Wickes 'Creosote Substitute' in the 25 litre drums seems pretty effective at turning water when it rains. I'm on my fourth drum of the stuff slowly working round the various sheds, fences etc here on the farm. When applied the contrast with untreated wood after rain is quite dramatic. Only time will tell it's anti-rot properties. I can still easily buy the original creosote from a local farm supplies place, but as we're employing others to put it on I'm not happy using something that has carcinogenic allegations lodged against it! Incidently they are much the same price - circa £30 a drum
No luck required. It will be available for the foreseeable future.
Why are dry joints more likely with lead free?
Little to do with dry joints though.
So? Plenty of stuff made with leaded solder was shoddily made. I had a Philips (a supposedly good brand) TV in the 1980s that failed withing it's guarantee period. It was due to inadequate soldering where the nature of the components (flyback txformer, IIRC) and copper pour on the PCB sucked the heat away too rapidly. It could have easily been foreseen with better QA and was easily fixed with a correctly rated soldering iron. The repairman knew exactly what was wrong as he had repaired so many with the same fault.
There are two problems with lead free, we don't even know long-term problem which will turn out to be the worst. One of them is an increased likelihood of a poor joint during manufacture, the other (probably the worst) is a "best quality" joint failing in the future.
Poor joint making is a direct and obvious result of the different eutectic range of lead-free solders, compared to previous lead-tin alloys. Electronic solder was always near to the 63:37 eutectic composition, so that there was a "fast freeze" behaviour after soldering. Dry joints (in modern production hand soldering) are no longer caused by a failure of initial wetting (that's just poor technique and should be fixed anyway), but by mechanical movement or vibration during cooling, when the solder is in the eutectic or "pasty" range. As the lead free solders have a wider temperature range for this, there's an increased risk of movement occuring during it.
After a perfect joint is made, there are still problems with lead-free solders.
They're much less ductile, so any "at risk" connnections such as mechanical switches or sockets soldered directly to PCBs are far more likely to break off owing to applied loads. Switch pins are being redesigned with inbuilt springs and better support from the switch body to try and reduce this. Many connectors are now using plastic pins that can be staked onto the PCB for mechanical support, leaving their connector pins to be thinner and more flexible, absorbing forces that the solder no longer can.
The lead free solder is so prone to fatigue that vibration is already showing a great many brittle failures in areas like car ECUs where a heavy resistor etc. is supported by its leads. This is probably the worst of the fault causes.
Tin has problems at low temperatures. This can be avoided by correct solder alloys, but most solder on sale for retail isn't the correct alloy, but something cheaper. So there's the risk of failures by the pantalon des grognards effect.
Finally there's the risk of whisker growth from the solder, leading to short circuits. Unheard of with most alloys, this becomes a problem with near-pure tin solders. It's especially a problem for SHF electronics and tiny surface mount construction.
This stuff is rubbish and no-one should be using it. If you care about lead poisoning for kids, worry about leaded petrol, plumbing or even roofing lead, not electronic solder. No one (Geoff aside) has enough environmental exposure to solder for it to be a problem.
I am sure that eventually the right alloys will emerge, but right now lead free solder is crap.
And judging by the above, crappier than I thought.
Its one thing to ban lead water pipes (good idea), led n petrol, or fishing weights ..It's another to ban leaded solder joints, where the volume of lead to water is minuscule.
I am not even sure that banning lead shot was such a great idea. At least lead eventually oxidises..does tungsten?
It's the same story over and over..the great Asbestos scare, the great CFC scare, the great LEAD scare, the great Mercury scare.. the great Nuclear scare..Sure we want to reduce these things to sane levels, but we cannot eliminate them altogether cos they all occur naturally anyway.
Indeed. I tried hand soldering with it once. It is exactly as you say. The stage where its essentially porridge rather than solid or liquid, and its disinclination to wet, makes it a vile job and one best left to a well controlled production line.
But not a problem unless you were in a soft water area as the pipes would get lined with scale over time.
Shot for guns or shot for fishing? The prime motivation for banning lead shot is to protect the wildlife, particularly birds who injest the shot for use in their crops.
Another one who was actually trained how to solder as a 'prentice back in 1967, and spent half his working life soldering. Not to mention setting up production line solder wave equipment.
Were you born a part, or is it the result of years of practice?
Its just another bit of green oriented legislative total crap that wont save a single life let alone the planet.
Now about those lead free car batteries.. if you want to see what a lot of recycled lead batteries look like in a heap leaking sulphuric acid, there's a nice lead smelter in France that I visited with a friend who makes heavy metal monitoring equipment. The car we used still had the scars on it from sulphuric acid dripping onto it, when he sold it 6 years later.
I have used nothing else since before the RoHS legislation came in (had too as I was selling the final items) and never had any issues due to soldering.
DIY and small scale use (what we are talking about here) is very different to a six-sigma volume production environment where everything must be just-so.
You can - it just ain't so easy and there are problems with how durable the joints are under some conditions.
The problem with actually soldering with it mostly come down to the transition between solid and liquid being very abrupt - with tin/lead solder there was a fairly gentle transition between the two. That shouldn't be a problem if your technique and setup are correct, but if anything's marginal you might have got away with it using the old stuff, but the new stuff is less forgiving.
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