Finding lead in Stanley's Quencher
lumafield.com
lumafield.com
Consumers are not the only ones that matter
The people working in the factoriesare exposed to lead. The people at the mines are exposed to lead. The people in shuttered ghost towns like Pitcher Oklahoma are exposed to lead. The people transporting lead are exposed to lead. People working in recycling or waste management or landfills are exposed to lead. Lead is not good to put into the manufacturing stream or the waste stream. By continuing to create demand you are continuing to put lead in the environment in forms where it gets into humans and damages their brains.
What do you think SAE660 bearing bronze contains.
This level of hype is horribly misguided.
I have not witnessed one machinist harmed by lead in 40 years.
If I cared I would wear a face mask when working with bronzes.
Truthfully Hexavalent Chromium exposure from stainless scares me more.
That is a known carcinogen and I machine alot of high Chrome content stainless.
1 in 5 students had excess blood lead. The schools nearby were scraped down and soil was replaced whenever the lead levels got too high from the dust blowing off the open ore and slag trucks running town. The smelter didn't hit EPA requirements for 25 years, and when faced with enforcement, decided to leave rather than produce lead cleanly, because it is not economical to do so cleanly. Cheap lead offloads the environmental and health effects to someone.
https://health.mo.gov/living/environment/hazsubstancesites/p...
https://www.kbia.org/science-and-technology/2012-08-08/the-e...
i wonder if the EPA could be better off if it gave grants instead of fining people.
For a recent example there are the covid relief scams galore. very often in the news the last year or two at least in Arizona, where some egregiously shameful people 'embezzled' and 'gamed' the grants system to buy super extravagent properties, etc. .
Lead, so sweet, its dust a sheet, over kindergardens, parks and shools, the fools!
Yes.
Not even close.
As someone who repaires such things myself, I know that there is no excuse for it.
Simple as that.
I do it myself and so I know just how not-a-problem it is.
Several lead-free solders are perfectly usable in all the same places, and the only way to reduce the background radiation of lead permeating the entire environment, is to stop putting it into the environment.
Keeping the antique radio out of the dump does not excuse the fact that the same user had to buy a spool of lead solder which had to be manufactured, and at least half of that spool will go right into the environment, not into museum exhibits.
It will be in spatters and sponges and wicks and soldapults and brillo scrubbers and random junk scrapped wiring and junk projects that are not antique radios housed in museums forever. Probably 90% or more of that spool ends up all over the environment rather than in some precious artifact.
Yes the lead-free solders are slightly more difficult to work with, but hardly enough to matter. If you never soldered anything before, the very act of soldering successfully at all is a baffling art to a lot of people. After some amount of trial & error, maybe training if they're lucky enough to know someone, they eventually develop a feel and a sense for how to get it to work right. Going from lead to lead-free requires a similar adjustment, but it's a freaking microscopic fraction of the difficulty.
Complaining about lead-free solder is nothing but pathetic baby crying, and crying over something that is simply not that difficult, and something that comes at a simply inexcusable cost.
My current inventory of solder was obtained from estate sales, so they are all leaded, but old stock, not newly manufactured. If I had not bought them, they would have been thrown away into the garbage dumps.
Avgas is the stuff with lead in it. Avgas is basically gasoline with lead added as an anti-knock agent and is burned in reciprocating spark ignition engines. Typically these are found in the general aviation fleet.
All anyone can say is that maybe I'm lying or maybe don't know what a good job looks like and so don't know I'm actually having problems. Or maybe I only ever tried within a narrow sliver of ideal situations and conditions. We will all just have to grant each other some basics like that or else there's no point in conversing at all.
But it's farcical me to say "I use it all the time and it's fine." and respond "You're wrong."
Really? I didn't just do the thing I just watched my hands do right in front of my face? This project in my hands is not actually soldered? And doesn't actually work? Am I in an Elon Musk simulation or something?
My physics are not different from your physics. My sac305 is not different from your sac305. My 300-350 degrees c is not different from your 300-350 degrees c.
Such basic implacables are not a "strong opinion"
But, it's true that, having examined the basic facts and tried things myself, I have now arrived at a conclusion that is a rather strong opinion that the crybabying is nothing more than that. 63/37 is a little easier and that's all there is to that.
All I wanted was a sense of the relative risk of leaded solder compared to the other sources of lead around me. That's all. I figured that someone with such strong opinions as yours would have that sort of information.
I have no opinions regarding the ease of use of leaded solder versus unleaded solder. I actually don't know what sac305 is... Google tells me it's 96.5% tin, 3% silver, and 0.5% copper.
Yes sac305 is a common lead-free solder. It's not easy to replicate the properties of lead-tin alloy, so there are a lot of different alternatives and none of them really work quite as well.
There's 2 classes of problem: usability and functionality. Lead-free is both a little more difficult to use, and then is a little more likely to fail over time.
Usability: The usability problems are 2 things, higher temperature, and surface finish.
In the best case with old lead-tin, you still have to develop a skill to get in and get out relatively quickly and not keep the heat on for a long time. Even the relatively lower old temperatures are still hot enough to destroy most components and the pcb traces if you lay the heat on for extended times.
But all of the lead-free alternatives require a little bit higher temperature, and so there is a smaller window of time to goof off and blunder around with the heat on. Smaller but still easy enough. A datasheet for a component might say something like max 300c for 3 seconds, but really you can poke around for 30 seconds at 350. 30 seconds is forever. If you can't get it done by then, the problem isn't the solder.
The surface finish matters because in the old days it just so happened that you could be a cave man and still know if you made a good joint or not simply by the surface finish. If it's shiny, it's good (probably), if it's dull, it's bad. sac305 usually cools to a dull finish even if everything is perfect. You can still tell if you made a good or bad joint, it's just not as utterly black/white simple as before.
Both of those are just, it's a little more difficult. Still perfectly doable and not just by some wizards and not by most mortal humans.
Funcionality: The most valid problem is the performance, where after doing the sufccessful soldering, the solder fails in some way later on.
sac305 and most others are generally a little less ductile and prone to crystalization and fatigue cracking, and the biggest problem is tin whiskers.
sac305 is pretty much the worst for growing tin whiskers. On fine-pitch legs on surface mount parts the pins are close enough together that in bad enough environmental conditions, whiskers can grow to short between two pins eventually.
But, it takes particular conditions and doesn't usually happen to most ordinary things kept in ordinary indoor environments, and if you're building something that has fine pitch parts and you know it will be used on a boat or something you can mitigate that by adding a coating, and lastly in this case, point-to-point wiring in an antique radio is way too large to have any tin whisker problem. Whiskers grow to something like 500um in the worst case. It takes both a bad environment (presumably and "antique radio" will be protected and not used on the deck of a saltwater fishing boat) and requires parts that are almost touching each other. Antique radios don't even have PCB's. Medium-old electronics that havs pcbs but through-hole parts are maybe barely subject to whiskers. It will be uncommon for a whisker to reach all the way between 0.1" (2.54mm) chip legs, but not impossible.
These things are certainly problems. That's true. Yet it's also true that most electronics have been using nothing but this stuff for almost 20 years already by now.
There has been exceptions allowed for specialized things where the functionality and performance of the lead alloys was necessary enough to outweigh the environmental impact. But they are about to remove a lot of those exceptions soon. It is a problem, but it's not a problem for any hobbyist.
This subthread, my reaction, was exactly about the suggestion about "some retro guy repairing an antique radio". That guy absolutely not even close has any need for lead solder, and yes, that one guy using it does poison the environment, because there is no such thing as one guy. It's countless guys. If one guy can buy and then use something, then so can everyone else. And for every one of those users, theyr aren't just soldering a few joints one time. They have 1lb spools of solder and ALL of that solder eventually winds up in the ground and leeching into the water and soil. Most of it actually gets turned into fine dust because that's what happens when you clean the tip, which you have to do continuously, and when you desolder something, the vacuum atomizes the liquid solder as it's being sucked out of the via.
That's why it's so bad. There's no such thing as just one guy doing it, and for every one of the people, imagine taking a pound or two of lead (solder isn't 100% lead, but a single person will posess a few pounds or more total of different solders) and imagine say 10% of that lead being actually in some project. Then another say 30% being in the form of little bits and pebbles and the size of a bb and discarded joints like bits of soldered wiring cut off and discarded, and the rest, say 60% all in the form of particles the size of sand all the way doewn to very fine dust. And all of that solid pound of finely ground pebbles, sand, dust, ends up just everywhere, only some ends up in the local dump. a lot ends up just in the structure of the house and the ground under and around it right near wherever the work bench is. When you sweep and vacuum your work area, you are not remotely actually recovering all that lead dust.
And the next family to occupy that land didn't sign up for that.
When I say "no excuse" I mean that, there is no overriding need that justifies it. Sure lead-tin works better both while using it and then klater for the life of the object, but it doesn't work better enough, and for most people the application isn't critical enough, for that to outweigh working towards the goal getting led out of the environment.
Unleaded gasoline is way more difficult to use and less performant and has cost everyone billions, and we all shouldered that burden, only so that some man-baby can undo that very difficult and costly work just so they can solder a wire in a radio a teeny little bit easier?
No. The two considerations don't compare at all. It's just that one is easy to see and one is not so easy to see. One you can see with your eyes right now and gives you immediate gratification, and one you have to see with your mind, and you have to care about anything but your own convenience as the single most important consideration above all others.
This is all well known, it's not a mystery, and lead in solder is the least of the problems with lead in the world today.
I still use 63/37 or 62/36/2 for anything challenging, though. Or for old rework: many people in this thread are missing that you really, really shouldn't mix alloys on a joint, so you've got to get the old stuff out before switching to lead-free, and at single-joint scale that's a lot more polluting than just grabbing the spool of 63/37.
From big old chunky point to point, to manually drag soldering 0.5mm pitch tssop.
I have no problem doing something that you claim is impossible or too difficult, and somehow this makes me the crybaby?
Ok.
Frankly if it was me I wouldn't be so keen to tell everyone how weak and incapable I was.
I grew up on leaded as we all did. I used to really like the radio shack 0.015in 62/36/2 silver bearing. Did indeed work very nice.
And yet after an inconsequentially short maybe a single hour of effort, I was able to adjust to 305.
You telling me I'm just better than you? Well if I'm just better, then shouldn't you be listening instead of arguing? If I'm not better, then how do you explain my lack of difficulty with something you claim is difficult?
I'm soldering with SN62 now as we speak.
It makes it sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about because you’re making an incorrect statement about a general category.
Unfortunately, we usually don't know what safety procedures were followed or whether they're adequate. This requires insight into the whole supply chain.
So, maybe it's better to be safe and ask for alternatives? But we don't know if it helps, because there are other materials and other reasons why one manufacturing process might be better than another.
Consumer purchase decisions are a very indirect way of affecting working conditions and a poor substitute for work-safety regulations.
Gilman and Pitcher closed because the cities could not be decontaminated.
The Doe Run plant outside Saint Louis closed because they couldn't refine clean lead economically. Much of the city around it was bulldozed off and buried.
There's a difference between "we don't what safety procedures were followed" and "there's no such thing as clean lead".
The ad-hominem attacks are un-called for. I was merely pointing out that the other used of lead involved boiling them off... and thus the lead was far, far more likely to go EVERYWHERE as a result.
There is a lot animosity from older gen EEs towards lead free solder, lot of lies as the flux is more poisonous etc., however the point is in fact is not only personal harm, but reduction of consumption of lead at first place. The less lead is produced and thrown away the better.
Why is lead so advantageous for sealing vacuum chambers that a manufacturer would risk all this backlash? Do simple epoxy glues not work?
As to why it's advantages, lead is really cheap and really effective. In material science there are 2 groups, those making amazing new materials, and those trying to match them without using lead or cadmium
_No_ level of lead is safe and_no_ level of lead is acceptable. That's a statement from CDC, WHO, or any other 3 letter agency you could ask.
Why is it still "used". Often, the difference is in percentage of lead in products when it's intentional vs not (probably obvious). The part that may be less known is how difficult it is to ensure that steel or other metals don't have <0.001% lead still in them, and even that is far, far too high (see original statement on lead safety level).
Working in characterization of materials _can be_ difficult. I have had 3 different pieces of equipment give 10% X, 50%X, and 80% X all for exactly the same batch of the same material.
However, lead is far more established in it's characterization in metals, so _given enough care and money_ these problems don't really occur.
This company, and many others, aren't going to check - that's the government's job to worry about the safety and health of the public, and protect them if a company makes an unknowingly harmful product. The government meanwhile does not have the funding, personnel, or time to tackle such a monumental task. This is why it takes so long to find bad products like this - it's typically on the shoulders of curious individuals.
To recap, this _should be_ a solved issue (also lead needs to come out of GA, as it has been shown to be possible for decades, and actually _harms_ the engines of small planes), but as it often is, harming people to save money spells success in our world.
It doesn’t reveal anything the world didn’t already know, though. There is lead, but it is within the sealed inner chamber of the cup. It isn’t accessible to drinkers.
Still, doesn’t seem wise to use lead in such a popular drinking device. With the millions sold, it’s hard to imagine there not being a few defects.
Imagine being able to look inside a weld with this level of detail...
We have crude tools in my field compared to this...
Essentially the same product but cheaper because there isn't a weird hypetrain around it.
I had assumed maybe it was the manufacturing process, maybe lead in the environment(from the solder), then some vapors condensing on the inside surface.?
I point this out every time that page is posted because it's really easy to miss. They probably should give these a slow rotating animation to make it more obvious.
it isn't the product, but the effect of viral. the effect of influencers is the thing to be looking at here. however, that's just the next evolution of marketing. to me, it is the ability to be influenced that should be studied and improved.
I'm curious about what you mean by "improved?"
For the record, I'm extremely cynical if that wasn't apparent. I've never bought anything from late night infomercials, and I see influencers below them on the scale of respectability. There are oh so many tales of the influencer that just wanted the checks even though they knew nothing of the product being peddled. Are they all that way? Maybe not, but it's not anything that I will ever be convinced is a net positive for society.
I don't like since prefer smaller water bottles, but I understand why some people would. I also don't get the viral popularity, but I understand why social promotion of something people want and is new can take off. It is turned into phenomenon that people want just cause its popular.
They all used Stanley mugs, usually the dark green one with a little detachable cup.
Such an uncanny valley for Stanley to suddenly the be the IT mom and influencer accessory, but it’s a well trodden path from work site to boutique (I think Carhartt, Suburban SUVs, many others I am sure).
Watching SNL, I have to ask: are they not leak proof? https://youtu.be/L2tUO2mp99Q?si=zVjGlxi-rcrMW2JC
We always just use Nalgene since you can’t lose the cap and they generally don’t leak but of course accept room temp water.
Meme transmission is a kind of peer pressure, the entire thing seems prickly to me from a moral perspective. I for one don't appreciate being pressured to spend money on things I don't need or want.
I overheard some office ladies gossiping about a co-workers Starbucks cup.
It cost over $85 and they were pouring over it to determine if fake or real.
A cup.
Every company I worked at gave out cheap plastic tumblers with the company logo everyone threw them in the trash.