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24
THE JOINTING OF LEAD WORK.
The chief cause of the failure of lead-work is the use
of solder. If the use of solder could be got rid of, wellconstructed
lead-work would last indefinitely. If old
soldered cisterns be examined, the lead will be found to
be eaten away all along the edges of the soldered seams,
while elsewhere the lead remains sound. In soil-pipes and
other lead-work which is put outside and exposed during
the day to the hot sun and during the night to severe
cold, the pipe cracks along the edge of the soldered joints.
These cracks are caused by the pipe not contracting and
expanding uniformly, and at the rigid seams of solder the
lead tears itself away, leaving a crack, through which leakage
of soil-water and offensive smells come. Cracks of this
kind never occur in the leaden rain-water pipes which are
socketed into each other and left with sliding play, as I
have already described. The cracks in lead-work by
the edges of seams of solder are also started by corrosion
due to the galvanic action which is set up by the contact
of dissimilar metals. In chemical factories, so marked is
this destructive action of solder upon the lead, that the
tanks, if soldered, would leak very soon. Here solder has
long been completely eliminated, the joints being made
by fusing one piece of lead to another as one piece of iron
is welded to another. There is no reason why this process
should not be generally used in domestic and sanitary
plumbing. Lead-work would then endure for hundreds of
years. This getting rid of solder is the greatest improvement
that remains to be made in sanitary work.
OUTSIDE SOIL-PIPES.
While soil-pipes are best outside the house in all cases
where the plan, materials, and workmanship are not of
the highest character, there are many large and complicated
buildings in which the highest level of sanitation
is not secured by placing the soil-pipes outside. To
train soil-pipes in and out up over the stone facade of a