"Meat Plow" wrote in message news : On Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:09:45 +0000, Arfa Daily wrote:
:
:
: "Stephen Cowell" wrote in message
: . net...
:
: "Arfa Daily" wrote in message
: ...
:
: "Dave Moore" wrote in message
: news:W7vHh.3913$B7.2859@bigfe9...
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: ...
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: Anyway, finally, it dawned on me that perhaps
: 30 years involved in electronics with a good
: 20 of them heavily involved in prototyping guitar
: amp designs, might have taken it's toll. So I did some
: research online and discovered that indeed my symptoms
: just might well be those of lead poisoning.
:
: ...
:
: Lead as a metal does not fume at soldering temperatures, such that it can
: be ingested in that way. The fumes and vapour that you see when
: soldering, are from the flux contained in the solder, burning away. There
: is some evidence that prolongued exposure to the rosin based fluxes used
: to date, can cause respiratory tract ailments such as industrial asthma,
: and may in extreme circumstances be carcinogenic.
:
: Rosin has Zinc Chloride in it... I've been poisoned with
: zinc before (welding) and you need to drink milk for
: the chelating calcium in it. Bad sick headache... not sure
: of prolonged low-level exposure, but fume hoods are nice.
: __
: Steve
: .
:
: That's a new one on me. I had always understood rosin to be a fairly benign
: material - at least when not heated up - made from naturally occuring pine
: resin. Is the zinc chloride something that has been added in to make the
: rosin suitable for some specific purpose ?
:
: Arfa
:
: Man have I woofed up volumes of "solder smoke" over the 25+ years on the
: bench. I used to love walking into the shop on a cold clear morning and
: waft in the mixture of rosin, pipe, and cigar smoke floating through the
: air. There is nothing wrong with me these days, just ask my son, either
: head will tell you so.
:
: --
: Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004
:
: COOSN-266-06-25794

I suppose it should be mentioned that soder for electronic work
to my knowledge doesn't have zinc Chloride in it.
I made the mistake of using some flux with Zinc Chloride in it
years ago on a circuit. It took me quite awhile to troubleshoot
why it didn't work right down to it's root cause, the conductivity
of the zinc on the PCB )`:
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