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 ?

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

Reply to
D Yuniskis

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

Reply to
Arfa Daily

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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
Reply to
N_Cook

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

Reply to
Arfa Daily

"N_Cook" wrote in news:hn50n6$ni2$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

...

The lead must be in solution to be detected with potassium chromate.

The procedure in my qualatative analysis text book for alloys starts with disolving a small sample in hot nitric acid.

The reaction with the chromate ion requires that the lead be in solution in the form of the Pb++ ion.

The test depends on the formation of a yellow insoluble lead chromate.

The test will not work unless the lead is in solution and the pH of the solution is correct.

There ARE tests that will detect lead without putting it into solution, X- ray fluorescence for example.

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Reply to
bz

Some US homes have a sacrificial strip of Zinc along the ridges on roofs to kill mildew.

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

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