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Ask Slashdot: How To Safely Saw Up Motherboards?
James-NSC writes "I like to do arts and crafts. I've been saving up motherboards for a while as a new medium and I started working on it last night. I wore the same gear I wear while painting – fine particulate respirator and safety goggles. I just cut some templates out of some motherboards and when I was done I used the shop-vac to clean myself & workspace up before removing my mask. Even after 5+ minutes, in a well ventilated area (not as well as it should have been apparently) my first breath was pins and needles. I'm looking into containment and exhaust solutions – ala baby's first iron lung, but seriously, am I nuts? Are these materials just too toxic to work with?"
My brother (maybe somewhat excessively) bought a military surplus compressor-based breathing system (on eBay) for use in his studio (they make rather large fiberglass sculptures/models for museums).
Not only does it do a great job protecting from all of the fiberglass flying around, with i's 50's style military look and the 100' hoses connected to full face masks, it just looks damn cool :)
Wow! This ignorant bozo (or lying douchebag that's going to get someone killed) doesn't know jack about the most basic components of cellular biology or mineralogy. Mod down that idiot before anyone stupid and/or ignorant reads it and doesn't know its total B.S. of the lowest caliber. (I don't have any mod points this week.)
Oh no! A stupid person might harm themselves by believing and taking medical advice from every idiot who comes along. Shit man, we might LOSE a MORON! That would make me sad. We have such precious few of them to spare and the ones we have left are so timid, never ever overestimating their own competence or importance. Why, if their own stupidity did them in that would be terrible INJUSTICE! We must prevent this even if that's to our grevious detriment.
... you think choosing to take medical advice from Joe Random Anonymous Coward and getting hurt makes somebody a victim of Joe Random Anonymous Coward. Your heart's in the right place, but that's just stupid and there's no sense in treating adult people like helpless children. You really don't want to live in the kind of society that would create. We're already dangerously close to that particular form of horribly micromanaged dystopia.
We sure as hell don't want a world where adult people make their free choices and live with the consequences, no sir! Some people would have better lives than others based on the quality of their decision-making, and that would be so UNFAIR. There's nothing more UNFAIR than a world where everybody who makes good choices tends to have good "fortune" and everybody knows it. What we should REALLY do is acquire political power so we can try to force reality to adhere to our theory of how it should be. Surely we are more sophisticated than insisting on theories which adhere to reality. That's why we can afford to ignore questions like whether this has been tried before and how that worked out, because we're special and the history of these ideas doesn't apply to us.
Oh, wait, right
Damn. That means I probably can't reason with you. No matter how hard I try, I just can't reason with denial of the obvious. Within your own faulty frame of reference your denial seems perfectly valid and you have an alternative victim-based explanation for everything that's really about personal responsibility. They are two theories that both explain the phenomena observed; it's just that one theory is only an explanation. The other also gives you the ability to change which phenomena you experience so you tell me which is better.
I see what you're saying and it sounds like, "MOM i'll be up for food LATER i'm listening to a speech by AYN RAND she's so COOL!"
No, we don't want to be in a world where idiots die. Nor do we want to be in a world where people offering good advice are shouted down by angry impotents like you who have no real power so instead assert your superiority over the most vulnerable.
Let's instead live in a world of balance, where those who are less able receive a degree of support which doesn't put impossible burden on others but which does lift them up to the point where they are safe and able to join in.
As the owner / primary crafter of girlgeekboutique.com, where we make jewelry and accessories out of circuit boards, I have tried various methods. I'll start with the one I currently use.
1) Ginormous guillotine paper cutter bought cheap off craig's list: cheapest, safest, fastest method I have found -- but with some significant limitations
Upsides:
* Cheap, easy to find, easy to use
* Chops straight through the boards with (almost) no fine particulates escaping into the air. Very little to clean up.
* If you can hold the board steady (with pressure and sometimes with the aid of high-friction material between the circuit board and guillotine surface to help prevent slipping), you can cut very nice straight lines
Downsides:
* You can only cut thin circuit boards -- well, unless you have a newer, sharper, larger guillotine than I have and/or are much stronger
* You can only cut straight lines
I also use a sander (in front of a powerful window fan that takes the particles out of the house) with fine grit paper to smooth the edges.
NOTE: I use thin, component / solder-free circuit boards found at an electronics surplus store. Dealing with cutting lead solder and components, I have decided, is just a bad idea in many ways. I will sometimes pry the components off and make them into jewelry separately (see http://girlgeekboutique.com/ for examples), but I do not use circuit boards with solder on them. It is sad to see them go to waste (though, of course, you should always recycle them!), but there are simply too many toxic materials in them for me to feel comfortable cutting them up and giving / selling them to others. Most other crafters feel the same way, and use circuit boards without components.
Having said that, some other crafters are more hardcore and *do* use recycled circuit boards (with, at least, the large components removed), solder and all:
2) Scroll saw
Upsides (second hand):
* One of my fellow Etsy sellers uses one with "metal/plastic blades" and she creates very unique circuit board jewelry, sometimes in curved shapes like hearts (Clone Hardware)
Downsides:
* She goes through many blades just for one circuit board
* I tried one and, though I was probably not using the "right" kind of blade, it kept catching on every raised contact or bit of solder, making it impossible to smoothly run the board through
* All of the above warnings about toxic particulates being thrown into the air
I have also had several people suggest dremmels to me, but those also solve none of the problems mentioned above.
3) High powered sander
Upsides:
* With the right grit sizes and sander power, you can sand straight through a circuit board relatively quickly and then swap to a finer grit to take care of details and smooth off the edges
Downsides:
* EVERYTHING is being turned into dust. I only tried this outside on a windy day with a mask on, but it was still just a very bad idea -- even with solderless circuit boards.
I appreciate the ideas in the above posts and plan to try some of them. I am particularly interested in the ring saw. Does anyone have actual experience cutting circuit boards with these?
Sincerely,
"Captain Girl Geek" of girlgeekboutique.com
(a long-time slashdotter who just created a new account because she hated her old username >^-^ )