On Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:24:21 -0800 (PST), with neither quill nor
qualm, " quickly quoth:


I'd like to know where he came up with that $280B figure.


I don't know, exactly, but in my assembly business, the time taken by
our assemblers to place a component on a circuit board using lead-free
pure tin solder is about twice as long as with tin/lead solder. So,
that may be where the amount came from. The machine placed components
using a paste of tin-silver-copper takes the same amount of time. The
pass through the convection oven is also about the same time.

Hand-assembled articles are surely in the minority nowadays, eh?
I wonder if his figure includes the fried components due to grown tin
spikes, etc.


The scary thing is what two of our customers reported in the last
couple of weeks. That is a perfectly soldered lead-free component,
soldered to a silver plated circuit board using tin-silver-copper
solder paste, popped off the circuit board, leaving a trace of copper
from the component where it had been soldered.

The actual lead-free plating on the copper component leads detached
from the component.

Whoa! That's a new one. Luckily, I didn't do more than a day or two
of assembly inspection in my QA years (shipping and receiving was much
more fun), but that was before lead-free was politically curserect.


I have read that lead-free wave soldering will always begin to
dissolve the copper board trace into the molten solder. Same thing may
happen with lead-free solder paste and a convection oven when the time
of the paste being liquid is too long. I have not read about the
component tinning/plating also causing copper problems in the
component.

This happened on one component on one board out of many for two
different customers. Not the same component manufacture, either.

This does not bode well, and if it turns into a larger trend, what
will the cost be to resolder all the lead-free equipment with leaded
solder in the future? sigh

Peter Huber got it right in his book _Hard Green_. The soft greenies
are depriving today's and tomorrow's children of their parents' wealth
and futures. Maybe the rampant idiocy in the media can be stampeded
back to sanity, so the useless forms of green thinking are eliminated
from the public eye.

Has anyone found stats for "lives saved by moving to lead-free
solders", perchance? Any bets on the figure being low to none?

---
Every moment is a golden one
for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
-- Henry Miller