Lead Safety

Yes, and yes. The amount may be small, but it is there. You should ALWAYS wash your hands after handling lead solder. Especially before eating or smoking.

Jim

Keep in mind that lead poisoning takes a fair amount, and it affects children far more than adults (though I can't recall whether that's because they are still devoping and thus vulnerable, or just because their body weight is so much smaller than adults that a smaller amount affects them).

Thus the more solder or lead paint you eat, the more damage you will do.

If you don't actually eat lead, the exposure is pretty minimal.

I've been soldering for 36 years, starting when I was 11, and have never taken special care. And it sure hasn't affected me.

But then, I've never actually eaten solder, and I don't think I've ever chewed on it, though I have kept it handy in my mouth plenty of times.

Michael

More important than your concern about touching it is that of breathing the fumes.

Don't.

Tom

Shee-it. When I was a kid, and we had to walk 100 miles uphill both ways through 25 feet of snow, they taught us to not eat the paint off our toys.

Good Luck! Rich

But an adult soldering and then washing your hands is possibly a lot better than letting a baby chew the paint off a toy that you bought a couple of months ago...

Chris

Thank you so much for answering my questions.

I am in tenth grade and go to a county career center in Pennsylvania run by my school district. There are no ventilation hoods and it is difficult to be able to wash my hands after being in the work area. Is there any alternative to washing my hands (My mom thought waterless hand sanitizer would work, but somehow I doubt it.)? Also, as there are no ventilation hoods what can I do to protect myself from the fumes? One more thing, I've read that you need to wash the clothes you wear while you are in your work environment separately from your other clothes. Is this true?

Sure it does but the amount it takes and your exposure via that route is not significant.

Things like lead soldered water pipes, pewter goblets or mugs, lead glazes, etc.. where the exposure may be chronic, are much more significant.

The EU's current lead hysteria is justified because the lead found in electronic devices is not economically recovered or recycled, so will be building up in the environment for a long time.

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Incidental contact with lead based solder is not a great concern. You would have to handle it for a considerable time to notice any accumulation. Washing you clothes separately is an overkill. Treat it as you would anything that you don't want to wind up in you mouth. As for the vent hoods, they may be required in school; ask the schools RTK (Right To Know) officer. I solder without a hood and keep may face out of the fumes.

Regards, Tom

LOL! Ain't that the truth! I have been soldering since I was 6 (that's about 40 yrs ago) and when I had a lead level test done about 5 years ago my numbers were so below the state and national average they ran them again just because they thought they HAD to be wrong. All you need to do is wash up before meals, like your momma always told ya' and I don't see any big problem.

Jim

I guess you have not heard about the mandatory end of life recycling that has been in effect for a while now. What is it called......the WEE directive or something like that? The lead free non-sense in the EU is NOT justified, it is just a knee jerk reaction to a problem that doesn't exist. In the end, the ROHS directive will put more waste in the ground than you can believe.

Jim

When I was in the USAF, people routinely held solder in their teeth, when they have to go out on a wingstand and lean into the airplane to fix a connector or something.

Apparently, it's not all that virulent. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Moist Towelettes. Or even baby wipes. Any pharmacy should have lots and lots of them.

Dust mask. It also works on rosin fumes. But even without a hood, a small muffin fan or miniature desk fan could keep the fumes out of your face.

No, they're blowing smoke up your ears. ;-) By the time the solder gets on your clothes, it's just more dirt.

Cheers! Rich

I have been to a couple of landfills in the states here and I think that lead from circuit boards will be a big problem in the future - as far as ground water contamination goes. How can you say it won't?

Individually it may seem insignificant, but collectively . . . .

And, our responsibility is to protect the environment - we only get one planet, after all. Sure, you and I will be dead before it matters to us - but look at the problems your parents generation have left us with - back when those problems would be a lot easier to correct.

We are the stewards of the Earth - not the conquerors.

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Most landfills are pretty well isolated from the ground water. They would have to be, look at ALL of the crap that gets put into them. If you want to pick on a REAL problem, how about all the crap from old mines. That's a real problem, right now. What you "think" and what is really happening might not be the same thing. The lead solder issue is just a made up problem and the solution has caused more problems and pollution than lead ever did.

Jim

Damn tenth grade? Well done. Good post.

You aren't in all that much danger of dying of lead poisoning from solder or solder fumes or flux fumes - or significantly shortening your life as a result. You are probably doing more harm with something you take for granted and expose yourself to every day.

If that is your concern - life extension - you should be looking at where you live first . . . Move to Alaska. And tenth graders do not concern themselves with their mortality - if they did - no one would join the military. That is inconsistent, and either makes you unique or a troll.

Back when I was a kid - we'd recover the mercury from mercury batteries - they got up to C cell size back in those days.

There are plenty of carcinogens in the environment that are a lot more dangerous than what you may be exposed to in soldering - even after decades of sniffing the fumes of solder (solder doesn't vaporize all that easily - not at soldering temperatures).

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Most landfills are isolated TODAY and only if the rainfall for a particular area is within predicted/historical limits. There's lots of landfills that are just dumps that have been covered with topsoil.

Human greed being what it is - it makes a lot more sense, from an environmental point of view, to charge the recycle fee up front.

Remember "hog lagoons?" just takes a tropical storm to dump that waste into the estuaries.

Life sucks - Human life really sucks. You have to see beyond your own satisfaction and greed - something no (few) human (s) do/es willingly.

You may be right - for the short term. A thousand years down the road

- are you sure?

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On Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:34:44 -0400, default wrote: ...

1. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. -- Genesis 1:26

Cheers! Rich

Yes, exactly. So how are new draconian regulations going to change anything?

Thanks, Rich

Rich

"Draconian regulations?" Yeah, it seems that way to me, right here right now, without thinking. Draconian in the sense "hey we ain't never had to do that stuff before." well, I still have to take the long view.

Lot of those Texas 1,000 year landfills are under water as we speak - simply because the 300 year limits for rainfall were exceeded (due to whatever).

Draconian?

I'm not saying you're right or wrong. I am saying that you should be objective and analyze the facts. Not that I know "shit from shinola." I do know there are lots of bias in the environmental/political agendas we are bombarded with every day. To me, that means there's lots of crap parading around as science.

For all I know, lead is not the issue. I, personally, think we could all ingest several grams of lead and it wouldn't matter in the long run - because we ain't put any thought into THE LONG RUN. We have much larger problems in the environment than what lead might do. In fact, lead looks like a scapegoat or diversion - an EU scare and EU muscle flexing in order to bring all the little nations of Europe into one control - - - " and thou shalt obey the US copy write laws, and thou shalt embrace globalization."

I remember having a "muscle car" in the 70's even after I knew about the oil reserves, politics, etc that predicted I would (die in the

50's) or couldn't get gas by 2010. My only thought was: damn that doesn't affect me!

I'm older, and more cynical today. Wiser too - but no thanks to me - it is just my perspective is different than it was.

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