So if these things are only a tenth the diameter of a human hair, how much current can they carry exactly? Wouldn't they just burn out before they did much damage?

Goody, something new to worry about! I was getting fed up with global warming anyway. And what happened to all the bees dying off? Like most scares, I suspect this could be deflated by two orders of magnitude without doing any injustice to the evidence.

If you'll read the column carefully you'll see that the smaller whiskers vaporize, the vapor becomes energized as a plasma, and the plasma is supremely conductive, able to carry HUNDREDS of amps of current, if only for a moment. That's enough to destroy most any device, meaning the smaller the whiskers the more dangerous they are. Bob

What, you're just figuring out that large parts of the environmental movement are anti-scientific scaremongers? Welcome to the club. Browse around www.cato.org, TechCentralStation and similar sites and you'll find many more examples of foolish and wasteful initiatives undertaken on behalf of environmentalists who haven't a clue about the actual impact of their proposals as long as they can be used to increase regulation and raise funds from gullible suburban soccer moms.

You would think that if it is a $280 billion problem, it would get more study. This is a problem that is affecting Europe as well who has already banned lead in any products.

A problem like this could bring down a space station a spy satellite or a large airplane like the new Airbus A 380 which is fly by wire.

leave it to a libertarian to blame environmentalists! did private industry oppose this move? not that i've noticed. call me cynical, but i think apple, to use bob's example, would absolutely love for us to have to buy a new ipod every year or two. the things we buy today are unreliable by design.

I've seen similar problems first hand. Ipods with busted off battery connectors. iBooks/Dells/IBM Thinkpads all with logic board issues stemming from poorly soldered connections. A lot of issues aren't 100% with the solder some of it is the heat the solder was applied with was too cold. Also the fact they don't use enough of it.

But the lead free solder is brittle when cooled, but VERY strong if used properly. Most of these issues are in manufacturing. Too much product + too fast production = Questionable quality. Bottom line!

BTW All your T-Birds Problems stem from that FORD Emblem... Just Kidding The Corrosion is 45 years living near SF Bay..

Still I'll stick with my 1991 Corolla.

The 1966 Thunderbird with a 428 did 0-60 in 9 seconds, according to Wikipedia. Is that what you mean by "goes like hell"? From a stoplight it'll get beat by almost any new car short of a minivan.

It certainly did weigh a lot for an old car with a flimsy chassis and no crumple zones for crash protection. Air bags? I hope it has shoulder belts. The handling was extraordinarily poor. The brakes weren't good either. Although Ford did add discs in 1965, they were not nearly up to the task of stopping the 4600 lb. pig in a reasonable distance.

The bad quality control extended way beyond a "bad batch of wires." Fords from that period had a bad batch of everything, including the people who put them together. I speak from experience, having owned a Shelby GT350.

Bob, if you think you'll "win" in a collision with "anything less than a dump truck" you've got another thing coming. The car is a rolling death trap. I hope you keep the family away from it. Seriously.

Hi Bob, yes yes - solder disasters all our devices are doomed. Thank goodness - hopefully my Blackberry will actually shut up for five minutes. What I REALLY want to know about is your view on the recent Microsoft pledge to finally open up its API's to all and sundry.
Any truth in it, do you think, or are they just trying desperately to create a smokescreen to hide them from the European competition regulators (and possibly a democratic president later in the year)?

PLEASE don't make us wait a week to find out!

1.)["Maybe it is worth adding," said one expert who prefers to remain anonymous,]

Why does this expert prefer to remain anonymous? Is the expert afraid of backlash, ridicule, black ops taking him out?

2.)[Goody, something new to worry about! I was getting fed up with global warming anyway. And what happened to all the bees dying off? Like most scares, I suspect this could be deflated by two orders of magnitude without doing any injustice to the evidence.]

Go to Straight Dope and Wikipedia and learn about the great bee die off.

3.)There's not really a conspiracy of silence as there is a conspiracy of apathy about this problem. Yet, there are almost innumerable other things that can go wrong and do, perhaps that is why engineers are not getting terribly concerned about this problem. All the same, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see an alarmist article about this problem in the New York Times next week, no doubt inspired by this week's column.

Well to be fair to everyone, it did take us about 20 years to get solder right when we first started soldering wires together... mind you, I didn't plan to fly in a jet plane soldered during that time either ...

OK - so what's wrong with wire wrap?

Let's see my TV, my washer, my dryer and my dishwasher have failed. I'd like to blame solder, but sadly it's poor engineering and cheap materials. I also have a frig that was designed for midgets as you have to bend over completely to reach the back of the frig. Poor engineering, not bad solder.

I've found that (with old tin/lead-based solder technology) in electronic devices like televisions and anything that has some decent power going through some of the circuits, that when something goes dead, I can resurrect the device about 50% of the time by resoldering all of the connections (at least the most susceptible ones) in the device.

It seems that the wholesale conversion to switching power supplies (wonderful, efficient things) have exacerbated reliability issues with consumer electronics because they throw a lot of current and magnetic fields around at ultrasonic frequencies, fatiguing solder joints. So resolder them and things work great again. as an aside, it took me a while, but I have an old (circa 1992) 9" Magnavox portable television that I've fixed a number of times this way (the offending solder joints are on a particular power transistor in the switching power supply circuitry), and I've finally got it exactly right and it's finally been years since it's failed. I'd bet there are precious few Magnavox RD0946 T101 televisions running today, as I'm pretty sure it was a major design flaw. I'm looking at it right now as I type this.

Back to the main issue: Even old-fashioned lead/tin solder isn't perfect, so the new lead-free varieties are probably even more suspect. It does take time to get things right.

On the other hand, the old Arrhenius equation should still hold for acceleration of failures by means of elevated temperature testing. You (typically) just need to establish an "activation energy" (measured in electron volts). Should be well-established by now...

Oh yeah, and *Bismuth* and *Antimony*? [sarcasm] Oh sure, those are elements without health concerns. [/sarcasm] Same valence (Group V) as Arsenic and Phosphorus. I don't know the details, but I did wafer fab in the old days, and Arsenic and Phosphorus (used both) are not exactly "health-friendly" elements (gross understatement).

"Sodder"? Bob couldn't have mispronounced that word so many times deliberately. Turns out Aussies and Brits pronounce it "sohlder".

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001382.php

Sodding Yanks! :)

Our company (well, the one I currently consult for)... has test results on ROHAS (leadfree) memory that has different parameters than the same configuration in a leaded format. IT's not just the failure rate, or the whiskers, there's electrical differences as well. But it sure is fun haveing new and exciting problems to work out... as if the old kind weren't enough.

The problem with regulations, is that they are oft written by politicians; and obviously... the field of expertise differs.

But, you can't get an omlette...

Change your cell phone every two years. Mail the old one to GWB, let him know you care...

My automatic coffee maker failed yesterday. Maybe it is whiskers?

More probably corrosion inside. Steam leaks and electrical contacts never did work well together. It has been back to Krupps twice already over the years, but maybe I will pick it apart this time.

My tool box is pretty well equipped, but no scanning electron microscope..

Here is another entry to add to the RoHS victim list: nerdy high school students. I'm getting ready to retire, and over the past decades I've amassed a huge collection of electronic components, some dating back to 1964. I offered to donate these parts to a local high school for use in their robotics and tech-ed classes. The teacher was happy to take the parts and he put in the paperwork. Then I received a phone call from the school district's environmental safety director. She wanted to know if any of the parts contained hazardous materials like lead, mercury, asbestos (the list went on). When I answered yes, there was lead solder in some of the parts, she said that the school district could not accept the donation and suggested I contact the county hazardous waste facility!

Typical lame brain liberal goop fiat that we all have to live by. Bunch of tin foil hat wearers think we all live in an erlenmyer flask with a rubber cork in its hole. How did we live before they were here to protect us from every little thing? And more important how did we live without them trying to suck every damned dollar we make out of our collective wallet? Carrying all that dirty money around is so very tiring!

Even NASA has its problems - http://nepp.nasa.gov/WHISKER/

Sounds like someone made a decision dumber that Bush. And that, is pretty hard to do.

Decreased reliability? Made in China! Hello?

it's nature's built in redundancy

by the way there is a "remedy" to the problem, sink the all artifact in "scotchcast" or equivalent, you then prevent any tinkering or fixing attempt but might get a new one regarding over-heating, that was our solution in early subsea gizmo.

Slightly off topic, but any news on Moon Team Cringely? I saw that the 10 teams were announced, and I saw no mention of Bob. http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/press-release/the-x-prize-foundation-announces-official-contenders-in-private-moon-race Maybe I am missing something? I hope so - get the forms in Bob!

If we assume that this is not a load of baloney and that there really is a problem that cant be solved, all you have to do is block the tin whiskers! Either cap the connection or have a layer over the circuit blocking them from touching anything else.

For scope: IEEE Spectrum featured an article on the dangers of failing aircraft wiring.

Good that this week's Pulpit was about your car, not your plane.

Interesting idea. BTW you need a refresher course in physics: In an accident your car might survive but because it doesn't collapse you will; the shock has to go somewhere. At least you will die in style ;-)

Philip

A straight tin whisker short, no plasma, is reckoned to be about 50 milliamps, enough to bother a digital circuit.

Hi Adam. While you're waiting for news
about the Cringley moonshot, I've got
a great bridge to sell you. You can make
a fortune on the tolls to Manhatten.

I'd be willing to pay more for devices that do NOT use pure tin solder anywhere. Unfortunately, how can you tell what was used to mount a chip?

RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!!
THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!
YOU'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!

Blu-Ray wins the format war and Bob's going on about solder . . .

Bob's gone and told the whole world that his wife is 40 this year. Oops!

Slow news day?

I thought they made wires out of copper. Can't you just repair the corroded wires in the T-Bird with new copper wires??

While a hard push towards "a more Green" product/a less messy disposal endpoint is behind this changeover, A modest increase in failures means more tech junk. If the increase in failures in a disposable(not likely repaired for one reason or another) component is just 10%, that will increase the volume of waste to dispose of that is less toxic.

I guess another thought with this is since many technology innovations progress quickly, any short-lived technology using this "greener" solder will be obsolete before the whiskers kill it.

Wait a minute; I just described planned obsolescence which will mean that there will be MORE waste to dispose of some how, somewhere; it will just be a less toxic pile-O-junk.

Back tot he Moon Project: Which team is yours?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080222/sc_space/privateracetothemoontakesoff

So the solder changeover costs roughly as much as the Northern Rock crisis. Neat.

What worries me is that environmentalists will get blamed for supporting the crossover, whereas only the environmentalists will point out that IT'S OUR OWN DAMN FAULT FOR DOING IT WRONG IN THE FIRST PLACE. Same mentality that makes it seem OK for governments to ever pass unbalanced budgets -- somebody else's problem tomorrow

This is the same reason I want a Democrat congress and a Republican President or vice versa.
If they can not agree on anything, they can not pass bad laws.
The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Lead is bad, let's ban it "for the children". Replace it with something worse, plus the costs to make the changes, plus it is less reliable.
Oil costs too much, so let's use bio-fuels. The price of corn goes up, really it is worse for the environment, does not reduce green house gases, and causes the soybean industry to go to Brazil where they are slashing the rain forests.
The examples can go on and on and on. Arg!

Bob;

If you think cars are a solder disaster, consider aircraft (small & large) & especially boats in the salt air environment...

KM

From the 2004 article: "Pb-Free is primarily aimed at reducing the amount of lead dumped in landfills..." reflects on the inanity of the "solution" to the problem. Lead is stable when in the products (who has ditched their expensive lead crystal chandeliers or champagne glasses?).

Lead is an issue during manufacture or disposal. Worker safety is addressed during manufacture (in the US and Europe), so why do we not address disposal? Why is it OK to dump electronics into landfills? Why do most manufacturers not see the value in building devices in which these valuable materials can be reclaimed?

This is not new thinking (see "Cradle to Cradle by McDonough & Braungart; http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm). And how is it that RIGHT NOW, we have a push toward compact fluorescent bulbs that contain lead (and federal law enacted last year that will phase out incandescent bulbs, but no regulations that require that Hg stays out of the landfills.

There is nothing new about whiskers. On a contract job in 1984 I had to fix a bad printer that had stumped some sharp people. When I realized my technician was checking in a circle, I had him stop. I told him that the cause had to be in a particular prom (programmable read only memory for you youngsters). A very rare whisker had shorted one bit, either on or off, and we needed a new prom. The printer manuals provided the necessary data. The technician had a prom reader/burner at his bench. In about an hour he had found the bad bit and burned a new prom. This was a rare problem, and these days component level trouble shooting is a lost art, but problems like this keep antacid manufacturers in business.

typo in the last entry; should read "...push toward compact fluorescent bulbs that contain mercury...."

In the early 80's I worked as a repair technician at the Ham Radio Outlet in Anaheim, CA, where numerous customers brought in 3-5 year old Japanese VHF/UHF radios for repair due to intermittents. I quickly found that resoldering the wave-soldered connections on all the circuit boards restored the radios to like-new condition. It seemed that the solder crystalized causing the connections to become unreliable.

Late 90s Hondas often have solder failures in the relay box that runs the ecu. When the weather is hot the car won't start. After resoldering the relays its worked fine. I never understood whey there wasn't (that I can find) a recall.

"whisker diameters range from 0.1 um to 10 um, while the diameter of a human hair is 70 um to 100 um --- so the largest whisker is only some 15 percent of the diameter of a thin hair, and most are less than 5 percent. A good fraction (of these are) so thin that light waves just pass them by, scattering a bit but not reflecting. So the optical microscope images that (typically used to illustrate whiskers) show only a small fraction of what is really there. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images are a bit better, but only show a small zone of the sample"

If you can't see them how do you know they exist?

I'm pretty sure your comment about bismuth and silver being more harmful than lead are absolutely incorrect.

Silver: People eat silver in large quantities because they think its a health remedy. Despite the hilarious blue color it turns them it doesn't cause much in the way of other health effects.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2297471.stm

Bismuth: "Industrially it is considered one of the less toxic of the heavy metals"

Lead: "Lead is a particularly dangerous chemical, as it can accumulate in individual organisms, but also in entire food chains."

The quotes are from a material information site called lenntech

I don't mean to imply that any of these 3 chemicals are healthy, but to imply that the danger from them is equivalent is downright misleading. It's one of those issues where lead is at least an order of magnitude more harmful than silver or bismuth. You should check your facts before you make these sorts of assertions.

What a great article. Too frequently "something must be done!" trumps questioning if the new solution is worse than the old problem.

I have a hard time imagining a good benefit cost analysis at the national level. This seems like the sort of area one could invest six months to generate pretty charts and graphs, only to find an obscure corner case no one thought of turns out to be the most important parameter. But with $280B at stake, it certainly seems worth the attempt.

Right now I am taking a university course that involves soldering. Our instructor told us "novices should use lead solder. Anything else will drive you crazy." What is the cost for teens with a copy of Make magazine deciding building stuff is just too hard, let's play with the WII instead of making our own controllers?

One of the things that I've learned in talking with people who manufacture electronics is that RoHS surface mount electronics cannot be repaired. The solder joints will not come apart without ruining the components, so there's an additional unexpected cost-- you just have to chuck (and hopefully, recycle) a board that fails, even if it is an infant mortality failure.

Walt Boyes
Editor in Chief
Control magazine
www.controlglobal.com

Yet another example of where the "something must be done!" mentality is going to price us out of the market place, and degrade the quality of domestic product.

"Only six months after the announcement of this competition, the response has been incredible," Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, said in a news release.

"We've received over 525 expressions of interest from more than 52 nations ... I think we're going to see an exciting and very competitive race to the moon, highlighted by some very creative designs unlike anything we've seen come out of the government space programs," Diamandis added. "Many of these teams represent some of the most creative and entrepreneurial minds in space exploration today. I wish them all the very best of luck."

Hey, my family had a 63 T-bird that had automatic ragtop problems as early as 68!

Regarding tin whiskers bringing down an Airbus, I'm wondering if the B-777 crash in London a few weeks ago. The engines just seemed to quit responding. I'm not comfortable in an aircraft with a "glass cockpit" control system anymore.

Hey, my family had a 63 T-bird that had automatic ragtop problems as early as 68!

Regarding tin whiskers bringing down an Airbus, I'm wondering if the B-777 crash in London a few weeks ago. The engines just seemed to quit responding. I'm not comfortable in an aircraft with a "glass cockpit" control system anymore.

An expert on the subject, Dr. Gordon Davy (www.BMPCOE.org) writes that:

Eventually the notion that RoHS is somehow “green” will come to be regarded as a just-so story – propaganda made up to promote an agenda.

The best source of information on lead poisoning and its causes is from the Global Lead Network. Years ago I contacted this organization and told them that the EU was going to be imposing restrictions on the use of lead in electronics. They were amazed. That usage was not even on their list of concerns. For more information, go to http://www.globalleadnet.org/.

Because of widespread litigation drawing attention to the issue, people will learn that even if RoHScompliant hardware were to become the only hardware available anywhere in the world, no cases of poisoning by lead, or by any of the other prohibited substances, would be prevented because there never have been any cases from such use.

As for the effects of the disposal of waste electrical and electronic equipment on the environment, I forecast that as a result of analysis occasioned by the collision there will come to be general agreement on the following two points:

1) Despite oft-repeated claims to the contrary, disposal by municipal incineration or by any kind of landfilling of waste electronics does not measurably harm the environment.

2) For the foreseeable future unregulated third-world recycling will continue to pollute the air from burning, and the ground and water locally with noxious substances used to recover whatever metals are in the recycled hardware.

RoHS and WEEE together will cause no discernible reduction of this activity.

The market forces driving the impoverished people in these countries to engage in this recycling are too strong for legislation and enforcement (both frequently thwarted by bribery) to prevent. Unregulated recycling is lowtech.

In addition to the indigenous discarded electronic hardware in the third world (itself a significant fraction of the waste stream being recycled improperly), it’s quite easy to smuggle waste electronic hardware out of the rest of the world and into these countries. It is also easy to relocate the site of operations if authorities try to crack down or the pollution level becomes intolerable.

I have offered evidence and arguments for these points in previous postings to this forum and will not repeat them here. Also, the forecast of growing awareness that RoHS lacks a factual basis has obvious implications for the WEEE directive, but that needs to be a separate discussion.

John Burke has a web site http://www.RoHSUSA.com, where engineers can register their reasons for opposing RoHS. He’s calling it “Pb”, as in “Push back” – “The truth about lead in electronic solder.” From that site:

I do not believe it to be possible to stop the RoHS lead in solders ban, but feel it would be negligent to let the protests of engineers and environmentalists everywhere, go unrecorded in the event that the truth of the environmental impact of this legislation becomes known OR in the event that the replacement has so many reliability issues that the legislation is in a position to be reversed.

If you are concerned about global warming then no-lead solder should concern you as it takes a higher temperature (260C) to solder it so more energy is being consumed every day to solder lead-free solder.

Precautionary principle:

It was pointed out at a meeting at the US Dept of Commerce by a EU representative that the basis for the RoHS directive is the precautionary principle. The relevant part of the principle for this discussion is that the people who want to introduce some new use of a material have the burden of proof to show that it won’t make things worse. In the case of the use in electronic products of the restricted substances, those substances already have had a long history of use. It is quite inappropriate to discuss the risk of what might happen from their continued use; all that is needed is to show that the present practice has caused problems. No such evidence has ever been produced.

On the other hand, the substitute materials that companies have found it necessary to use in place of the restricted materials are in some cases new materials, or new uses for existing materials. Hence it is those materials against which the precautionary principle should be applied. That has not happened. If the principle were applied rigorously,
it is entirely possible that some of the substitute materials would be found not to comply with the principle.

The entire electronics industry is at risk of being told that it has chosen a substitute that is unsuitable (in someone’s opinion – the principle fails to identify who gets to make the call).

For example, while the problems caused by lead when ingested by people have been well documented, problems caused by the use of lead in electronic products (including recycling) have not. Application of the precautionary principle to the substitute solder that the industry has adopted (referred to as “SAC,” a lead-free alloy of tin, silver,
and copper), would require showing that its environmental and health impact is an improvement, or at least isn’t worse. That hasn’t happened in any systematic study.

In fact, without it having been established that the use of lead in electronic products has caused problems, one wonders how anyone could switch to the use of an unproven substitute and still be consistent with the precautionary principle.

principle.

Incompatibility of BGAs with tin-lead solder Where SAC solder is used, it is used for a type of component known as a “ball grid array,” in which the connections to the rest of the system is through an array of solder balls on the underside. The SAC solder melts at a temperature 34 °C higher than conventional tin-lead solder. [Pentium chips have BGA footprints]

It is well established that there is no practical way to attach these BGAs to an assembly using tin-lead solder, because the resulting connections are not reliable. (In principle, raising the soldering temperature would solve the problem, but that puts the remaining components at risk from overheating.)

• Tin whiskers Where tin plating is used, there is a risk of electrical failure. That is because tin has the perverse property of, over time, developing filamentary growths from the surface. These tiny filaments, referred to as “whiskers,” can grow long enough to reach to adjacent circuitry, thereby causing a short circuit so that the system fails to operate properly.

A significant number of communications satellite failures has been attributed to tin whiskers. NASA is very concerned about the use of pure tin in products going into space, because those products of course can’t be repaired.

You can see an excellent discussion of the problem on the NASA web site:
http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/.

Yes, it make years for the whiskers to become long enough to be a problem, and since it is virtually impossible to prove that an equipment malfunction is due to a whisker (their
small diameter makes them almost invisible without scanning electron microscopes which are very expensive instruments).

Since the use of pure tin can shorten the life of an electronic product, it can hasten its appearance in the waste stream. So would the use of a BGA with tin-silver-copper solder balls soldered with tin-lead solder.

• Because the entire high-reliability electronics industry (automotive, medical, military, and aerospace) is faced with no option other than to buy components with a pure tin finish, they have just two choices, neither of them very palatable. One is to replace (with unavoidable risk of concealed component damage) the tin with tin-lead alloy (lead is the only element that inhibits the growth of tin whiskers). The other is to coat the assembly with an insulating coating (but whiskers are known to be able to penetrate these coatings). In the case of BGAs, there is only one
option: pay a third party to replace the SAC solder balls with tin-lead solder balls.

In short, the RoHS directive, which intentionally exempted the high-reliability electronics sector to avoid unintentional consequences to reliability, is having a perverse influence on it anyway.

Lead is more harmful, I was reading in the paper that a guy was killed because he had a lead foot. This abnormality caused him to go to fast around a decreasing radius curve.

I also heard that lead can settle in your ass and make you lazy.

I have a tin ear, and that may be the cause of all the whiskers growing out of it.

I try to mind my own bismuth, but wire we talking about this anyway?

Things aren't supposed to last forever Bob; the fact that your T-Bird's wiring has worked for more than 40 years is a failure of product engineering - "profit optimally" it should have failed after about 8-10 years.

Things aren't supposed to last forever Bob; the fact that your T-Bird's wiring has worked for more than 40 years is a failure of product engineering - "profit optimally" it should have failed after about 8-10 years.

The reason few electronics manufacturers are barking about this problem is because it makes for built-in obsolescence: A ready market for new stuff. The people who ARE complaining are those fuddy duddys who expect their equipment to last for more than a few years.

The problem is that if you open a Digi-Key Mouser, Jameco, Allied or other electronics catalogs, you will discover that most of the newer electronics parts are ALL RoHS compliant. The older solder lead parts are rapidly disappearing.

You can't solder RoHS pads with regular solder. So we're left with a terrible manufacturing problem, lots more random failures in the field, and basically electronics gear that is guaranteed to turn to crap before you even get a few year's use out of it.

So you won't hear Cisco, Dell, or Apple complaining about the RoHS solder problems. But organizations like Space Agencies, Military, Avionics companies, and Industrial Equipment manufacturers, they care!

I understand the Europe's cradle to grave philosophy regarding electronics. I can sympathize too. But to ban a substance from manufacturing because you don't know how to recover it properly? That's as stupid as trying to make new solders which haven't been proven yet!

Oh, wait...

The same goes for military equipment by the way. US munitions all have an expiry date (never mind that the beautiful French coastline still has off limits areas due to WW2 mines). How the big manufacturers would salivate to put an expiry date on all military electronics as well . . .

I agree with Cringley the threat of lead solder is severely over rated.

While I support the removal of lead from paint and gas and areas that will allow the lead to get into the environment lead solder just isn't much of a threat.

That being said.

Cringley the reason your mechanics did not recommend replacing the wiring harness is because no one makes a replacement, YET. You can by a harness for hard top Thunderbirds from the 50s. Right now they are still the most desirable to restore, thus there is a a market for them.

Wiring harnesses do wear out. They are subject to a wide range of temperature extremes. Insulation wasn't as good forty years ago and a little oxidation increases heat, which increases oxidation, which helps to break down the insulation, which increases the oxidation. You get the idea.

Many companies are now making replacement harnesses for a variety of cars. A company called "Painless Performance" Makes a generic harness for classic cars. Unfortuanately, your car with a complex mechanical convertible top would probably not be a good candidate.

What you are going to probably have to do is carefully remove the harness from the car and use that as a blue print to make a new one. The connectors are probably easily obtained. Finding an automotive electrician with the experience and patients to make a harness will be much harder.

I've wired several race cars. It is relatively simple but is very time consuming. If you don't do the work yourself, you might find it VERY expensive to fix your car.

Hope this helps

Regards

Paul Jenkins

Being a small embedded computer manufacturer, I'm going through this no-lead gauntlet right now. It's expensive and it's scary. I *don't* want to do it and I've put it off as long as possible.

The one place you've dropped the story is the blame. And that's the European Union demanding RoHOS compliance. They have driven this thing from day one and I hold them completely responsible. Their justification is not that it will clean up the environment, but that it will make recycling easier. A small but significant difference.

Why do ordinarily intelligent people think that weight equals safety? If I stuff a 330 pound linebacker in my trunk is my car safer? Inquiring minds want to know.

james

Copper! Did someone say copper?

http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206503050

@james: The reason why heavier cars are slightly safer in a collision has very little to do with structure. The main reason is that because of their heavier mass, the accelerations experienced by the heavier vehicle is lower in magnitude. (F = ma, so more m means less a.) The lower the acceleration of the car, the better for the passengers, since it's acceleration that injures people, barring penetrating trauma or flying through the windshield because they hadn't buckled up.

@Cringely: Bismuth and silver are more dangerous than lead? Metallic bismuth isn't toxic at normal exposure levels (I don't think anyone's ever eaten a kilogram.) There are some toxic bismuth salts, but those aren't going to be used in solder. Other bismuth salts are used as brand name stomach drugs. That's why it's called Pepto-BISMol. See http://umbbd.msi.umn.edu/periodic/elements/bi.html which cites its sources.

Yeah what about Team Munchausen ^w err Cringely? (Just kidding)

I suspect the solder thing will be resolved within a few years, after some casualties of some devices. You got me reading a bit more on that topic. I don't think they will ever be able to switch to 100% tin connections because the whisker problem is pretty well-known, and then there is the "tin pest" that occurs in cold weather, which did in the tin buttons of Napoleon's army as well as some pipe organs with tin pipes, etc... And bismuth is not required, it apparently just makes possible an alloy with a lower melting point, but there are lots of lead-free solders, only some of which have bismuth. And some of them are more prone to whiskers than others, too. That's the cool thing about alloys - get the mixture right and you can change the properties of the majority metal pretty drastically. So I don't think it's an unsolvable problem.

I read about the whiskers that form on galvanized steel a long time ago, too. It doesn't seem to have stopped mfgr's from building computer cases with galvanized steel though. I have a couple rack-mount cases like that, and wondered if I'm going to end up frying something because of that, but I'm still using a 7-year-old motherboard and processor in one of them so I guess it's not too bad.

Speaking of things on cars crumbling, I had a 1976 Ranchero once that had a plastic speedometer housing, which literally crumbled when I tried to take apart the dash cluster for some repairs. It was plenty thick enough, but ended up weaker than a dried-out eggshell. Same kind of deal I guess... it was probably a new plastic at the time, and they didn't know how badly it was going to age. I never could get that dash put back together; just ended up selling the car because it had too much rust and some transmission problems anyway.

The problem fits well with the culture of "Planned Obsolescence"

Also like my uncle has pointed out to me on numerous occasions, "We put a man on the moon with wire wrap". The Apollo guidance computer was wire wrapped.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

It is not an environmental problem - it is a problem in the heads of people who do not understand the chemistry of lead in solder.

As John Burke (www.rohsusa.com) states:

It is widely accepted in the engineering community that the recent ban of lead in solders for use in electronics in Europe is not only erroneous, but will actually lead to a worsening situation on the environment with the replacements being in general use from July ’06 having a GREATER environmental impact.

His source? - The US Environmental protection agency. The EPA report on Solders in Electronics: A Life-Cycle Assessment (472 pages) published August 2005 has some very interesting data. It shows that the replacements for “leaded” solder generally referred to as “SAC alloy” has a higher impact than tin lead solder in a number of areas such as:

Non-renewable resource use
Energy use
Global warming
Ozone depletion
Water Quality

for Environmentalists and Engineers everywhere here is the link:
http://www.epa.gov/opptintr/dfe/pubs/solder/lca/index.htm

To refer to such solder replacements as “Green” is laughable given the much greater impact on non-renewable resources (NRR). Check out tables ES-4 and ES-5 in the report. A quote from the report:

“The difference between SAC (the replacement solder) and SnPb (the leaded solder) is 453 kg of NRR per 1,000 cc of solder applied. If this were all automotive gasoline, this difference is equivalent to 162 gallons of gasoline. Assuming a driver consumes 20 gallons per week, this is also equivalent to approximately 8 weeks of driving".

CALCE has a website for Pb-free issues http://www.calce.umd.edu/lead-free/other/

CALCE also has a tin whiskers site http://www.calce.umd.edu/tin-whiskers/

Dr Henning Leidecker now at NASA Goddard (Greenbelt Md) (one of my former physics professors at American University) wrote me that:

Our world depends on the proper functioning of electronics, and so this is a world-wide problem. We already see eliminations of lead as causing failures in newly-produced electronics, and we can be sure we will see many more failures as the older equipment ages out of service and is replaced by this new lead-free stuff.

Lives will surely be lost as a result, and probably already have been. But our systems are not set up to track this. Deaths are tracked at individual levels, but medical doctors assigning causes are not trained to report: "Cause of death was the failure of electronics, which in turn failed because the lead-free replacements did not work." Epidemic-tracking centers are set up to work with known diseases, and not deaths or injuries caused by equipment failing as a result of lead-free substitutes.

Companies using the lead-free replacements are not (as far as I know) reporting any injuries or deaths caused by the failures of their equipment, caused by lead-free substitutions. I suppose they are more likely to settle any cases that are brought to their attention "out of court", which is to say, "out of the public's attention."
Consider the failure of Galaxy IV, that silenced 35 million communication devices for about a day. Some of these devices were used by medical doctors.

Can we suppose that there were NO cases of patient suffering (or worse) as a result of the loss of contact between patient and doctor? But who would track this? And make the findings publically available?

And companies that suffer as their products fail as a result of use of leaded-tin substitutes are not tracked either. While the company remains in business, it is typically reluctant to advertise that it is suffering from such problems. If the company dies, then so too does the reason. No one tracks this cause. No one can say, "We lost 57 companies this year, as a result of failures due to the ill-performance of the leaded-tin substitutes."

So we have a world-wide situation that is "under a basket", "out of the light', and likely to remain that way!

One of the strong drivers for RoHS has been that people DO count the number of folks harmed by lead in their environment. But we do not count the number harmed by removing lead from electronics. So the situation is unbalanced.

Thus, one way to go forward in achieving a better balance in RoHS actions, is to add "problems to people caused by failures of equipment caused by lead-free substitutes" to the problems noted by epidemic-tracking centers.
Ditto for companies.

Another electronics design expert is Dr. Howard Johnson, Signal Consulting http://www.sigcon.com as he does high-speed digital design seminars, publications and films. Howard sent me this link to an article in Electronic Design News with an associated video interview:
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6477864

In the film, Joe Fjeldstad (his interviewee) does a pretty good job of laying out the case that the RoHS lead-free initiative is bad for the environment, and bad for business. By the way, Joe has no objection to the other materials addressed by RoHS. He doesn't think the whole thing should be repealed, just the lead-in-solder part of it.

Hats off to Detroit Iron. I don't mean to bring up a downer, but car-to-car impact is not the cause of passenger injuries (and worse). Your car may win in a jousting battle with a Prius, but your impact with the interior of your T-Bird will pluck your feathers up. Make sure you're restraints (seat belts) are brought up to date and properly anchored. You're too valuable to all of us.

I forget my html/unicode/encoding minutiae, but surely there's a way to write "µm" (with a greek letter mu) instead of "um" (with a letter m)???

Extended ascii - alt+230 on the keypad with numlock on will give µ (in the MS-PC) world

Hey Bob. Actually, this problem has been solved. Iver Anderson, at Iowa State, has the patent on Sn-Ag-Cu solders. The Tin acts to disrupt the formation of the whiskers. The technology is only 5 years old or so. There are other issues such as grain growth, but work is continuing. As is usually the case, if something breaks, its because customers demand, more so than anything else, rock bottom prices for rock bottom products. Quality may not change, but it won't be for lack of technological know-how. Check out this article for more info: http://materialstechnology.tms.org/pbFree/pbHome.asp

Michael, you misread the article. It says absolutely nothing about stopping tin whisker growth. The article is dealing with another problem of lead free solders, the brittleness of the joint. In high mechanical shock applications (like a missile) or high vibration (automobile electronics) the lead-free connections are not reliable. Tin-lead solder is a "soft" joint that resists cracking. This improvement in SAC alloys may solve the problem but it sounds like its years away from being a product we can use. What do we do until then? Do you want your pacemaker to fail? The FDA already recalled a pacemaker that failed as it's timing oscillator shorted due to a whisker. The SWATCH watch company lost over $1B on watches that failed (and they got themselves a nice special exemption from the EU so they could go back to tin-lead solder).

Tin whiskers will still grow ABOVE the point on the electronic components where the lead-free SAC solder alloy does not wet the tin. Look at a solder joint - see for yourself what I mean. In order for this to be a solution to tin-whiskering, all electronic components must have their leads (and BGA parts their solder balls be this SAC alloy.

I have seen nothing in the literature nor from colleagues that suggests this will be done.

The industry forgets again the lesson learned in 1942 when cadmium plated tuning capacitors shorted in aircraft radios, in the 1950s when zinc plated computer floors shed whiskers and blew computers, when tin plated relays in the 1950s shorted relays in AT&T phone switching centers.

We seem to have to re-learn again and again what metalurgists know, that pure tin, zinc and cadmium platings grow whiskers.

One thing we do know is the damage that lead in the environment does to human health. It damages children's brains leading to various levels of mental retardation and just recently research has indicated that childhood lead exposure can cause very bad health outcomes decades later, in apparently "normal" individuals. It's looking like childhood lead is a major trigger for Alzheimers disease and several other neurological problems of middle-to-old age. It's not just how old you are, but how much lead from car exhausts, paint, batteries, electronic devices, etc. you absorbed as a child. Currently, just like the solder whiskers, there's absolutely nothing that can be done to prevent it once you're exposed.

I'd rather have a slightly less reliable iPod today than to forget what one was when I retire.

Excuse me. I wrote in haste this morning. What I was thinking of was the addition of Zinc into the Sn-Ag-Cu solders that helped to increase the strength and ductility, not the addition of Tin. "According to Anderson, cobalt and zinc appear to be the most attractive in terms of retained ductility and strength, and zinc also offers benefits in terms of solderability, ease of alloying and material cost." (http://www.ameslab.gov/final/News/2006rel/inventor.htm)
The patent has already been licensed by over 50 companies generating over 10 million in royalties. There is undoubtedly more work that can be done, but I don't think a reasonable solution is so many years away as Bob suggests.
Apologies for the confusion.

Bob,

The cost to industry to comply with the EU RoHS directive has not been anywhere near $280B. The cost to industry of the changeover from SnPb to Pb-free has, therefore, not been $280B because it is a subset of the impact of RoHS. In fact, it is much less - it is still a big number but not that big. I have seen many estimates thrown around for several years. Unless you can document this I suggest you not propogate rumor.

We recently completed a survey with another well-known market research/consulting company for a large industry association that enabled us to finally quantify the one-time and ongoing costs of compliance to the EU RoHS directive. We expect to be able to publicly release that information in a few weeks.

ALong the same lines you state without providing evidence that MTBF of electronics has gone down due to lead-free solder. Show me the study; I would love to see this. I would gladly bring it to the attention of the European Commission.

Oh, and regarding the "cost benefit analysis" of RoHS - there never was such a thing. The EU does not seem to work that way so it is unlike the US in at least that manner for the time being...in fact, I just covered this issue with a group here at UC Berkeley, including someone from the European Commission's Environment directorate general, today. The fact is that a lifecycle analysis comparing the preexisting tin-lead solder with the lead-free replacement (tin-silver-copper) was never done. It would be quite interesting to see how they compare; after all, tin mining in Congo is done at the point of a gun (see the June 2006 Fortune article), and silver and copper both have rather problematic environmental issues associated with them.

Bob,

The cost to industry to comply with the EU RoHS directive has not been anywhere near $280B. The cost to industry of the changeover from SnPb to Pb-free has, therefore, not been $280B because it is a subset of the impact of RoHS. In fact, it is much less - it is still a big number but not that big. I have seen many estimates thrown around for several years. Unless you can document this I suggest you not propogate rumor.

We recently completed a survey with another well-known market research/consulting company for a large industry association that enabled us to finally quantify the one-time and ongoing costs of compliance to the EU RoHS directive. We expect to be able to publicly release that information in a few weeks.

Along the same lines you state without providing evidence that MTBF of electronics has gone down due to lead-free solder. Show me the study; I would love to see this. I would gladly bring it to the attention of the European Commission.

Oh, and regarding the "cost benefit analysis" of RoHS - there never was such a thing. The EU does not seem to work that way so it is unlike the US in at least that manner for the time being...in fact, I just covered this issue with a group here at UC Berkeley, including someone from the European Commission's Environment directorate general, today. The fact is that a lifecycle analysis comparing the preexisting tin-lead solder with the lead-free replacement (tin-silver-copper) was never done. It would be quite interesting to see how they compare; after all, tin mining in Congo is done at the point of a gun (see the June 2006 Fortune article), and silver and copper both have rather problematic environmental issues associated with them.

Bush aint dumb and anyone who thinks he is ...probably is dumb. Obama is stupid. And he talks enough to be sure of it.

Bush ain't dumb and Obama is stupid?

Fred? that you? Fred Bizarro? Of the Bizarro's of Htrae?

How you been?

Dear Bob,

Your original blog here re the removal of lead from solder resulted from my writing you suggesting you update your 2004 blog (which was good fortune telling, BTW). Unfortunately it included this line ""Maybe it is worth adding," said one expert who prefers to remain anonymous". Some have questioned as to why that writer would wish to remain anonymous, including the writer himself who just wrote me that he most certainly does NOT wish to remain anonymous (and never did as his writings are public on his NASA tin whiskers website). That person is my former physics prof Dr. Henning Leidecker at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

He further writes me:

"My my!

Documenting billions of dollars in losses is hard since these are closely protected secrets by the companies with the losses. My own estimate is "up to a few hundred billion since 1940", and not "380 billion in any single recent year". And these losses would include total losses: losses to manufacturers and losses to users and also deaths & injuries.

We do have one document --- the petition by the lawyers working for SWATCH. True to the general rule, the SWATCH web site is utterly silent about whisker problems.

Attached is a copy of that petition, documenting the failures of 5% (at time of writting) of the product after switching from leaded-solder to "99.5% tin + 0.5% copper" solder. The failures were tracked to "shorting caused by tin whiskers"; then, inspection for whiskers showed that 30% of the product had whiskers (at time of writing), but not all these whiskers had (yet) caused shorting.

A qual program had been carried out before switching solders, and this new solder passed the qual program. I have not been able to learn what this 'qual' program covered. Experience shows that this "qual program" was not qualified to detect the whiskering problem!

The SWATCH group web site mentions their business income in a recent year. I recall it was 3.5 billion $ in 2003 --- but you should check to make sure! I recall the lawyers's petition saying that SWATCH was shut down for six weeks while they worked this problem. I estimate that (six week/52 weeks)*(3.5b$) = 400 million dollars.
But there are other ways of judging the loss.

As for the 5% failure rate (at the time of writing this petition): ironically, I got a presentation watch last year, made by SWATCH. It worked erratically for a few hours and then stopped. I keep it as a memento --- it is too heavy to wear. So the actual failure rate may well be a bit higher than the reported 5%."

[the SWATCH petition Henning refers to as well as other documentation on this problem are collected at my company website: http://www.hlinstruments.com/RoHS_articles/]

You didn't mention another concern about pure tin solder joints: As I understand it, in addition to growing whiskers, tin can spontaneously recrystallize from a metallic state to a non-metallic (and therefore much less conductive) state.

As I understand it, the very rare surviving pure tin artefacts from ancient times are displayed in heavily shock mounted cases, because vibration can trigger a spontaneous recrystallization, and the artefact will crumble.

(FYI: Henning Leidecker is speaking on the basis of his own experience, only; he is not speaking for NASA.)

He writes me:

"Where Mike Kirschner writes:

"Along the same lines you state without providing evidence that MTBF of electronics has gone down due to lead-free solder. Show me the study; I would love to see this. I would gladly bring it to the attention of the European Commission."

I had Mike's observation in mind when I sent you the SWATCH lawyers's petition.

It is hard to document MTTF data for products in general.

Sometimes, we can do it for particular products, like the SWATCH watches made using the new lead-free solder. Then some critics label that as a "one off", and say that it is of no interest to the industry in general.

Jay Brusse and I get several calls a month from folks who are experiencing a problem (or problems) with the convertion to lead-free electronics. We do what we can, and then ask for permission to document the problems so that others can better understand this new territory we have entered. So far, almost all have said, "No! We will not give permission to document." This prepares the stage for "Show me the MTTF data" --- the affected players work hard to make this data unavailable.

One example: a fellow called to lament that they had switched from their old platting shop to a new one who promised whisker-free pure tin platings. Well Bob, do you recall the Esquire cartoon showing an outraged princess at dawn, scowling at a smirking frog lying beside her in her bed, and shouting at the frog: "You lied!"? The whisker-free pure tin plating honored its promise for some six weeks and then began to grow whiskers that quickly got long enough to create a shorting hazard. We worked with the fellow to characterize the risk that these whiskers would present, and we also asked for permission to document this. After many months, we were told there would be no permission. And that they were going forward with this plating choice as they believed that most of their customers would never identify any whiskering problems. (And this is true, I believe: these sorts of problems are hard to identify!) And that they had a standing policy of replacing any particular example of an item that fails to operate correctly, upon being shown that this has happened.
(But some of these whiskering events will melt or evaporate the whisker.)

Another example: a guy called about a product line that had shown some failures whose cause was elusive; whiskering had been recently suggested. After some chatting, the top brass of the company visited Jay and me, bringing along an example of their product. We found two distinct types of whiskers in it. There were zinc whiskers coming from under-the-floor (these product were sometimes used in raised-floor rooms, whose tiles are a sandwitch of vinyl tops, plywood cores, and galvanized iron bottoms: the zinc coatings often grow multitudes of zinc whiskers and these can escape from under the floors, and get blown into top-side equipment by the forced air blowers). And there were also tin whiskers growing from pure tin plated snap-together connectors. We taught them how to see these whiskers, and they have been successful in trouble-shooting field sites since then. And providing a list of the companies who advertise "we can help you with your zinc-infested rooms", when zinc whiskers are found at the field site (not rare at all!). They have asked us to not identify them.

I was present at a hall-way conversation two years ago in which one fellow was mentioning sending out a line of boards to have FPGAs attached. There was a mix-up in the lead-free solder used, and the outside group's lead-free solder was incompatible with the lead-free solder already present: the FPGAs fell off the board under modest testing. Some 27 million dollars was "eaten" by the outside house. Not a whiskering problem; "just" a soldering problem caused by metallurgically-incompatable lead-free solders. This sticks in my mind for several reasons:
(1) it was not generally reported, (2) this illustrates that 're-work' is now hugely dangerous in the presence of certain mixed solder types. The parts subjected to a bad mix of solders may not fall off the boards immediately; rather, this --- or just a few joins opening up here and there --- may be delayed until the units are in the field. And who tracks this at the general level? Or reports this?

I am reminded of the awful problem with the limited-lifetime aluminum electrolytic capacitors made in Taiwan several years ago. Do a google search on "failures aluminum electrolytic capacitors Taiwan" and have fun!

I've seen stacks of hundreds of Dell computers, waiting for replacement electrolytics. But production of these caps was in the millions per month, and so these stacks of hundreds were a tiny tip of a pin point of the full problem.

Jay has a photo that will raise the hairs on the back of your neck: a high-capacitance aluminum electrolytic in a big can is next to a similar can, opened. When opened, one can see that a small-capacitance device has been wired into the big can! Near the end of life of these ill-made Taiwan caps, when the dielectric has been nearly corroded away, the capacitance increases. So these miserable folks have taken the last of these ill-made caps --- by then widely recognized and avoided by all buyers --- and repackaged them into larger cans with larger C-values so they could move some more of these out of their inventories, and into yours. A quick check would show that the larger C-values are about right (but not for long!). It would also have found increased leakage. A check of voltage-breakdown would have found miserable acceptance rates. I can only suppose that the acceptance testing on these did not pay attention to either "leakage" or "voltage rating", but supposed that these sellers were honest.

The fact that this went on for so long and was so widespread, is a clue as to the attention that the industry pays to MTTF. The situation had to become catastrophic before things were done."

Bob C., your readers should pay close attention to the facts, not the promise of solutions some propose (but do not demonstrate). These facts are well known by engineers and scientists who are trying very hard to solve the problems the EU created with it's lead-free solder mandate.

The URL I posted before has a typo. Here is the corrected URL to the Swatch and other articles.

http://www.hlinstruments.com/RoHS_articles/

This is just nonsense. The art of working with lead-free solders has been worked out and been used for quite a long time in a number of areas.

There are mitigation strategies for whiskers, but you can also work with different materials, including Tin-Zinc, tin-Copper, Tin-Bismuth, Tin-Silver, Tin-Indium, Tin-silver-copper or even Nickel-Palladium.

Getting lead out of automobiles is a very, very good thing and should have been done a long time ago. Why there is such enthusiasm for a toxic substance that is proven to cause real damage to children is beyond me, apart from the fact that it's cheap. You can google all the fun facts about lead, but the reality is: It's not good and let's stop using it. There are plenty of quality replacements for it.

It would be a bit more difficult (expensive) but you could put plastic or even glue over the solder connections to protect against shorting unless the whiskers are able to pierce through the plastic as they are growing.

@alex: The amount of lead we're talking about here would be minimal. The important thing is to get lead away from areas where it is likely to be ingested or inhaled by humans.

I agree that lead is not good for you. But you need to consider that for some things it is still the very best material we can find. And in some critical applications, such as a pacemaker, you would be wise to encapsulate it as best as possible, but still use it. After all, you want that thing to last for more than a couple years, don't you?

I fix pianos. In the late 1950's, Steinway thought they could save money by using plastic parts in their piano actions. It worked very well until the late 1970's. Then there was a huge problem as all the plastic parts disintegrated, with some spectacular failures in concert. And pianos are easy and non-critical compared to debugging solder joints.
This is really an issue of failure to obejctively assess the risk of exposing humans to lead versus the reliability of systems on which humans rely. There is absolutely nothing that humans do worse than objective risk assessment.
-presley

Yo Cringe - Wasnt the real issue here in finding a replacement for all soldering then?

My feeling is that it wont be long before Solder is totally replaced with a copper-based liquid adhesive. Its sprayed on and forms a strong and reliable junction which is more temperature resistant that most solders today. Likewise with a properl Mask type resistive layer it doesnt stick to those areas. This new technology allows the casting of 3-d Circuts as well so its pretty cool.

There are also new ceramic type models which can be 'fused in place' by a plasma type flow, which actually do a form of welding per se. This new type of electrical connection is being used in HV/High Current systems and there are some interesting results from what I understand.

So personally I think that the movement off of lead-based solders is not really a big deal. Its going to take some time to resolve the issues and build reliable replacement's but its not impossible or even a stretch IMHO...

Todd Glassey

Yet another 'fix' with bigger downside that up..

Look at high reliability sources and one finds companies that will remove the 'new' ball grid solder arrays and replace with lead based solder... For better reliability.

Yet another 'fix' with bigger downside that up..

Look at high reliability sources and one finds companies that will remove the 'new' ball grid solder arrays and replace with lead based solder... For better reliability.

Great car. I, too, have fallen victim to some of these type of problems. Thankfully, I don't have a ragtop to get stuck. At least when the EM pulse hits, old cars like your T-bird and my '70 Buick will still run.

Inane reasoning like this is what brought down the shuttle when the EPA approved foam broke off and tore up the wing. NASA had an exemption to use the non-environmentally foam for safety purposes. Look where those good intentions got us.

Bob raises the electrolytic capacitor problem from a few years ago...cost Dell $300M (look at their 2006 annual report). Cause had nothing to do with RoHS but rather with the capacitor industry being snookered by a rogue electrolyte manufacturer that had stolen the legitimate formula. They produced much lower cost electrolyte, but evidently forgot one of the chemicals...probably the cause, as well, of my Philips TV of 2003 vintage dying in 2006.

Regarding the Swatch issue, yes - well aware of it. There are so many process variables that you can not extrapolate the experience of one company having trouble on one class of products to the universe (or even a small part of it.

And Alex says "The art of working with lead-free solders has been worked out and been used for quite a long time in a number of areas." Well yes, it has. It is possible to make a good, quality joint. Is it reliable? Could be; we don't have 60 years of experience with it like we do with SnPb.

"What I wonder is whether a cost-benefit analysis of this solder technology changeover was ever done? I haven't seen one."

This sounds all too familiar. I have heard that NASA's problem with external fuel tank insulation for the shuttles was caused by a change from the original polyurethane insulation to something supposedly more "environmentally friendly", and the scary thing is that no one even questions it. So what if our electronics turn into suicide bombs, at least they're better for the environment!

In the words of someone famous: "This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whisker."

What do you have against Bismuth ????

What do you have against Bismuth ????

I think it is a great name ....

This article is right on the point. Especially with use of BGA packages, there is no way to be able to detect solder attachment problems like these when assemblies fail. The failure rate our small company sees on lead-free assemblies compared to lead solder ones is very signifigant and costly to us. It is a nightmare.

I work for an electronics manufacturer, and tin whiskers are just a nightmare. It is not that they arc and cause problems, they form a current bridge. 5 volts just isn't enough to vaporize them, but it is enough to make a part fail. I think we will be paying for this mistake for years to come.
ROHS Sucks.

"A false sense of security is worse that no sense of security"

"A false sense of security is worse than no sense of security"

"A false sense of security is worse than no sense of security"

Is the benefit of removing lead from solder intended to help the end consumers and landfills or help the factory workers that handle the boards?

Is the benefit of removing lead from solder intended to help the end consumers and landfills or help the factory workers that handle the boards?

After using these new solders, why not apply a thin coating of an insulator (say using a plastic suspended in aerosol spray or brushed on). Would this prevent whiskers from forming?

After using these new solders, why not apply a thin coating of an insulator (say using a plastic suspended in aerosol spray or brushed on). Would this prevent whiskers from forming?

Is the benefit of removing lead from solder intended to help the end consumers and landfills or help the factory workers that handle the boards?

Just yesterday we had 5 tin soldered motherboard returned from desktops installed at a large industrial shop. All the solder on the back of the board was completely gone. The board was not much older then 6 months. It's fair to say that this industrial environment catalyzed the process more then in the typical home but never had anyone seen anything like it. Every drop of solder just gone, while the old pc sat beside these new computer humming along like nothing was wrong.

Just for the record, folks...
1. This is a European (EC) initiative called RoHS. Google it.
2. That one didn't do enough damage quickly enough, so they've initiated another one - REACH. Google it too.
3. The offered excuse was consumer electronics accumulation in waste dumps; no one is talking about car batteries. Quickly, now... how many iPods can you manufacture with the lead from one car battery?
4. Lead-free solder has reliability engineers loosing sleep in aerospace, nuclear, petro-chemicals, military - just about anywhere a failure is very bad. As some of your correspondents have pointed out, the problem is that we don't know how to resolve the issue. We do know that whiskers occur and that they do cause device failures.
5. We also know that post-failure, the lawyers will be very quick to point fingers.

John

There are *some* coatings which are known to slow tin whisker growth, or more precisely, prevent them from bridging between tin-plated conductors.

But none stop the process altogether. Worse, if you have a solid coating between pins on an IC, it becomes a de-facto conduit as the whisker will simply grow through it.

The only way to prevent tin whiskers reliably is to add lead to solder and use no tin anywhere else in electronic assemblies. Even the 'lead free' solders such as tin-silver-copper have been shown to grow whiskers over time.

7-litre V8 engine, 10.7 L/100 km on the highway and 14.7 L/100 km in the city, drive home at 8 (let's say 10) km/h, parts sticking two and a half metres into the sky.

As you've pointed out (once or twice), you do have a worldwide readership (and since the Americans redefined gallons just to be different, your MPG doesn't even mean anything to the Brits either).

Otherwise, love the column.

If you try to extrapolate anything from your article, you can only come to the conclusion that nothing is safe.

As the driver of an old car (74 LR S3) I too know all about electrical gremlins. Mine are named Lucas. And don't tell anyone, but I still have some lead solder. I use it with a lovely pre 80s 110V iron, not that new style battery junk good only at making cold solder joints that fail at the first bump in the road.

And now all my new tech has electrical whiskers? Maybe we should just go back to pre-wire days. I wonder how long this message would take if I were banging Morse code out on a rock pointed in your general direction? Essentially a UDP connection so I'd get no ACK you ever read this. Imagine doing a captcha?

MTBF and service level tests need to go way way up. What ever happened to "You can hear a pin drop?" I'm lucky if I can tell who is calling on my phone these days. Most of the time I have to rely on caller ID to tell me.

How can we get back the quality and durability of the old, and still keep the innovation of the new?

"How can we get back the quality and durability of the old, and still keep the innovation of the new?"

Stop consuming junk.

> Hats off to Detroit Iron. I don't mean to bring > up a downer, but car-to-car impact is not the
> cause of passenger injuries (and worse). Your
> car may win in a jousting battle with a Prius,
> but your impact with the interior of your T-
> Bird will pluck your feathers up. Make sure
> you're restraints (seat belts) are brought up
> to date and properly anchored. You're too
> valuable to all of us.

I did have a jousting match in my Prius with a Dodge 1500 pick-up. Both were totalled but my wife and I are still here, due in no small part to the design of the Prius. The front end is gone but bought us the milliseconds needed to have the seatbelts pretension and the airbags deploy. We did have some injuries but nothing life threatening. Not too many people in older cars survive a head-on crash with both cars going about 40 MPH. Today it is common to walk away from something like that.

Are the cars of my youth still "cool"? Of course they are - I'll take a 427 over the street cars of today anytime. Would I take that 427 cross country; not now even if I could afford the gas for it.

As someone who works in an EMS factory I feel a lot more comfortable not having lead around.

So what's so bad about silver solder? I've eaten with silverware all my life! And if whiskers are a problem, and a shave is impossible, why not seal with something waterproof and whisker proof.

"Maybe dumping lead solder was absolutely the right thing to do. Maybe it was absolutely the wrong thing to do. The truth is we haven't the slightest idea the answer to that question and anyone who claims to know is wrong. We didn't know what would happen when we started this and we don't know what we'll get out of it, either, or whether it will be worth the cost. All we know for sure is that a bumpy ride lies ahead."

That sums it up perfect. No one has the slightest idea about anything until it is many years after tha fact, then we still don't know

The correct answer is already known, but harder to use in some cases, and it already is in use.

What is needed is a complete conversion to CRIMP terminals. A good crimp joint will last almost forever, provided dissimilar metals are not used. So copper wires get copper crimp terminals, aluminum gets aluminum, etc.

The 4-0 aluminum wires that carry 200 amps at 240 volts into my house are secured under pressure by plated bolts and sockets, along with an antioxidant, absolutely essential in this application.

We already know how to do all this stuff, but it probably is more expensive right now, and will be until we get the innovaters working on new approaches by the promise of new and bigger markets.

It's lead free, tin free and wiskerless. What's not to like?

The correct answer is already known, but harder to use in some cases, and it already is in use.

What is needed is a complete conversion to CRIMP terminals. A good crimp joint will last almost forever, provided dissimilar metals are not used. So copper wires get copper crimp terminals, aluminum gets aluminum, etc.

The 4-0 aluminum wires that carry 200 amps at 240 volts into my house are secured under pressure by plated bolts and sockets, along with an antioxidant, absolutely essential in this application.

We already know how to do all this stuff, but it probably is more expensive right now, and will be until we get the innovaters working on new approaches by the promise of new and bigger markets.

It's lead free, tin free and wiskerless. What's not to like?

Maybe switching to 1.6 gpf toilets that you need to flush three times instead of just once was a good idea too.

Bill,

That aluminum wire you like can and will compress under load at some point in it's life. And when it does, there will be a large arc of electricity and then your house will go dark.

Been there, done that with aluminum.

As far as crimps.....crimps are good, but more prone to corrosion because of the mechanical way they are put together. (more exposed surface to corrode) If a good crimp is not sealed, it will corrode faster than a solder joint..especially in a humid, coastal environment.

I crimp, and solder and seal my boat's connections!!!

This is an interesting problem...for sure.