A co-worker and I were joking around about how cool it would be if instead of having flux core solder, you could make opium core solder! That way you could get a good high out of soldering. Which brought us to wonder, how much lead exists in the fumes from soldering? That is, how much lead am I inhaling when I’m doing an ECB repair? I know most of the fumes coming up are from the flux, but is there any lead in there?
I have no intention of starting a debate on opium use, let alone having people inform me of what would happen if you trying using opium as a flux agent. I’m only asking if there is lead in solder fumes.
1000 F is pretty high. 60-40 Lead tin solder melts around 180 to 220 C, or 356 to 428 F. I doubt that there is very much lead in the fumes of a eutectic solder.
Mass soldering stations have a legal requirement for effective evacuation of fumes.
Apart from the risk of lead poisoning, the flux itself is corrosive and can be toxic, it can certainly cause allergic reactions over a period of time which then can trigger reactions to substances that dod not originally cause problems, as such solder flux can be an allergen precurser.
Mass soldering is such a tedious task that any supervisor would have to become suspicious if they found their staff actually enjoyed doing it and had a need to do more and more.
DDG, you can link to Google’s text versions of those infernal pdfs, but you lose the graphic and some of the formatting. Either copy the “text version” link from the Google results, or put the pdf’s URL after
