coughing and splutterering and spitting feathers pissed off. Just ppicked up a cigarette, plus plastic straw section I've been using to have a toot. Look round to pc screen, lighter flame applied to end of same and inhale, rather than my rolly. Like toking on a burning rubber tyre damnit to twatting tartarus, trying for one last big gulp of brown before I slather my plates'o'meat in steroid gel and start putting one in front of the other w/oburning my bloody fingers.
Fuck me, I'm bringing my glass ice pipe and using that, assuming i manage to score. basically a straight narrow hollow borosilicate glass rod, heated to glowing red heat and softening with the flame of a propane torch (need a decent one, not just a canister fed blowlamp. but we thankfully had just the thing, in the guise of a big tank-fed powerful brazing torch, that we used to use when we had our guitar parts business economically feasible after making the bits on an old, probably pre-WWII era capstan lathe. Damn satisfying that was...locking big brass rod in place...drill.in...out, shift-click, tap threads, in, out, shift-click, cut to shape, click-clack and in with the tungsten carbide cutoff tool after knurling grips on the correct places and parts, then sticking steel bars on a jig, cutting screw threads with a die-head on more steel, all in the jigs, before toasting the bejeesis out of them, and brazing all in place with high-temperature silver/cadmium solder. not a nice element, Cd, its like lead, only worse. Not as bad as thallium, but worse than lead. Not sure where it stands relative to mercury, as the element itself, tox-wise.
BUT, the Cd/Pb free solders are shite. Awful awful crap, lead free solder. Because the lead helps avoid stress cracking by allowing plastic deformation instead, and also, the presence of lead in solder retards the formation of tin whiskers, little tiny nanofibers of tin that grow out of some high-Sn (the symbol for tin, comes from the latin, 'stannum') solders, the purer the tin the worse the whisker formation, dangerous to fine circuits, as they can grow and short things out. And Pb-less solder has abominable wetting ability too. Utter fucking bollocks, never mind less toxic, it just doesn't do the job anywhere as like as properly as leaded solder.
Presumably cadmium silver though might not need it, or much, seeing how similar cadmium is to lead. Nasty shit though, I don't fancy cadmium poisoning one tiny
bit. Seeing as how the japanese named their Cd-release and toxicity environmental disaster 'itai-itai' or 'owch-owch' disease due to the pain caused from their softened bones deforming and breaking as they walked.
