperature! Boiling point is only the temperature when the substance is evaporating from the entire volume (that's what produces the bubbles) and not only the surface.
Vapors can form even when the matter is still solid (sublimation - even solid lead sublimates under certain conditions) or liquid but below the boiling point.
(Pure) lead melts at 327°C and starts releasing fumes at 480°C or so. Common soldering (especially given that we use lead-tin alloys that melt at even lower temperatures than this) has no way to reach that unless you are using a flame thrower to solder.
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