cleaning keyboards in the dishwasher

On 1/13/2006 at 8:38 AM Sridhar Ayengar wrote: The problem with many of our hazmat regulations--particularly when it comes to heavy metals, is that they rarely take into account the form the metal is in. For example, if you have amalgam fillings in your teeth, you have mercury that's been placed in your body (silver amalgam is a solution of silver in mercury). In this form, the mercury's not particularly reactive with the substances inside your mouth and the danger is minimal. Yet the amount of mercury in one filling, combined with two other harmless elements (hydrogen and carbon) to make dimethyl mercury, is sufficient o kill you and a couple of your friends. Add a little sulfur and some sodium, rejuggle the molecular structure and you've got thimerisal, a preservative used in vaccines and injected right into your bloodstream. The EU RoHS has me in a tizzy because the regulations are beginning to mandate that lead be removed from solders used to assemble brass musical instruments. Well, the substitutes don't flow as nicely and it's much harder to make a strong joint. I've seen instruments that have come from the top German manufacturers that have cold solder joints. But a musical instrument has a very long life (50 years and longer isn't unusual); the solder is well contained and doesn't leach from the joints during use, so where is the harm? We're not talking about mobile phones with an average life of less than a year here. My oldest (and still-played) tuba dates Cheers, Chuck