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Material Safety Sheets
Wow! My dad used to use Carbon Tetra-chloride on some stuff, and he always said never get it on your skin or breathe it in. (If your wire set for the spark plugs were wet, brush this on the rubber and it drives all of the moisture out! ) Anyway, material safety sheets can have some biased stuff in them, but solvents are tricky, like you said cumulative effects! So gloves, good ventilation, treat as highly flammable are all good ideas. And by biased they err towards caution. The whole "Lead" uproar 20 years ago, caused many manufacturing jobs to flee California. Items like valve guides and rods were made out of a steel with a small lead percentage in it as a natural lubrication and the steel had some types of softness that made the machining / cutting tools last a lot longer. The state came in and demanded the cuttings be treated like hazardous waste, sealed, vacuums air cleaners, etc. It might as well have been radioactive. The manufacturers told the state the lead is part of the steel, bound to the steel and not easily leached out or seperated from the steel and posed no risks. Heck you could eat this steel with out the lead going into into your body's bloodstream. But the state would not budge and all of the manufacturers first tried non leaded steel but the cost and the constant re-tooling made it non viable. So they moved out of state and California lost hundreds of jobs, maybe thousands.
Solvents are described in "Heat" terms sometimes, cool, warm amd hot. It referes not to tempurature BUT to its ability do disolve or unlock chemicals. The example is like putting a variety of solvents in styrofoam coffee cups as you get closer to "hot" the quicker and more completely the cup disolves into the liquid. MEK, Methyl Ethyl Ketone is pretty "hot" in those terms.
Also as they get "Hotter" they tend to evaporate quicker, so in industrail uses they are often used in areas that are refrigerated to cut down on the evaporation. For many welding type jobs the metals must be completely degreased to weld safely, and get a good weld, and these solvents get used in degreasing metal used in manufacturing fighter jets and such.
Iif you use Naptha or others let it dry well and for a lengthy time in a warm dry place so all traces of the solvent disappear.
MEK was a bane for industrial disposal here in California, they did not want it to be stored any wheres once it was used.
+++++++++Pilgrim said:I refer to the safety info on the sheet It appears to be stuff that you should only use when wearing protective hand coverings, and a NIOSH approved respirator for organic solvent vapors. (Of course, you'll see these warnings in relation to just about any petroleum-based solvent, but this is mighty darn volatile stuff.)
Now, over my 55 years I've managed to handle with bare hands just about any solvent that you can name - carbon tet, leaded and unleaded gasoline, mineral spirits, kerosene, rubbing and denatured alcohol, and certainly some I can't remember now. But we're a lot smarter now than we used to be about the cumulative effects of this stuff, and it just pays to be safe with it. And my brain cells may be declining fast enough without my adding more solvent exposure to the equation.
Wow! My dad used to use Carbon Tetra-chloride on some stuff, and he always said never get it on your skin or breathe it in. (If your wire set for the spark plugs were wet, brush this on the rubber and it drives all of the moisture out! ) Anyway, material safety sheets can have some biased stuff in them, but solvents are tricky, like you said cumulative effects! So gloves, good ventilation, treat as highly flammable are all good ideas. And by biased they err towards caution. The whole "Lead" uproar 20 years ago, caused many manufacturing jobs to flee California. Items like valve guides and rods were made out of a steel with a small lead percentage in it as a natural lubrication and the steel had some types of softness that made the machining / cutting tools last a lot longer. The state came in and demanded the cuttings be treated like hazardous waste, sealed, vacuums air cleaners, etc. It might as well have been radioactive. The manufacturers told the state the lead is part of the steel, bound to the steel and not easily leached out or seperated from the steel and posed no risks. Heck you could eat this steel with out the lead going into into your body's bloodstream. But the state would not budge and all of the manufacturers first tried non leaded steel but the cost and the constant re-tooling made it non viable. So they moved out of state and California lost hundreds of jobs, maybe thousands.
Solvents are described in "Heat" terms sometimes, cool, warm amd hot. It referes not to tempurature BUT to its ability do disolve or unlock chemicals. The example is like putting a variety of solvents in styrofoam coffee cups as you get closer to "hot" the quicker and more completely the cup disolves into the liquid. MEK, Methyl Ethyl Ketone is pretty "hot" in those terms.
Also as they get "Hotter" they tend to evaporate quicker, so in industrail uses they are often used in areas that are refrigerated to cut down on the evaporation. For many welding type jobs the metals must be completely degreased to weld safely, and get a good weld, and these solvents get used in degreasing metal used in manufacturing fighter jets and such.
Iif you use Naptha or others let it dry well and for a lengthy time in a warm dry place so all traces of the solvent disappear.
MEK was a bane for industrial disposal here in California, they did not want it to be stored any wheres once it was used.
