Chemical test for SnPb lead/ RoHS lead-free solder

 

A chemist gave me enough potassium chromate to have a go. Ground off a few
mg from some sheet lead , dropped into some chromate solution and a cloudy
yellowish deposit formed in the otherwise orange liquid - what it is
supposed to do apparently.
Then ground off some known lead free solder , added to some of the solution
and no yellow.
Then ground off some known SnPb solder and again no yellow - so not so
simple a test as first appeared, Pb and tin are combined too well to react ?

 

N_Cook wrote:

Why not try one of those inexpensive "sticks" used to test for lead
in paint?  (no idea if it would work)

 



Well, we all knew that SnPb solder was a stable compound that was not going
to break down on its own, allowing cartloads of lead to somehow get into
into the environment, as the eco-bollox lead-free solder brigade, would have
us believe ...

Arfa

 


few

cloudy

react

going

have

That was what I was thinking. And it wold take more than acid rain to leech
the lead from solder, or lead would not be possible to be used as the plates
in car batteries.
The only "lead" test pens I've seen are in paints section of hardware and at
8 GBP a pop and nothing on the package about being used on more than one
occassion, they can stay on the shelves. Those would be for red lead in
paints, which is not elemental lead, so probably would not work either

 



Or of course as lead flashing on every house ever built, or lead guttering,
as is found on many old - and even ancient - buildings, and has been there
for hundreds of years, being 'dissolved away' (ha!) by the rain for all that
time, including the several decades of bad-arsed acid rain, that we had in
the last century ...

Arfa