No, the alphas from lead are a real problem. Ten years ago, there were folks going round to churches with lead roofs, offering them a new lead roof in exchange for their old--and now low-alpha--lead ones.
Same with steel from old battleships.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
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hobbs at electrooptical dot net
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No, you're not misunderstanding, and what you say is logical. But... This disparity existed 30 years ago, when I first bought a roll of eutectic solder. At that time, eutectic was less-common and less asked-for. That /might/ explain the difference.
Solder prices for single pound lots are all over the map- they change with voltatile metal prices and some distributors may have old stock.
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There's been roughly a 4:1 price range in lead and 2.5:1 in tin over the past three years. Currently tin costs about 10x as much as lead, so you'd expect about a 10-11% price difference due to cost of the metals. At current prices there's around $5.30 worth of metals in a pound of solder, of which only 30 cents or so is lead. There's also the plastic spool, the cardboard box and 10-15 grams of flux.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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No wonder I haven't seen those $4.95/lb. bar solder sales lately. I used to wait for those and stock up a couple hundred pounds for the soldering machine.
Only a problem with flip-chip (C4) bonding. At one point I worked in the packaging research group at IBM Yorktown lab (no, I'm not a packaging guy--it's a long story).
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Lead-tin eutectic in my era (1987-2008), followed by gold-tin currently, IIRC.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal
ElectroOptical Innovations
55 Orchard Rd
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
The last time I dealt with any of this was in the mid '70s. Before TCMs, even (LEMs). I'm pretty sure they were lead-indium, but there may have been tin in there too. There was also an issue of polonium contamination causing uncorrectable L1 errors, but that's a completely different issue.
No need to, really. it was used to salvage parts and tin wire. Most of the boards were soldered with 80/20 so i had to add some scrap lead from time to time, to lower the melting point. The other metals didn't hurt anything.
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