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Do Hornby Use Lead Weights?


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15 minutes ago, whart57 said:

Banned some thirty years ago, but you wouldn't believe today how angry the petrol heads got over that

 

I'd forgotten about tetra-ethyl lead, the main reason the petrol-heads got upset was that unleaded petrol tended to burn out the valves/seatings in the cylinder head leading to very expensive repairs to install hardened seating and valves.  The most recent thing upsetting them is the introduction of more and more alcohol into petrol.  This dissolves flexible piping in the fuel line of old cars and some styles of floats in carburettors, causing petrol leaks and fires... 

 

Sorry.  Only page 2 and :offtopic:

 

Edited by Hroth
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Whilst I haven't dismantled a Lima J50, I do posess a pair of Kings and a pair of 09s (do I win?), and the weights in them don't appear to be lead. I don't know what they are, but they don't resemble any lead I've ever met. Some awful zinc based witch's brew would be my guess. 

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1 hour ago, Il Grifone said:

 

It has been surmised that the Roman Empire fell because of lead water pipes.

Wasn't the real issue with lead & Romans, that they used to add it to cheap wine to make it sweeter?

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3 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

...However I don't think it was actually lead but a similar type of alloy...

Most metals in common use are alloys. But 94% Pb content is enough to be simply called lead I feel? A little Bismuth and Antimony for the balance is my recollection. You could scratch it to bright metal with a finger nail, which is a pretty good simple test if this dense grey lump might be lead, and an instrument isn't available. (Happy days when I had an XRD available in my employer's labs, which I had helped to commission into service earlier in my career.)

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Of course the man who invented lead in petrol also invented chlorinated fluorocarbon propellant in aerosols..he Thomas Midgley Jr  had a great career... 

 

Lead melts at 327.5C,  it boils at 1740C, so it's some going to truly vapourise and generate lead fumes, though Rosin and fluxes from soldering may well bring lead particles into the air,  they are dangerous in their own right.  You should ensure you're working in a well ventilated area or use air extraction as we do at work. 

 

The Roman's used vast amounts of lead,  managing to make a peak in the atmosphere in AD210..

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5 hours ago, Il Grifone said:

IIRC lead-free solder was never allowed by NATO. (I may be wrong it's over 20 years that I worked on NATO contracts.)

The original EU RoHS requirements were just for Consumer Electronics, so avionics, medical equipment, electronic instruments, telecoms equipment, etc, etc were excluded, mainly over concerns over reliability.

 

Over the past 15 years these exemptions have slowly been reduced, but as expertise in using Lead Free Solder in electronics manufacturing has increased in the mean time this is less of an issue than it was in 2003.

 

Regards,

 

John P

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Thanks for all the replies. Since the coaches were brand new from a train set, combined with everything you have all said, I'm pretty sure that its not lead. While I know touching lead isn't inherently dangerous, I do get quite iffy with 'dangerous' things e.g. bleach. I dont know what metal it is but it's a black colour, if anyone knows what that is.

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8 hours ago, whart57 said:

 

Lead as silvery grey metal is not much of a problem as it takes quite a bit of transfer and ingestion to be poisonous. Lead as part of a chemical compound on the other hand is way more dangerous. Like all those bright reds and greens painted on 1950s Meccano for example. And my cot was painted with lead containing paint .....

 

By the mid-1950s lead in children's toys was a big issue and Meccano had moved over to Lead-free paint. That's what the 'LF' stickers are on 1950s Meccano O gauge boxes.

 

7 hours ago, PatB said:

Whilst I haven't dismantled a Lima J50, I do posess a pair of Kings and a pair of 09s (do I win?), and the weights in them don't appear to be lead. I don't know what they are, but they don't resemble any lead I've ever met. Some awful zinc based witch's brew would be my guess. 

The weights in Lima models were hefty but not Lead as by the 1970s it was definitely verboten for anything sold as a toy in the UK.

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Stripping it out of locos and carriages?

 

Putting it under the bed?

 

I actually checked the first posting date on this thread to see if it said April the 1st

 

Seriously chaps get a grip your not going to get lead poisoning from the weights in your locos and carriages.

 Just get real

 Grind it down and use it for snuff, suck on a lozenged sized lump of it and there's a chance you might get something but left as a weight that passes by you on your layout in a loco Jez 

 It's not flipping kryptonite for goodness sake.

 

Rant over

Edited by Londontram
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I don't consider myself that old, but I'm still of a generation who got to play with loose mercury in school physics lessons. Dipping fingers into a trough of it, floating blocks of brass on its surface, or making a torricellian vacuum with a glass tube of it. Spilling it was frowned on (and, my goodness, Mr Shaw could frown for England) , more for the expense and hassle of replacement than any perceived danger. I don't even remember post-lesson handwashing being particularly rigorously enforced in the physics lab, although it was in chemistry for things other than mercury. 

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57 minutes ago, Londontram said:

Stripping it out of locos and carriages?

 

Putting it under the bed?

 

I actually checked the first posting date on this thread to see if it said April the 1st

 

The OP is actually quite young and had probably been warned by someone that trains used or had used lead in the past.

 

He asked the question, got the answer, then the rest of us went to town on when lead stopped being so readily available about our lives.

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48 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

The OP is actually quite young and had probably been warned by someone that trains used or had used lead in the past.

 

He asked the question, got the answer, then the rest of us went to town on when lead stopped being so readily available about our lives.

Thread drift on such a subject seems reasonable. When the OP first appeared, I alerted the Mods to the fact that some unkind comments were likely. It is quite heartening to find that this took a page and a half and more than 36 hours to actually occur. 

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There's a much more immediate health risk than toxicity with lead (and other metals with a relatively low melting point). I refer to the idea of melting them, and pouring the hot metal into enclosed moulds. If the mould is even slightly moist, there is a very high risk of the metal 'blowing back'. A school-friend of mine found this out the hard way; he lost a lot of skin off his face, and might have lost his sight, had he not been wearing glasses.

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24 minutes ago, maico said:

I've got a wrenn 8F fom the 1980s and the weight in it has 'lead' written on it.

 

Old lead pipes have had protective calcium carbonate linings built up in them decades ago.

 

Most of the Wrenn stuff was made up of left over parts from the 1960s. When they were made, lead would have been perfectly common.

 

When I grew up there was loads of Wrenn models on the shelves of model shops. Nobody wanted it apart from collectors. It was also extremely expensive. They probably got around the fact they had lead in them as they weren't marketed as toys.

 

 

 

Jason

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3 hours ago, Londontram said:

Stripping it out of locos and carriages?

 

Putting it under the bed?

 

I actually checked the first posting date on this thread to see if it said April the 1st

 

Seriously chaps get a grip your not going to get lead poisoning from the weights in your locos and carriages.

 Just get real

 Grind it down and use it for snuff, suck on a lozenged sized lump of it and there's a chance you might get something but left as a weight that passes by you on your layout in a loco Jez 

 It's not flipping kryptonite for goodness sake.

 

Rant over

I'm sorry for being annoying, and I know touching lead isn't really 'deadly' nor is under the bed a safe place to store it but I get irrationally scared with things that are 'dangerous' lead, bleach whatever so I just wanted confirmation that the weights in Hornby models are not lead.

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7 minutes ago, tubs01 said:

I'm sorry for being annoying, and I know touching lead isn't really 'deadly' nor is under the bed a safe place to store it but I get irrationally scared with things that are 'dangerous' lead, bleach whatever so I just wanted confirmation that the weights in Hornby models are not lead.

 

The only daft question is one that isn't asked. You wanted to know something and asked. RMweb answered, admittedly in our usual somewhat jokey way and you are now reassured. Looks like the forum is working properly. 

 

Gentlemen, I think our work here is done!

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