Did you ever stop to think how unlikely the discovery of soldering is? It’s hard to imagine what sequence of events led to it; after all, metals heated to just the right temperature while applying an alloy of lead and tin in the right proportions in the presence of a proper fluxing agent doesn’t seem like something that would happen by accident.
Luckily, [Chris] at Clickspring is currently in the business of recreating the tools and technologies that would have been used in ancient times, and he’s made a wonderful video on precision soft soldering the old-fashioned way. The video below is part of a side series he’s been working on while he builds a replica of the Antikythera mechanism, that curious analog astronomical computer of antiquity. Many parts in the mechanism were soldered, and [Chris] explores plausible methods using tools and materials known to have been available at the time the mechanism was constructed (reported by different historians as any time between 205 BC and 70 BC or so). His irons are forged copper blocks, his heat source is a charcoal fire, and his solder is a 60:40 mix of lead and tin, just as we use today. He vividly demonstrates how important both surface prep and flux are, and shows both active and passive fluxes. He settled on rosin for the final joints, which turned out silky smooth and perfect; we suspect it took quite a bit of practice to get the technique down, but as always, [Chris] makes it look easy.
If you’d like to dig a bit deeper into modern techniques, we’ve covered the physics of solder and fluxes in some depth. And if you need more of those sweet, sweet Clickspring videos, we’ve got you covered there as well.
And 2000 years later, they want to (and are) take away or lead in our solder. You’ll pry my lead-based solder from my cold, dead hands!
Ahhh… Lead water pipes. Those were the days!
Good old lead! Mmmmm
Nothing better than the sweet taste of non-RoHS water :D
sugar of lead?
Sugarlead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener
everything that NASA launches into space is leadbased because tin whiskers
Well that, and it’s not coming back.
lead pipes quickly gets covered with calcium so as long as you don’t have acidic water it isn’t a big issue
I live down aquifer from a super fund site.
The cities well water is contaminated with a number of industrial chemicals (and lots of lead), as part of the settlement the federal government covers all the costs of treating our water for those things.
a couple of years back a new chemical (industrial solvent) was found in our water, while they are getting the equipment installed for the new system our wells were shut down, and our water source was pumped in from a nearby large city, they used treated surface water.
The PH of the new water source was corrected and matched that of the old water source, the water ended up being a bit warmer (surface water) out of the pipes, and the water from the other city was not as hard as the water from our wells.
The end result was non-acidic water leaching lead from pipes that were not leaching lead with the previous water source.
So no, it doesn’t require acidic water for lead to get into the water supply from lead solder… all it requires is a change in the water, it could be temperature, it could be level of calcium in the water, it could be any number of things, so the question has to be, why risk it when unleaded solder works just as well?
The unleaded solder doesn’t work as well, but for plumbing PEX is a good replacement for copper pipes and avoids the solder problem.
For (Copper) pipes for potable water leadfree solder is a good choice. For electronics – which are not intended to be ingested – it is a very poor choice. It decreases product reliability and lifetime.
@Bill
Sounds like underground pipes which generally aren’t PEX. Let alone the installation time period would have excluded it.
I dunno if it was PEX fitting, it was a “shark” push on union, label on said ” California has determined that the chemicals contained causes cancer”. I returned them
[Andy Panda]
That warning is there because of the brass used in the fittings. Brass usually has some amount of lead in it.
Everything causes cancer in California. The law, written by the people, not the legislature, requires listing of everything that is even suspected of causing cancer without regard to quantity. Parking decks have warning signs that say “This area may contain exhaust emissions which are known to the state of California to cause cancer”.
Cancer has determined that this causes California
@Martin but at the end of that electronic device’s lifespan, it goes in the dump. And from there it gets into the groundwater. Maybe we will go back to lead solder when eWaste initiatives finally work?
Prop 65 warnings are pretty much useless. I’d be surprised if jugs of water don’t have them… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_65_(1986)
In my home region there is no calcium in the ground, so there is no calcium in the water, the water is pH neutral not acidic. We certainly would not want lead in our pipes.
Ah… lead pipes. Too bad I can’t remember them (because of the lead).
I generally feel the same way about lead-free solder, but you have to think about what you’re doing. When I built freezer alarms and other devices that are used near food, I was very happy that lead free solder is so easy to come by these days.
So yeah, 95% of the time I’ll used leaded solder until they pry it from my cold dead hands but RoHS solder has a place too.
I don’t see the discovery of soldering that difficult. Copper, tin and lead were some of the first metals men used. So I am sure at least when experimenting with alloys like bronze, soldering could have been discovered easily. The melting point of the components is very different, and also the addition of flux like substances is somehow natural when experimenting with metallurgy.
Possibly the discovery for processes could’ve been someone drinking and throwing things into a fire then waking up and finding the conglomerations of metals melted overnight, or someone that was a smith / tinkerer seen the result and asked how that drunk did it or it was a drunken tinkerer etc possibilities, It’s all very depressing
Well, few metals exist in nature alone from other metals.
If you melt down some ore, it will probably be an alloy of some sort.
Link to the video in the article needs to be fixed.
Thanks – he changed the URL between the Patreon release and the general publication, and I missed fixing the text.
” precision soft soldering the old-fashioned way” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_6Hqr84M_M)
User removed the Youtube video.
Anyone snag it before it disappeared?
So why do they call them soldering irons, if they have forever been made of copper?
An Iron is something that has come to be a universal term for something that applies heat. Things like branding irons and clothes irons would have been made of iron, today however they can be made of a variety of metals.
It is the same way we use terms like ‘record’ for a music track or in British english ‘Film’ for a movie despite records and film mostly no longer being used to record music and movies.
There’s nothing odd with “record”. The odd one out is “music track”. Think about what the words mean.
A cord means a ligature, a bind, and a rib-like texture of fabric, which also reminds of rows of text in a book, and the joining of letters as in cursive handwriting. What medieval monks were scribbling onto books were “records”, and that was the original use of the word.
Now that any kind of data is handled digitally, in strings of binary digits, the word “record” has the same meaning as to “file” (“to arrange in order”), and it’s perfectly meaningful in the sense of recording music.
“soldering copper” would be ambiguous
wiki lists most all known solder alloys
Of the 100+ solder alloys, it appears soldering to Iron is possible :
Bi50Pb28Sn22
Eons ago when I was in junior high, they *were* called soldering coppers, at least by my metal shop teachers. Possibly to distinguish them from the electric soldering irons we also used.
The tips could have been made of iron. The tip does not need to be tinned. Only the surfaces to be joined need to have solder on. Soldering irons (made of iron) could apply the heat needed.
Pretty shure they used Galden 230 back in the day… Or is the 230 not the number of the year BC when they came up with that idea?
You think soldering is unlikely? Wow. It’s incredibly obvious. Heat a low melting point easily obtainable metal like tin or lead and use it to tack other metals together.
You want to talk about unlikely. How was bread ever invented? Or coffee….take the seeds of certain inedible cherries, semi-burn them, grind them into a powder, and steep that gunk in boiling water. Who would have ever dreamed that up?
People have probably always wondered what happens when you mix different things together. Lead + tin = solder. Experiment with ratios. Same goes for brass, pewter, semiconductors, battery electrolytes and plates… and some of the combinations of materials in those latter two boggles the mind as to “what on earth made you try that!”
Soldering irons like the ones used here were in use as late as the 1800’s I have a tool chest made by my great-great-grandfather, with many of the original tools. There are 2 soldering irons that are basically lumps of copper on a handle. Years ago, I used them (I use the woodworking tools to this day). They work surprisingly well, it was a *very* mature technology by then…
Could also have been done without an iron, either by “chip soldering” or coating one side of the smaller parts with solder, positioning the parts, and heating in an oven, much like SMT today. (Chip soldering = cut a small chip of solder, place next to the joint, heat.)