A note on glove safety

Ryan Mooney

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The Gorge Area, Oregon
Glenn's note on the Methanol thread about gloves reminded me of this...

If you're buying latex gloves as a "safety" measure for finishing supplies you're not doing yourself any favor. They offer little to no protection against most lab/finishing chemicals and can actually decompose and absorb into the skin causing all sorts of additional problems. In particular methanol will literally eat latex gloves and carry both the latex (and latex binding chemicals) as well as the methanol into your skin - they're worse than no glove at all in that case.

Its important to choose a glove to match the chemical you're working with. Nitrile is usually sufficient for most of the chemicals we work with, sometimes Butyl rubber or other types are called for though. Sometimes doubling up on the nitrile is a good idea.

If in doubt there are a number of good "what glove do I use" guides out there, this one from Cornell is one of the more accessible and defines a lot of the basic concepts:
http://collum.chem.cornell.edu/documents/Hand_Protection_and_Glove_Selection.pdf

The lbl guide is more amenable to printing out to hang on the wall but lacks some of the details:
http://amo-csd.lbl.gov/downloads/Chemical Resistance of Gloves.pdf
 
Thanks, Ryan. Good info to have. Harbor Freight has various weights of Nitrile gloves. I keep a box of the heavy duty ones for playing with solvents etc.
 
I guess in this respect I am lucky. I rarely ever use any kind of solvent except naptha for cleaning a brush. Very little comes in contact with my hide. I do wear goggles while doing it. But, when I am putting on my normal finish on bowls and such, they are still spinning on the lathe. I apply my walnut oil/shellac mixture using those $1 throwaway brushes you can get almost anywhere. When not fit for use I throw it away and get out another one. I use the same thing for when I do use DNA, which is not very often. Saves me all kinds of hassle and extra expenditures. Everybody has their methods and safety and health should always come first before anything else. Otherwise how are we gonna be able to keep going on with what we love to do?
 
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