Soldering is a controversial subject in boating, under many standards, the use of solder as a primary means of joining cables or terminals is prohibited. There are some places though that you may still need to solder on board, the connectors for VHF antenna cables for example.
I have had to equip a workshop, going on a spending spree buying new tools, one of these being a couple of soldering irons and various rolls of solder. The irons were easy enough to find, when it came to the subject of the solder it was more difficult.
Leaded or unleaded?
I thought it would be easy, find the right size (thickness) of solder wire and add it to the basket, move on. Not so fast, you see it had never occurred to me that solder for electrical work would contain lead still. To be more specific, it didn't occur to me that solder containing lead would still be so freely available. Lead had not been used in plumbing solder, petrol or paints for years, but there it was, readily available, I was very surprised. So before buying anything, in the spirit of you can´t know everything about everything, but you can find out, I started a little research.
This is a good video, comparisons between different lead free solders to their leaded versions.
Temperatures
Leaded solder will melt at a lower temperature than lead free solder, about 180 degrees Celsius to the 220 degrees Celsius of lead free solder. For what I will be using it for it will not make much difference, most of the items I solder, such as antenna plugs and RCA audio cable plugs, I doubt the higher temp will make a difference. A higher wattage iron might be a good idea so it does not lose heat as quickly. If you are not well practiced at soldering, the lower temperature of the leaded solder might be easier to work with.
Lead free solder sometimes contains silver, silver has the best electrical conductivity of the metals, it also will increase the price of the solder.
Lead free solder seems to create an “uglier” finish. Leaded solder gives a nice shiny finish, almost like mercury. The thing that comes to mind is it might be more difficult to see the duller finish of the lead free solder when working.
In conclusion, I would say if you are doing your own work, then feel free to use whatever sort of sort you´re comfortable with, just take sensible precautions when using leaded solder.
I recall reading that here in the USA, when the auto manufacturers and their electronics subsidiaries had to remove lead from solder, that's when we started to find PCMs failing due to cracked solder joints. Not sure if it's really true, but that rumor was floating around for some time. I had one fail on a '98 Grand Cherokee but never found out why, the replacement is still working 13 years later!
ReplyDeleteI rarely solder much these days, don´t have to, the only thing I know that we still do is PL259 VHF connectors. The lead free solder we use is from Weller, seems to work well, only briefly tried it when the new soldering irons arrived, I think a bit of care initially is required, need to work at a higher temperature. I do know we still use natural rosin flux and everybody swears by it.
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