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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?"
Motherboards are essentially epoxy bound fiberglass. If you are going to be sawing it up, you need gear that is designed for extremely fine stiff fibers. You need filtration equipment suitable for removing fiberglass, or better yet asbestos, particles from the air.
Good luck. Try not to give yourself lung cancer.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
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.
Your first breath? Try breathing more often?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When cutting things that make lots of dust, its best (if possible) to cut them underwater, or submerged in a fluid. This way none of the particulates become airborne.
Once it gets into the air, fine fiberglass dust is going to remain there a good while. It's light enough that it will effectively never settle in any useful amount of time, and your typical house probably doesn't completely recycle its internal atmosphere nearly fast enough to solve the problem that way.
If you are going to be doing much of this, you might want to consider building a negative-pressure work area large enough for your tools and workpiece to be comfortably manipulated:
Basically, a reasonably adequately sealed box(doesn't need to, and won't, be airtight, because of the negative pressure) with a slot for you to stick your hands in, a plexiglass window to see what you are doing, and a shop vac or similar pulling air out of the box and through a HEPA filter. Because of the suction, air will continually be flowing into the box(preventing the egress of most dust, even though the box isn't fully sealed) and the dust-contaminated air will be filtered before it leaves to ruin your day. Still probably not a bad idea to have the outflow vent outdoors, rather than into the room; but the filter should scrub most of it.
First off, you need the correct saw blade.
Most motherboards (all? I've never seen one on phenolic), are G-10 fiberglass.
G-10 Fiberglass is nasty stuff. While it will not give you cancer (this has been studied because people thought fiberglass seems similar to asbestos, but it isn't) it's definitely an irritant. Your lungs will expel the fibers.
That said:
Wear a dust mask. A full nose-and-mouth mask from the hardware store is fine. You don't need to go overboard.
Use a vacuum pickup.
Use the correct saw blade. A silicon carbide blade (particles bonded to a steel band saw blade) is ideal.
You also might want to try using a tile cutter saw that uses an abrasive blade and flood water cooling.
Don't try to cut with a steel blade.
--
BMO
>it can give you cancer.
Hi. I'm a machinist. I used to machine boards and G10 fiberglass parts for circuit board testers (basically a big board with hundreds of probes on it that you plonked a circuit board onto and it QCed the board).
This concerned me.
So I looked it up. The only study I found that had a link to cancer was that they surgically implanted a chunk of fiberglass into rat lungs that the lungs were not able to expel. This chronic irritant did produce tumors. The rat population that only had inhaled fiberglass dust did not have a statistically significant increase in cancer over the control group of rats without exposure.
The human lung cilia and mucus are able to expel fiberglass fibers. This is not the case with asbestos, which is why asbestos is a hazard and fiberglass (a much larger fiber) isn't.
The IARC removed fiberglass from its list of "possibly carcinogenic materials" in 2001.
This is not to say that fiberglass is not a hazard. It is. It can cause asthmatic reactions and difficulty in breathing because it's a strong irritant. Wear a good facemask. Try to keep the fibers from entering the air in the first place. Use vacuum pickup and if you can, try to cut under flood water-based coolant.
--
BMO
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 :)
In a 'shop making telephone boards in the '60s, we heated the sheets in ovens before the big presses hit them. Put our pies for lunch in those ovens too. Then, open drilling and open flow-solder. Citric acid for drinks came from the (gold) plating 'shop - "other bottle, boy, that one's the cyanide". Never did *me* any harm.
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.
that would be the same as the instructions for a ShopVac bong.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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 >^-^ )