You'll be right after a while. Go and watch Luis Rossmans Apple repair videos on boobtube. It'll make you feel a lot better 😉

Unless you drop your dead boards in a blender and make smoothies out of them, it's extremely hard to get lead poisoning from metallic lead contained in solder. Wash your hands after handling the boards, the iron never gets hot enough to vaporise it.

Phoe wrote on 2021-10-26, 00:05:

Or am I losing my mind even more than usual, stuck in a nightmare fantasy land?

Yes.

I'm guessing you are quite young, live in a relatively new house, and have been told your whole life that various things are dangerous. Yes lead is poisonous. But in reality you have to go out of your way to get poisoned by it. I live in an old house that has a lead water main, and updated copper pipes inside soldered together with lead. There's also lead on the roof, and every bit of wood in the house is probably covered in lead paint. Basically this is how everyone lived for 100 years, and if you still live in an old house, you still do.

If you were drinking gallons of water from a newly installed/cleaned lead pipe, yes you might get lead poisoning. It depends on how much you drink. Handle lead and forget to wash your hand occasionally? you'll be fine. I'd wager if you eat a piece of solder, absolutely nothing would happen. I wouldn't recommend it, and if you did that every day, sure you will EVENTUALLY get lead poisoning. But this is going out of your way to get ill.

Look at it from an empirical standpoint. There are 100s possibly 1000s of us who solder as a hobby. Have you ever heard of someone getting lead poisoning from it?

If you solder for a while you will eventually burn yourself. After that you will be far more concerned about that.

Another way to think of it is how often will you actually be soldering?
It may be a couple of times a week at the beginning while you are practising and possibly working though a backlog of faulty hardware.
But after that initial period you may only pick up a soldering Iron once a month if that.

Your exposed to plenty of other forms of pollution on a much more regular bases

mR_Slug wrote on 2021-10-26, 02:29:

I'm guessing you are quite young, live in a relatively new house, and have been told your whole life that various things are dangerous.

It depends on your definition of quite young and relatively new. I'm well into the back half of my 20s, my house was built in the 80s, and I definitely didn't have a sheltered or alarmist upbringing.
No, unfortunately I'm just the owner of a particularly sub-par brain, a body that only technically works, and a comically crippling anxiety problem. 🤣

I really appreciate the reality check y'all, it was very helpful. I figured my worries were well outside the realm of reality and the best medicine for that is always going to the people who know what they're talking about, which was the right move.

If nobody sees a serious risk in the practice in general or doing it on my dining table in particular then I think I'll go ahead with it instead of shying away or looking into recapping services.

Thank you.

Solder flux is being targeted but for everyday production uses. Being casual and avoiding smoke like a hobby shouldn't harm anyone.

Yeah there's people who will rant about the dangers of chemicals in everything, then go and burn a "natural" beeswax candle with "purifying" essential oils in it, all day every day. And being around a burning candle of any kind is as bad as smoking a pack a day for smoke, soot and carbon nano-particles, and the oils of any kind will be kicking out all those terpenes, terpenoids, and aromatic hydrocarbons that get the enviro-health freaks wound up if there's a trace of them in drying paint the one day every few years you paint. (Not to mention if you go in a pine forest on a hot day and sniff the "fresh" pine scent you're getting a lungfull of them)

But anyway, limiting exposure to that is long term wise, like a bruise or two is nothing (to non-hemophiliacs) and heal away in a week or two, but getting bruised all over can give you kidney failure, which doesn't heal. Hence why occupational safety standards go way over the top in emphasizing danger, because ppl might be exposed all day every day for 50 years. Then also familiarity breeds contempt as they say, so they have to double or triple up the safety standards to allow for ppl just halfassing them or making honest mistakes. Should you however, begin to take recap and repair work in as a side hustle or assemble boards like Snark Barkers or XTIDEs, then you are probably legally obligated and smart to follow these standards and regulations.

So... hobby work, a couple of dozen sessions a year, don't worry too much, a fan to waft the flux fumes away from your face in a large or well ventilated room is adequate, a filter fan with an activated charcoal filter if you're in a box room or closet, and open the door and take breaks. Wash your hands after handling boards with leaded solder, it's not the metallic lead, it's the acids in yours sweat potentially dissolving the lead oxides you picked up and converting it to bio-available lead, which you might ingest off your next sandwich, or from picking your nose or teeth etc. If you've got a habit like nail biting or thumb sucking to contend with, maybe wearing gloves is safer just to remind you not to while working. Unless they are impermeable gloves (and few stay that way when you've spiked them on the backsides of PCBs a few times) you still want to wash your hands afterward.

I'm sure you're right. I don't intend to make this into a job or start a youtube channel or anything, it'd just be me taking care of old parts so that I can enjoy them in a select few builds as well as maybe building a few fun little kits here and there.

Doing it on my dining table does still worry me a bit, but I don't really have an alternative, we never eat on it, and it's a good 15 or so feet from where we prepare food so it should be safe, I hope.

Assuming you're gonna wipe it down after use, it's a bit dangerous to the dining table more so than you, bound to scorch and scratch it. I would advise getting a piece of plywood, old door, even an older crappier tabletop to actually work on top of.

Will do!

Dont be afraid of the lead. If you buy a fumes extractor with a filther, then you will be allright. Use that and solder with ventilation, and there is no reason to be afraid. Also, wash hands in soap after you are done soldering. Never drink or eat food when you solder.

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Anders- wrote on 2021-10-26, 22:51:

Fume extractors are great, as the stuff in the air is best to avoid breathing in. OP, if you lack proper ventilation and need to […]
Show full quote

brostenen wrote on 2021-10-26, 22:23:

Dont be afraid of the lead. If you buy a fumes extractor with a filther, then you will be allright. Use that and solder with ventilation, and there is no reason to be afraid. Also, wash hands in soap after you are done soldering. Never drink or eat food when you solder.

Fume extractors are great, as the stuff in the air is best to avoid breathing in.
OP, if you lack proper ventilation and need to solder more than just a little bit, think about doing it on the stove?
(using the fan assy above it to pull the smoke out of the house should help somewhat).

I would not mix soldering with the kitchen. Lead does not belong there. It is the same with people who wash old computer boards in the dishwasher. That is a big no-no for me. Or putting shoes on the dinner table or put a ladies handbag on the table. You never know were the hand bag have been placed or what you have stepped in with the shoes. Meat eating bacteria and feces bacteria from animal droppings do not go well with a place were you eat.

Yeah doing it on the dining table is already pushing it for me wrt kitchen proximity, I don't think I'd want to do it on the stove haha

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Phoe wrote on 2021-10-26, 00:05:

My Mom and I are both disabled already and the thought that, through doing this hobby, I might introduce something that worsens our situation scares the shit out of me. She doesn't care and largely thinks I'm being ridiculous fwiw. To make things worse really the only part of our house that has space for soldering work is our dining room table, we never eat on it and it's 15 or so feet from where we prepare food, but the kitchen/dining space is pretty open. There is a door right there I can open for ventilation of the flux fumes, at least, but what worries me the most is lead contamination via lead dust or me transferring it from my hands.

Oh mate, that's an easy fix:

1. Get a tube with some length and put it near where you're soldering. Then add suction to the other end and hang it out a window or place it on a balcony. I've seen some contraptions on YouTube, so you might want to look there.
2. Get some cheap gloves, like they have in hospitals, 100pcs for $10. Ditch them at the end of your soldering session.
3. Start looking for a small but solid table for soldering. Personally I never needed much space for soldering , so YMMV.

👍

Nowadays solder is often sold as lead-free, also. 🙂
That being said, I never poisoned myself throughout the years through using the good lead/silver solder.
Or at least, I didn't notice. Lead is a slowly killing metal, after all. 😉😁

There are different versions of flux, also.
There's the industrial one that smells a bit fishy and then there 's colophony (rosin) that's dissolved in alcohol. That's resin, essentially and doesn't smell.
It's a semi-natural product based on trees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosin

Anyway, it's best if you have a look at different types and find out what' s best for you.
Some people might be a bit allergic to one of either, or so I read.
Anyway, I just mentioned it for the sake of completeness.
Never felt dizzy or something after touching rosin/resin or breathing a bit of its solder dust.

The idea with the pipe and the fan isn't bad, IMHO.
The solder smoke isn't that strong, as far as I can tell.
A little air flow is enough to suck it away.

We just use plumbers flux.. It's quite cheap and works a treat.