Guest blogger and jewelry artist Deryn Mentock on soldering, solder fumes, and lung protection

Cross posted from somethingsublime.typepad.com/

Soldering….love, love, love soldering. Hate the fumes! If you do any amount of soldering, at all, you know how much smoke it produces. Breathing that stuff is really hazardous to your health.

For a long, long while, it’s been my intention to ramp up the soldering activities on my work bench. One of the reasons I’ve hesitated is that I don’t have a proper vent hood. Wife Whisperer, good as he is, I don’t think would be willing to punch a hole in our garage wall, ceiling, or whatever-it-takes to get me a hood that vents to the outside.

But, I’ve found a solution.

Isn’t it beautiful?

I ran across this on my friend Catherine Witherell’s facebook page. She highly recommends it. I do too.

Let me introduce you to my lovely new machine: the Winged Sentry SS-200-WS. You can read all the technical stuff about microns and particles, on the website: Sentry Air Systems, Inc. Suffice it to say, this baby sucks up all the bad stuff from soldering.

I could probably solder in my bedroom now, if I wanted to. Not that I want to.

Terrific and impressive points about this fume extractor:

It’s high quality. I’m fortunate enough to live nearby Sentry’s headquarters so I made a little visit, to check this thing out, and save on shipping. I’m cheap, that way. I spoke to one of the co-owners and was very impressed by what I saw. While this machine doesn’t have a lot of fancy parts, what it does have is very high quality. It’s gonna last me forever!
It’s portable. If I ever, ever get to move into that 3000 square foot studio of my dreams, I can take this with me.
It’s powerful. Again, click here to read about all that techie stuff. Your nose won’t even be able to tell your soldering.
It has wings! The wings aren’t for flying but for better capture. I also purchased the “cover”…a long piece of acrylic that hinges onto the top, covering the wings. It allows for even better capture. Yeah!
It has an awesome hepa filter, as well as a carbon filter. The filters are easy to replace. They’re lung savers.
It sucks up other stuff besides smoke. I can use if for dust and particles, of all kinds…sanding, grinding, filing and fumes.

So, here’s the dealio. It wasn’t cheap. However, many of the less expensive brands merely suck up the smoke/fumes, and spit them out the back…without a proper filter. While it’s good to get that smoke away from your face, the particulates are still lurking, waiting to drift into your lungs. I think this was a really, really good investment.

Here’s a little vid to show you how it works and how geek-ily excited I am about it.