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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."
>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 :)
Drink it. It will make you smarter.
It works. I did that once and now I'm smart enough to never do it again.
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 >^-^ )