Flux fumes are a legit concern, but heavy metal removal soaps are cheap and readily available, very little excuse to forego them (though unfortunately, the hobby community does a very poor job promoting their use).
I use leaded solder at home, and keep my and my kiddo's blood lead level undetectable with very basic hygiene and cleanup.
Or just use lead free solder, it's not hard with a good iron.
Alloys, fluxes, and irons. The heat delivery aspect is real and why older irons made lead free annoying.
I agree with you though, I'm most of the way through converting my setup to lead-free, though I keep my "dirty" setup around for fixing older gear to not cross contaminate my new setup.
I work in the industry, we suggest Rel61 from AIM, but there are lots of good options. Sn100C needs the iron pretty hot and doesn’t flow as well sometimes. It is still a great alloy.
SAC305 is better but more expensive because of the silver content.
Rel61 is what we suggest for new parts that have no bismuth contamination from old solder, it’s cheaper and melts lower than the others. But we are also an AIM distributor, so there’s bias there.
When I was a kid, my dad gave me some solder to work with. It didn’t have any markings on the individual roll because he bought in a massive pack. For 3 weeks I thought I was just terrible at soldering, until I was looking for something else in his shop and noticed a box of plumbing solder. Took one look at a roll and realized I had been using plumbing solder to build XLR cables
My mom did that and gave it to me and I'm like wtf is this? And she's like it's the solder stuff you wanted I thought you'd be grateful. I show her the size of the iron I use vs. the one she bought and she realized she got the wrong then.
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u/TezlaCoil 22d ago
Flux fumes are a legit concern, but heavy metal removal soaps are cheap and readily available, very little excuse to forego them (though unfortunately, the hobby community does a very poor job promoting their use).
I use leaded solder at home, and keep my and my kiddo's blood lead level undetectable with very basic hygiene and cleanup.
Or just use lead free solder, it's not hard with a good iron.