New board, bad smell.

I think I have smelled what you are talking about. I chalked it up to the component being in the bag for too long, but I do not know the source.

The epoxy in the boards can outgas which can reek.  When I miss the smell of the fifties-sixties I have someone light up a Camel-non and warm up some phenolic.  They say that you are cancer-prone in proportion to how freckled you are.  Exposure to rando toxins is half the fun of this game.  Remember the French proverb:  He who bears no scars has no life!

Thanks, though I prefer when my scars come from walking into doors rather than breathing hazardous chemicals.

Few carcinogens have a linear dose-response curve at the low end of the exposure scale.  Stochastic agents such as asbestos being the only exception of which I am aware.  My father remembers when everybody got rid of their leaden appliances during a health scare.  He thinks that we are propagandized into hypochondria by the capitalists so that they can get us to buy new stuff.  He's not just a crank, he is a cognitive psycho-pharmacologist/pharmacognosist by trade.

Anyway, yes, the Napoleonic eggs were and are being broken to make the omelet of the electronics parts we so dearly love.  It's undeniable.  Probably phenols from the epoxy.  It is a smell that takes one aback.  It was a much more prevalent smell during the first era of that superb thermoset, phenolic.  The mechanical requirements of a circuit board are stringent:  Dimensionally stable, hard, chemically stable, thermally stable, low tempco of expansion, high-dielectric, workable.  Also has to be cheap.  So they typically use fiberglass/epoxy composite material.  At one point the epoxy is a thick liquid, so solvents and an exothermic reaction are required to harden it.  And when industry wants things to dry out quickly they use high-velocity/low mw solvents.  Phenols are aromatics.  They reek.

I don't know you well enough to have any idea whether this applies to you, but modern psychology sees hypochondria often as a manifestation in someone with unverbalized family rules against certain forms of success.  Hypochondria excuses inanition without requiring examination of one's unconscious patterns.  Not sayin' that that's you, but you might check it out.

At the exposure level and duration you describe you have nothing to worry about.  Insofar as these substances are in car exhaust and furniture foam, you may have gotten more of these ingested on a ride to the store in a new car.  If the stuff was that nasty, workers at the plant where it was produced would be dropping like flies.  My opinion is that worrying about this event is worse for your health than the event itself.

I am a Chicago lifer and I must say the world around me has, in general, gotten much cleaner.  I wish I could drive some of today's people through Gary, Ind. during the Indochina war era.  Every color of smoke and flame from a thousand smokestacks!  This is where we made our agent orange.  You would feel every alveoli in your lungs from a county away!

To quote my padre:  "Ya' gotta die of somethin'!"

Health is a weird thing.  Most of my inlaws smoke tobacco heavily.  This always has taken me aback.  My SO smoked herself around eighth grade, then quit, she's kindofa neat-nik.  Anyway, she was recently diagnosed with Parky's.  Turns out with her genome she is 3% as likely as the average person to contract cancer and is unlikely to die from her high cholesterol, as their heart problems are typically non-fatal.  Turns out that if she had ingested nicotine regularly, probably the onset of her Parky's would have been delayed.  So environmental exposure must be rather idiosyncratic. Lucky for the members of her family that don't come down with Parky's, as they own one of the largest industrial farms in the USA and are exposed to spooky organics constantly.

If you have a family history of things like liver cancer, than you should take stringent measures to avoid organics, probably.  Otherwise, just hold the bag further from your schnoz next time.  As

Friedrich Nietzche informs us:  "All that doesn't kill educates."

OK, I kind of meant that as a joke. I know that one whiff of something won't kill me, unless its chlorine, hydrazine or something like that. I was just curious as I've done work with some boards and stuff (raspberry pi, arduino and taking apart calculators, computers and junk like that) and this smelled much more putrid than anything else I've smelled. Less like new electronic board, more like someone forgot to wash off production chemicals. I was just concerned that maybe someone did forget to wash off production chemicals, or something like that, in which case it would be dangerous.

Thanks again, this is actually very interesting, I've got a few examples of my own family that had similar experiences. My own great grandmother lived through almost all the twentieth century, lead paint, rampant smoking, and just about every health issue you can think of from then and she lived to 106.

My son went to the dermatologist with a splotchy melanin patch.  The Dr. asked him if they were longevous in his family.  He responded affirmatively.  The doctor sent him home there and then. 

I do wonder about this.  The positive health effect I associate with e- is that it makes my life more interesting.  My father thinks wanting to live is a major factor in health.  Really, IDK, but it makes some sense.

I ponder the fate of one of electronic's greatest heroes, Michael Faraday, who went on to explore the halogens with the predictable, horrid impact on his health:

https://www.google.com/search?q=michael+faraday&newwindow=1&client=firefox-a&hs=Y8C&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&chann…

I mean this as a joke, NSFW (language F-word):

Chopper - Harden Up Australia! - YouTube

Update, I recently got stepper motor drivers that smell like cherry pepsi....it's kinda neat.

Cool. All my attempts at using perfboard for circuits smells very strongly of burning.

I have the same problem. Mostly because my soldering iron burns everything.