Gloves?

[pinkjimiphoton]

And if you have dry skin, don't buy the powdered type gloves. They have powder inside them, makes them easier to put on, but as for myself, they dry out my hands.

yah, that was what i meant. they can tend to make your hands crack a lot.

[musiclikscreams]

ya i stay the hell away from powdered and the coated strings do help a little

[Kipper4]

We wear some of those gloves for work and some of the powders are really nasty. Beware. Nitrile are nicer IMO.
Good luck

[R.G.]

I have the opposite problem. Latex or nitrile, my hands sweat furiously inside them. I get about 10 minutes with gloves and my skin starts to wrinkle from the water trapped inside. Any powder just gets sluiced around, so my experience is that powder is irrelevant.

I probably want nitrile OVER cotton gloves. 

[pappasmurfsharem]

I have the opposite problem. Latex or nitrile, my hands sweat furiously inside them. I get about 10 minutes with gloves and my skin starts to wrinkle from the water trapped inside. Any powder just gets sluiced around, so my experience is that powder is irrelevant.

I probably want nitrile OVER cotton gloves. 

Do Want

[Philippe]

Like driving, drinking & soldering generally don't mix well...know of a diy'er who almost burned his house down when the soldering iron was left on/unattended/forgotten. good case for weller soldering station...providing the iron is put back in its base.

[davent]

I have the opposite problem. Latex or nitrile, my hands sweat furiously inside them. I get about 10 minutes with gloves and my skin starts to wrinkle from the water trapped inside. Any powder just gets sluiced around, so my experience is that powder is irrelevant.

I probably want nitrile OVER cotton gloves. 

Do Want

Lee Valley sell a light, knit cotton glove for this very purpose. My hands swim in sealed gloves of any persuasion as well.

http://www.leevalley.com/en/wood/page.aspx?p=31204&cat=1,42207

[PRR]

> when I build my fingers/hands get dried out and peel horribly leaving em nice and raw and tender.
> It's after the whole soldering process that they start peeling.

Some few people are allergic to rosin smoke. Rosin is the usual flux for electronic soldering.

The best advice is to get another job (hobby).

Any comfortable glove should be fine. The stuff is not going to go through any of the usual glove materials.

But I worry, if it hurts your skin so much, what about your lungs? Eye-balls? At least use a GOOD fan.

Non-sterile gloves can also be found at car-parts stores. Maybe not as cheap as Harbor Fright, but handy and probably tough yet somewhat sensitive.

> Isn't acetone the active ingedient in nailpolish remover?

Many of the products are now "acetone free". (I don't know what other horrible solvent they use instead.)

[mistahead]

Like driving, drinking & soldering generally don't mix well...know of a diy'er who almost burned his house down when the soldering iron was left on/unattended/forgotten. good case for weller soldering station...providing the iron is put back in its base.

I am hearing the tone of a person who doesn't agree with drinking at all here  

[PRR]

Safety-sheet for MultiCore activated flux:

http://hybris.cms.henkel.com/henkel/msdspdf?matnr=511511&country=US&language=EN

Note that this covers a 55 gallon drum. Some of these exposures just won't happen building a pedal (you can't spill 50 gallons over yourself when you only have an ounce of flux in a pound of flux-core solder).

Article on rosin allergy:
http://www.dermnet.org.nz/dermatitis/rosin-allergy.html

The allergic reaction to rosin smoke is *rare*. I can believe R.G. has never met a case. I've only known one. It seems that 99+% of people can flux-solder with no more irritation than any other job, and <1% get Very Severe skin reaction which won't get better. (The case I knw was days when rubber gloves were built like rubber boots, and we didn't even consider trying fine-work that way.)

Rosin is: you tap the sap from a pine tree. Boil it. Catch the vapor and condense it, that's Turpentine. Scrape the unboilable scum, that's rosin. Entirely Natural product. But all-natural is not always all-good. Wash your hands in turpentine. Most people will get very raw skin. A sip of turps usually won't kill you (it has been used as "medicine"), but a slug will make you very sick. Rosin smoke tends to be less noxious, but there's all sorts of chemicals in there (nobody knows how many).

[R.G.]

But all-natural is not always all-good.

I nearly always laugh when I hear "all natural" used as an advertising adjective for "really good and safe". The green movement has produced just as many gullible people who'll buy whatever as "all natural" as the chemical industry did for "better living through chemistry" ever did. Probably more.

Mother Nature made Ebola and Marburg viruses. Botulinum toxin and tetanus toxins vie for the title of most acutely deadly substance known. Botulinum toxin is all natural, and you can make it at home by just closing up food to exclude air so the little beasties that make it can get to work. They're most everywhere, waiting. Ricin deserves an all-natural mention. Produced by the castor bean (castor oil, anyone?)

Here's a list with lethal doses:
tetanus;  1 nanogram/kg
botulinal neurotoxin (bacteria); 1 nanogram/kg
shigella (bacteria); 1 nanogram/kg
palytoxin (coral); 60 nanogram/kg
diphtheria (bacteria); 100 nanogram/kg
ricin (from castor beans); 1 microgram/kg
aflatoxins (mold which grows on nuts, legumes, seeds); 1-784 micrograms, depending on type of aflatoxin
shigella (bacteria); 1 microgram/kg
saxitoxin (shellfish); 3-5 micrograms (iv), about 50x higher dose orally
tetrodotoxin (fugu pufferfish); 10 micrograms
diphtheria (bacteria); 1.6 milligram/kg

Notice how many of those are all-natural (Hint: they all are!). Mother Nature has had Her minions involved in an ongoing chemical warfare for several hundred million years, and the winner gets the planet to themselves.

The only incredibly-toxic material I know of that's not found in nature at all is plutonium-239. All Pu239 that we know of has been created by human processes. That includes dioxins, which are formed by low temperature combustion of any organics that have chlorine-containing compounds in them.

It's important to know Mother Nature for what a mother she really is.

[mistahead]

Poison dart frog poison is both synthesised by creatures (the frog by eating insects, that eat a plant, quite complex metabolisms involved) and a naturally occuring substance... NASTY stuff (read how it works on the human body - ow!).

Metal sensitivity needs better than latex, latex has been known to bleed metallics through the gloves - dental profession is one you could look to here, they used mercury in big qty's for years (got any shiny fillings guys?).

Cotton / Nitril combo should help.

[PRR]

What's special about all-natural Pine Trees (and their sap) is that many insects and other organisms avoid them. They taste funny, probably bad, maybe ichy/scratchy. The pine likes these noxious chemicals because it's better (for the pine tree) than the bugs.

Since all life is related (or from the same Designer), it's no surprise that what bothers bugs may bother people. Since we are not that close-kin with bugs, no surprise if it doesn't bother us much. Or if it does. Some random gene-flip that makes no difference in anything *except* pine-sap exposure (which most folks don't do, but electronics solderers do).

[R.G.]

Note that there are some people who can die of anaphylacsis from touching latex. Like these here gloves...

Then there's genetic drift. Plants can't run like animals can. Pesky roots. So they have to resort to chemical means to keep from being eaten. Two-gender reproduction and resorting of genes thereby results in (at least) genetic drift, reinforced by mutation. Any plant that develops nasty tastes, poisons, built-on broken glass (silica deposits), spines, whatever, gets a minor freedom from being eaten that lets it make more plants with its genes. So plants make interesting compounds, and the ones that make the most poisonous compounds, or worst tasting, or that reproduce fastest in whatever the current situations are, wind up taking over because they're eaten less.

For animals, the animals that inactivate the poisons, or sidestep them by not having that metabolic pathway to poison can eat the plants and have more offspring.

Give this process over 3 billion years, and you get some interesting quirks and biochemical sidesteps.

I've often wondered whether the theoretical setup in Jurassic Park is even possible. Given the nano-grams per kg of some proteins that are deadly poisonous now, if you took a T.Rex and fed it a cow - it's possible that the cow's proteins - one of the several billion (?) types in there, would be as poisonous to T.Rex as tetrodotoxin is to us. And vice versa. They were feeding their big vegetarians ferns and bracken. Um... our ferns have had a long, long time to evolve chemical defenses to animals that no longer exist. What if Maidenhair fern is as poisonous to Brontosaurus as botulinum toxin is to us? And I certainly wouldn't want to be the first person to try out a Brontosaurus burger if there are t hings that can kill me in ng/kg doses.

All speculation. As I say, a monstrous mind is a toy forever.

[mistahead]

'raptor prion folding disorder.