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Comment by _vdpp | Hacker News Reader

I never heeded much caution when soldering using lead solder growing up. When I got to university, the department employed a long-time soldering professional, with NASA certifications, etc. She was very knowledgeable, but visibly suffered from what I assumed was chronic heavy metal poisoning - hair loss and visible skin problems. It was a pretty big wake up call for me that I needed to treat solder with more caution.

Especially for people introducing children to electronics, make sure you're using lead-free materials. If for whatever reason lead is unavoidable in a project, make sure you're using good ventilation and wash thoroughly before going around your kids after you've handled lead.

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>If for whatever reason lead is unavoidable in a project, make sure you're using good ventilation and wash thoroughly before going around your kids after you've handled lead.

I worked for a welding company and a significant portion of the engineering training involved attending welding school, which also included classes about the chemistry and physics of welding. They drilled into our heads the dangers from long term exposure to elements and chemicals in the fumes such as manganese and cadmium, and I even recall them mentioning lawsuits brought upon them that the company won, which I guess somehow disproves the danger. Anyway, if there's one thing I learned it's that I'd never allow my family members to become professional welders if I have a say. That stuff is nasty and a dirty "secret". Not to mention, a huge number of welders develop cataracts, but that could be due to incorrect shade usage and one one's fault to blame but the weldor....which I guess you could point back and say that's a result of improper training. Either way, I think welding is fun and a great skill to have, but I'd never do it for a living regardless of the pay.

edit - I should add this mostly applies to flux based welding such as stick and FCAW

I was a welder for two years and after the first year I already started to notice a mental and physical decline in my health. Unfortunately, I was not a union welder and the company that I worked for did not educate or enforce proper use of safety gear. It was an eye opening experience for me and I’m glad to have experienced it, but knowing that my health was being put at risk is frustrating.

> Unfortunately, I was not a union welder and the company that I worked for did not educate or enforce proper use of safety gear.

That's just infuriating. How bad of a human being do you need to be to knowingly expose people to health hazards and still only offer basic safety training if an union gets involved?

> Unfortunately, I was not a union welder

This looks like a quote from a Victor Hugo book, about working in the XIX century.

My dad is a welder, and he's always been a stickler for his own health; at his previous company (which went under, unfortunately, he had worked there for 40 years) he had a strong extractor (on a hose so it could be moved close to his work) and a positive pressure / filtered hood - always on.

He's had 'welding eyes' (basically sunburn?) and he's had metal splinters in his eyes, but besides that he seems to be in good health still.

He did have to insist on better ventilation and a positive pressure welding mask at his current job though; he's been complaining about fatigue, which cleared up right when he started using that one. If I had known he was made to work like that I would probably have bought him one myself, but OTOH it's a matter of workplace safety / worker health so he could've kicked off about it himself.

> 'welding eyes' (basically sunburn?)

Like a more concentrated sunburn. A welding torch will create much higher intensity UV than you're typically exposed to, and you're staring right at it. So instead of your skin, it burns the cornea directly. I've always heard it called "flash burn" after the flash caused by welding.

Why don't they just make a welding mask that uses goggles with a video feed so you don't have to be exposed to any UV?

I don't claim to be a welding expert, but the immediate and obvious answer to "why don't they simply do X", where X is more expensive and more complex than the current solution, is that for those reasons X isn't going to catch on.

True. Also if I was 3M or Bosch and going to invest in a project like this I would want exclusive IP. There is already an incredible tech demo of this that may inhibit corporate investment: https://hackaday.com/2012/09/11/augmented-reality-welding-ma...

Using computer vision, it looks at the flow rate and arc of the weld and turns any mediocre welder into a good welder.

Having been in a power plant factory in China (which is to say a factory that makes power plants) - bad welds are still very much a problem and a system like this could go miles to improve the craftsmanship of medium skill work there. In the US or Germany a headset like this may cost a few grand (going by Dräger Xplore 8000 prices) but even if China finds a way to get them down to $200 (as with the Shanzhai AR headsets) it's still nearly a months salary for a worker - questionable if an operation would spring for it if they're cutting costs so many other places.

Because an inexpensive auto-darkening welding helmet will provide full protection against IR and UV.

Welding is a highly-skilled precision process. Welders look at the color of the molten steel, the color and brightness of the arc, the flow of the steel, and even the smell. No video feed will have high enough resolution, latency and refresh rate, or color reproduction and brightness fidelity for the task.

Maybe it doesn’t need to? If a computer can simply look at the weld with sensors and detect attributes it can overlay them on the video feed for a welder to see. Then you can turn welding into a lower skill process and create more job opportunities.

    > If a computer can simply

I believe that the term "simple" is being applied incorrectly here.

>Welding is a highly-skilled precision process. And, yet, every automobile on the roads today has had some portion or it's frame welded by a robot. Not just spot welds, full on GMAW, and for hundreds/thousands of vehicles a day.

>No video feed will have high enough resolution, latency and refresh rate, or color reproduction and brightness fidelity for the task. Counter example: robotic surgery. Sure, there's fewer UV, IR and X-rays, but it's only a matter of time before a better CCD/CMOS sensor and lense comes along.

There is a difference between welding the same part automatically millions of times with exact, very tight known constraints that are always the same, and doing small batches and one off custom welds.

The two are not comparable.

Welding is hard. Dealing with a video feed is not something I want to be doing.

You're supposed to use a welding mask

Welding masks already block UV. People get arc flashes when they make mistakes in using the equipment -- striking an arc with their helmet up, or someone else in the area striking an arc when they're not wearing theirs. Video goggles would suffer from the same weakness :)

Actually the wouldn't...the point would be to always have them on from the minute you walk in the door.

You can do that with the auto-darkening welding helmets that are currently in common use. But people don't, because it's annoying.

Can happen in snowy places too, we call it snow blindness

I think snow blindness gets the retinas more than the corneas. Had it once. Not nice.

”I even recall them mentioning lawsuits brought upon them that the company won, which I guess somehow disproves the danger.”

I would guess they won the lawsuits by showing that they had good safety rules and made all reasonable efforts to have their personnel obey them, not by convincing the court/jury that these jobs are risk-free.

> mentioning lawsuits brought upon them that the company won

Perhaps something like "Please follow the safety rules. If you don't follow them and you hurt yourself, you won't get a huge payday, just bad injuries that your brought on yourself"?

She might have been a "lead licker" who was an earlier generation soldering expert who used to literally lick the solder. This was forcibly stopped in approx 1980 here but I noticed people doing it when I was working on a line as late as 1995. They were older folk and yes they had the skin problems.

I myself have done a lot of work with leaded solder and have 20 rolls of it in the cupboard and it's most likely zero risk if you take the relevant precautions which are keep it away from eating surfaces, clean your hands afterwards properly, keep things out of your mouth and use a fume extractor.

I noticed analogue "legend" Jim Williams also used to lick the solder and had serious neurological problems when he got older and wondered if there were any links.

Why did they lick the solder?

For the taste.

Ah, Hacker News, where you get downvoted for making a joke.

(to be truthful this comment didn't really add anything, which makes it fair game to downvote, but I still got a bit of surprise seeing a decent joke grayed out)

It was a joke, yes. I knew it'd get downvoted when I made it, but I thought it was worth the price.

Well I enjoyed it. I’m sure I’ll be downvoted by the resident Vulcans for encouraging deviant behaviour immediately.

This isn't reddit or imgur. Why would you expect it to behave like it was?

It's literally in the guidelines: >Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

People downvoting this as a joke, it could also bring up a point. Lead acetate was used as a sweetener occasionally in US food products up until the FDA was established. People have been somewhat aware of its poisoning effects since the Romans ("mad painters disease") but still used it in food and water systems. Pretty sure it is still used in some lipsticks as well.

Presumably the same reason people lick pens and pencils, something to do with softening or making it flow easier.

I never understood it either. It was usually silver bearing multicore solder so it had flux, had no issues with flow. The stuff was an absolute joy to work with.

I’m curious as well. A google search didn’t bring anything up about people licking solder.

Presumably, it acts as a flux or something?

I am much into hobbyist work, like 3d printing/welding (mig/tig/stick welding/grinding), laser/CNC cutting.

I use a fume hood, I made it myself using Centrifugal fan and filters.

I thought about using scuba gear for welding, but I was worried about explosion from oxygen in case of leak?

Then I wear a respirator.

Is there anyway to respirate using a pipe placed elsewhere? Thinking about having a respirator attached to 20meter long pipe and put other end of the pipe outside to get fresh air instead of breathing the welding fumes.

is this for real?

Once I welded Galvanized pipe and I was sick for a week, I drank a lot of milk to counter that which I learned from my welding instructor

The sickest I've ever been was cutting/torching galvanized pipe and fencing in our poorly ventilated machine shed. I opened the doors to let most of the smoke out, but geez is that stuff aggressive.

We hammered milk afterwards to try to get rid of some of the symptoms, but that sticks with you. It's hard to describe, because it's an illness that isn't really like anything else. It sucks.

That's probably metal fume fever?[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_fume_fever

Do you find the dangers and precautions biologically or medically implausible, or do you find it implausible that the social danger of appearing to be weird is worth the risk of sharing?

The “breath through a 20m pipe” part isn’t going to work: all that dead space will (literally) kill you.

Depends on whether you breath in and breath into the pipe (which is not ok), or just breath in from the pipe, and breath out elsewhere (you will need some valve that will regulate the flow here).

No, I think the issue is that your lungs can’t generate enough negative pressure to respirate effectively through 20m of pipe.

They're not underwater. It doesn't take much pressure just to move air through a tube.

I assumed they were going to put a fan on it because otherwise it would be hard to even get a breath in, even if there was a check valve for exhaling.

I find it funny that trying to be safe, the alternative is to do something that will probably kill you. Respirator/Ventilation should work perfectly fine

3M makes masks specifically for welding (3M 8515). Due to current circumstance, they can't be had for any price (they are also N95 rated), but normally that would be the solution to your problem.

Scuba(normally) does not use any higher concentration of oxygen than air. The compressors used just pump high pressure air into the tanks.

Using a scuba tank filled with air does not pose any additional explosion risk due to oxygen. The only additional explosion risk is due to the relatively high pressures involved (2000-5000psi) and the risks surrounding the use of any compressed gas.

There are blends of gasses available that do present an additional explosion hazard, but those are generally not available to someone without the training required to safely handle. For that matter a scuba shop following the rules won't even fill a tank of air for you without verifying your certification.

I thought about using scuba gear for welding, but I was worried about explosion from oxygen in case of leak?

FWIW, it's way overkill, but you'd want SCBA (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus)[1] not SCUBA (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) unless you are, indeed, underwater. Of course the technologies are similar (and can be swapped to a limited degree in a pinch) but SCBA is used when you're not underwater. Those are what firefighters use while attacking fires, or performing trench rescue / confined space rescue / etc. and handling hazardous materials calls.

Note that SCBA do not used bottled oxygen... it's just plain air, but under pressure. I'm not a diver, so I don't know as much about SCUBA, but I know they aren't using pure oxygen either, but I think there may be times when they use a mix that is slightly different from plain old atmospheric air.

An additional note: SCBA are expensive, require maintenance and need to be refilled with air. All of these things would be a challenge to using one outside of an industrial setting. The "refill with air" part is especially tricky, because you might think "I can use a regular air compressor", but you actually can't, for at least two reasons. One, the pressures needed to fully refill an SCBA tank are higher than a standard shop air compressor. Two, the air also needs to be filtered to remove any contaminants - including, for example, oil used to lubricate the pump on the compressor. As you might guess, fire departments and other SCBA users buy special compressors that are very expensive.

And unlike SCUBA, I don't know that there are many, or any, commercial shops where you can walk in and get a bottle filled. If you had a buddy on a local fire department, they might be able to get a bottle filled for you, but no guarantees. Oh, and the bottles also need hydrostatic pressure testing every few years to make sure they are safe to use.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-contained_breathing_appar...

And some small rural fire departments don't even have the ability to refill their own SCBA tanks, and instead bring them to a larger department to get them refilled.

Yes, exactly. Those compressors are expensive. Back in my firefighting days, of the 21 or so departments in my county, I think maybe 3 had their own compressors. A few more had cascade systems, either at their station, or on a truck. So every couple of weeks or so, the other departments would haul all of their bottles to one of the departments that had a compressor, and refill them all (including the cascade bottles).

It really is a bit of a hassle, but it's worth it for an application like firefighting where SCBA are an absolute requirement.

Most recreational diving is just compressed air, no added oxygen.

I wonder if, or why, SCBA gear would use different tank valves than SCUBA gear such that any dive shop couldn't fill one.

I wonder if, or why, SCBA gear would use different tank valves than SCUBA gear such that any dive shop couldn't fill one.

Good point. I don't actually know for a fact that they are different. It may actually be the case that a dive shop would have the capability to fill an SCBA bottle. Now, whether or not they'd be willing to do it is a different question.

FWIW, nitrox use is pretty common among recreational divers as well, and mixed gas diving is all but a must for tech diving. 32 and 36 percent O2 are most common and up to 40 is ok without taking extra equipment precautions.

>Is there anyway to respirate using a pipe placed elsewhere? Thinking about having a respirator attached to 20meter long pipe and put other end of the pipe outside to get fresh air instead of breathing the welding fumes.

Yes, sort of. Supplied air respirators are masks or helmets fed with compressed air and are widely used in paint spray booths. You'll need a compressor capable of supplying a sufficient quantity of filtered, oil-free air.

A less cumbersome option is a powered air-purifying respirator (PAPR), which uses a belt pack containing a battery, fan and filter unit to supply purified air to a mask or helmet. PAPRs are the most widely used respiratory protection option in commercial welding, with several manufacturers offering PAPRs with an integrated welding helmet.

Both these options have the advantage of being positive-pressure, which means that no fit testing is required to ensure safe use - even if the mask or helmet leaks, the constant supply of clean air at above ambient pressure will prevent the ingress of contaminated air.

An example of PAPR application: I know of a professional woodturner who uses one, a 3M system IIRC. Beyond potential issues with long-term exposure to wood dust, turners tend to use material with unusual provenance compared to commercial timber. That in turn often means "spalted" – i.e. it's got fungal growth in it. It produces some lovely patterning and coloration in the wood, but which you definitely do not want to be breathing. The PAPR effectively combines breathing protection with a common turner's face shield; it's a compelling combination for that kind of work.

Get a 3M respirator with the appropriate filters for handling lead. When finished, wash up with Hygenall Lead-Off.

> Is there anyway to respirate using a pipe placed elsewhere

Yes, a CPAP machine.

A long tube, remote air with a filter, heated and humidified if you like.

And they're designed to adapt to your breathing so you won't know they're on.

though to be honest it's more like 2-3 meters, not 20.

I think she might've been exposed to a lot worse than lead.

Agree. I’ve taught kids to use needle nose pliers to handle solder.

I have to ask - was she aware?

I'd have to assume so - it was plain to see.

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