Projects How many of y'all wear rubber gloves when working??

I buy nitrile gloves by the case and use them when ever there is a risk of absorbing anything through the skin.
Another question people should be talking about is how they clean their hands. Took me years of harping on one of my buddies to stop washing his hands in lacquer thinner. Do your family a favor and learn about PPE personal protect equipment. My Dad was a mechanic all his life and always had black stains around his nails after washing his hands, the doctors felt chemical adsorption is what caused his cancer that killed him.
Here is a web site that has a glove chart (starts on page 24) to help decide which is the best glove for protection.
https://www.osha.gov/Publications/osha3151.pdf
Please protect yourself.

 

Well...I have never worn gloves at all even when I was a painter and in chemicals daily for years. I am sure I have knocked some years off my life, but guess I didn’t know any better either. Seems I need to rethink my past strategy on gloves and maybe try to teach my boys better habits than I had as we are rebuilding vehicles for them now.

 

When I first stated, we used the same rubber glove, washed between cows and then powdered with talc when you were finished and it was dry. Now, talc is banned by the FDA, gloved are plastic and disposable and 90% of the vets who are graduating and doing this work are women. Times change.

 

My hands are gloves. A friend tried to stitch me up when I got a good cut on my finger, he had to hold the flap of skin with needle nose pliers and use his lighter behind the needle because it kept poking into his thumb instead of through my skin! As far as chemical absorbtion and what not, I'm sure it's possible but I probably stand as good a chance getting run over checking the mailbox.

 

Pic

 

I Should Wear Gloves But Once I Get Started I Just Forget Them...

 

When I was young and dumb I never wore them. Once I had some really potent carb cleaner, the kind you dunked the blown apart carb into. I just reached down into the stuff and pulled the parts out bare handed. Three days later all the skin came off my hands. I still wonder what that may have done to my system. I wear gloves always now, even for woodworking. When you get old, you're like an old car-- gotta take it easy on the parts, they get worn!

 

Me, because I'm a proctologist.

 

I'm wearing them now for the first time at the bike shop, because of this thread. So far OK, changed a couple of tires, switched a disc rotor, put on some pedals, nothing too dirty. They're some black ones one of my guys sometimes uses, but he just started doing that recently after working here 12 years.
Wasn't too bad, til I sat down at the computer to type this. Typing DOES suck in them, and now my hands are sweating.
But, y'know, this thread might just save somebody's life on the HAMB.
Not mine, I've ignored gloves for 50 years, but it might add years to some of the younger HAMBers. I hope so.

 

Not true.

All hyperbole aside, almost all chemicals used in the automotive trades have a component, if not many, that have transdermal absorbtion properties.

An alarming number of them are carcenogenic, and/or mutagenic. Many accumulate in fatty tissue, doing slow damage, over time, while others do acute damage.

Commiting slow-motion suicide, to avoid swallowing your pride, and enduring a tiny amount of discomfort, shows a lack of value of your own life, and, worse, a profound lack of respect for the people who love you, whom you will leave behind.

 

Best I've found: SHOWR ATLAS 370

 

I've tried but can't get the one glove on or off very easily. Disclaimer here, I only have on arm.

Pat

 

I had my hands badly burned when I was a kid requiring skin grafts. This left my skin thin and susceptible to cutting easily. I worked for a NASA contractor for a number of years and we had a glove for every job. Some of the chemicals were particularly nasty, Hydrazine, Monomethyl Hydrazine, Nitrogen Tetroxide, and Hydrogen Peroxide (90%). We also worked with a number of cryogenic liquids as well as high pressure gasses. I am thankful that wearing gloves was a requirement.

 

As I said before, I wear them at work almost constantly. I use a brand called Monster Mobile. I get them from my Mac Tool Guy. A box of 100 is about $18.00. If you are careful taking them off, you can get several uses out of one pair. I never thought about it too much until the editor of Hemmings Classic Car Magazine wrote an editorial on getting cancer and he attributed it to bring around the harsh chemicals in our hobby/industry, particularly Carbon Tetrachloride. Now that my nine year old son is out in the shop with us, I bought him a box too and I’m teaching him about Personal Protective Gear. He still hates wearing his dirt bike helmet though.


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Yeah, I used to have hands that looked like that. Stained from grease and oil. Even clean, they were still black.

Now I use gloves.



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Gloves have gotten better and now I wear them regularly. They had some bright green and bright orange ones at my local Napa. There good enough to last all day and I can reuse them a few times.


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I wear these.

 

I worked with one guy, he did brake jobs day in day out for 25 years by that time. He developed blood poisoning from brake fluid exposure. This is when we rebuilt calipers and wheel cylinders so we swam in it. One day he winds up with a black line running up his arm, he was out for a week while on the mend. The doctor said he could wind up dead from it. I had left the shop soon after and never learned what happened to the guy.

I would have every summer little bumps appear on a few of my fingers after having brake fluid on my hands. The heat did something to my skin having brake fluid on it. Once I stopped fixing cars, it stopped. But has had made other appearances after from being exposed to it. Now I wear gloves when I do a brake job.

 

Many have mentioned the safety data sheets for chemicals and not everyone is aware of their existence. Years ago our company put us through material safety training. I retired and did 3 years out in the oilsands and the refineries put us through the materials safety as part of the employee induction. It was pointed out to us in the initial MSDS training that there was safe material use data sheets and employees were to follow the safety precautions and wear their personal protection while using the chemicals and products. The lesson out of that was a person could go to their local hardware or an auto paint supplier to buy hazardous chemicals that are toxic with harmful consequences w/o any awareness. A person almost needs a microscope to read that there is safety data sheets for the products off the shelf. Home owners are allowed to use the products and suffer the consequences. Nowadays the information is available on manufacturers sites as Safety Data Sheets (SDS) that list the material properties, effects of the chemicals on the body, safety precautions and personal safety equipment. A lot of the products have toxic effects and accumulative effect that takes a toll on ones body overtime. For example the SDS for hardeners used in acrylics and urethane paints is a scary read. Wearing gloves or personal equipment may be inconvenient but not as inconvenient as a trip to the hospital sucking for air over a hardener reaction or a serious home grown industrial illness. Please take a minute to Google the chemical by its "product name" SDS and someone's site should have the information. We want to enjoy your posts for a years to come.

 

Of course EVERYTHING in California causes cancer!

 

Not one to normally wear gloves but every year I help out with an apple pie fundraiser event for my church where gloves are necessary to protect the general public from my hands. When I remove, the gloves, they are black on the inside from my dirty hands. Definitely time to rethink the glove idea.

 

There are worse ways to die than cancer.

 

Found some orange gloves with some texture on the palms that seem to be better than the blue ones. Twenty bucks for 100 at True Value.

 

Only if I am putting my hands up an exhaust pipe!

 

It's a wonder some of us are still alive. Good genes I guess. I come from the pre glove era. A lot of the time by the time I realize I need them my hands are already dirty or wet with what ever joy juice I am spraying. I am working on being more cognizant of using them all the time for the reasons mentioned above. When I was in the Army we shoved our hands into the saddle tanks on the trucks. At work it was the 5 gal. bucket of parts washing varsol, even before lunch. Brakes, you banged the drum on the ground, used your air hose to blow off the backing plate, then stood in that tan, grey cloud and did the job. Young and tough. Hard to stop, but necessary. One of the good things about our modern world is the general availability of information on hazards and hazardous materials.

 

Not too many!

 

Well, gloves aren't traditional for hot rodders, but I do like them for castrating skunks.

 

Only when using noxious chemicals

 

Truckdoctor Andy hit the home run . I had stage 4 Cancer , 28 years ago , Boiler Chemicals , weed killers that make earth look like the surface of the moon in 2 days , parts cleaners , paint thinners and are not for bare hands to be touching . I wear gloves for everything , long sleeve shirt and pants when welding , UV will creep up on you when you least expect it to . The topic is gloves , but I stress wear any PPE you can when ever you are tinkering . Eyes , fingers , toes , hearing , breathing its all hard to replace when destroyed by being stupid and not using any PPE .

 

I read labels way more than I used to 20 years ago and I try to follow precautions. My biggest lack of caution was/is when welding, no long sleeves. Been over twenty years since I done serious welding and my arms are still a few shades darker than the rest of me. Today I picked up a bottle of blue dye to read the label. It is used for adding to water so when spraying with additives you can tell where you been. Cap was loose (?) so now fingers are sort of blue/green.