XO-1.5's sudden death - oven resurrected!

[Yioryos Asprobounitis]

--- On Mon, 10/15/12, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: XO-1.5's sudden death - oven resurrected!
> To: "James Cameron" <quozl at laptop.org>, "Yioryos Asprobounitis" <mavrothal at yahoo.com>, "OLPC Devel" <devel at lists.laptop.org>
> Date: Monday, October 15, 2012, 4:41 PM
> On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 4:33 PM,
> James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org>
> wrote:
> > I recommend never using that household oven for food
> again, because we
> > have no clear idea what poisons might be ingested, or
> what effects
> > they might have.
> >
> 
> James raises an important safety issue.  In spite of
> OLPC's careful
> attention to "green design", electronics manuafacturing (or
> re-working) certainly involves a some level of exposure to
> toxic
> materials.  With heating there are potentially toxic
> metal vapors or
> volatile organic components from the plastics (particularly
> halogenated organic molecules) that could present a food
> safety risk.
> 
> If you find yourself unable to take his advice to dedicate
> that oven
> to non-food use, I would at least check to see if it has an
> "oven
> cleaning" cycle of prolonged high heat and I would do this
> in a
> well-ventialted work environment.
> 
> cjl
> 

Safety was/is certainly a concern and is good that is brought up here. 
I did make sure I was alone in the house in a well ventilated kitchen with the hood running at the time and I did run the oven for an additional hour at 250 C to get rid of any possible residue.
 
I would certainly not recommend turning one's kitchen to reflow repair facility, but I must contest the logic of "avoid what you do not know". Living in a world that less than 0.1% of the chemicals that we are coming in contact with every day have pass any serious, if at all, safety testing, this approach is more philosophical than useful or protective. 
  
Having said that, in cases like the XO boards I think that we could and *should* know, at least the chemicals involved