DIY Fiberdust collector

Let's please try and keep the forums polite. The reported "idiot" insult has been removed from the reported post above. When someone comes to the forum and posts about a mistake they realize they made when they were younger, it doesn't do anyone any good to insult them for it.

Edit: this was posted before seeing your remark above; thanks for clarifying the intent. Still, when he posted that he needs to carry an oxygen bottle now because of his serious health condition, it seems he is already well aware that not subjecting himself to that exposure would have been smarter in hindsight. Let's please try and keep the forums polite and productive and with a bit of care make the same points without insulting anyone. Thanks.

 

Tunnels, your defense of your insensitivity posted above, shows the repeated absurdity of your personal compassion (or lack there of) for others. This is a true tell of what type of person you actually are. Interestedly enough, you can find yourself in situations whereas by no fault or mistake of your own, you still end up getting the fuzzy end of the stick. Naturally, this never happens to you or those you care about, so you feel untitled to insult and degrade others, in a futile effort to make yourself feel better about your unjustifiable, indefensible and insulting positions.

 

I said what I said end of story !! you don't like it I really don't care !! !!

 

Please direct any further insults to some other site and let's please try and get this thread back on track and try and make the same points without insulting anyone. Thanks.

 

I had a lot of respect for you and contributions to the forum but that post was just plain nasty.

 

Calling Jeff an idiot was unnecessary. Every day of his present life he is paying the toll for the errors done in the past. I am pretty sure that, if Jeff could turn back time, he would do many things differently. So no further shooting at him is necessary. Let the man live in peace.

However, I would like to stress out one good thing about tunnel's second post - the call for taking care of personal safety in boat building yards and workshops. We talk about nearly every aspect of boat design and building here, but we have seldom touched the issue of workplace safety. By not talking about it, we are implicitly passing a message to newbies of boat building, (woodworking, laminating etc.) that safety is not a thing to worry about.

Perhaps it would be great if we started a thread dedicated to safety in workshops, where each of you guys could contribute with good advices, or even with eye-opening stories like Jeff's.

Cheers

 

Its happening already !! good thing follow just take a big nudge to get it moving !!

Call it a wrong choice of words if you want !!
I am not heartless at all but far from it !!
I am by nature concerned for the young newbies that appear in our work shops that know nothing of the dangers that lurk for the unsuspecting innocence of not being fore warned when they were employed !! For the love of building boats we will endure great hardships as those that have gone before us have done and will continue to do into the future !!
Its the horrible materials we use and the way we use them that's my major concern .
The dust from Diamond blades and high speed air tools and the universal used by everyone every where I've ever been in my travels ,the 4 inch hand held grinder that's a lethal little killer in sheep's clothing !!
If only the grinder manufactures would make a small hand held grinder with a very efficient dust sucker upper that could pipe away all the dust to be disposed of effectively and safely !!
Asbestos used to be the major killer and as we change to other materials so we need to be aware of the hazards of all the other materials we use , not just a few .
I have learned a long time ago spraying catalysed resin with a saturator gun for hours during a day and going home with my hair that felt like I had a hard hat on my head and showering 2 or 3 times with really hot water to get the muck out !!
Later we had health a safely nurses that came to our workshops and stuck little pads on use including our noses to monitor the amount of fall out that we were exposed to during a average work day !!
I was amazed and made my choices there and then to cover up ,wear ear muffs and a 3m respirator with double filters and a cloth covering on my head made from cheese cloth , I had to wear glasses to work so I bought big ones that cover not only my eyes but a fair amount around them ! Then I realised the plastic frames dissolves and softened because of the styrene fumes and wow that what is settling on my face and eyes the wearing of Surgical gloves became second nature and felt naked unless I worn them . I learned also to spray on a angle so the over spray would be blown away from the guys I worked along side !! all these things I worked at alone and I had a following where ever in the factory I worked and the other gun operators could never get it into there thick heads why no one wanted to work with them !!because they were shown many times and told why but wouldn't listen or accept !! I always had to work with 2 teams of laminators between 2 different jobs all the time and became quite used to it as did the guys !!.
Then I went to another company and learned to use a chopper gun so not only resin and catalyst but glass roving and all the ever so fine glass filaments of glass like a glittering dust storm right from the cheeses of roving on the scales all way along the boom loops to the end where the glass was resin saturated and blown onto the surface .
Watching some one spraying in the afternoon sun was a real eye opener and yet more life learning experience I will never forget, again lessons learned and so always the crews I had were made to dress and wear there protective armour as I did !!.
I have seen and done and worked for hours and hours in factories holding and using all and every piece of equipment that gets used . I will still do those jobs even today with a big but attached to it !! I dress and protect myself and if other are close by without protection they are told to leave and not come near till the job is finished !! Will never ask anyone to do any job I will not do myself !!
How many of you do gooder bosses will do that ??
Spraying gel coat is another hazardess job and lots over spray regardless of what equipment is used , but with care and attention to the operation of the equipment and pressure settings it can be minimised to a great extent .
I worked with a very skilled glass man and he died at 46 years of age because he never worn any mask ever when he worked he taught me all there was to spraying gel coats and 2 pot reaction paints ! but it cost him dearly eventually !!
Heartless!! no I am not !! how often do you show and make sure the people you work with are safe doing there jobs ?? do you write the date on your respirator cartridges and make sure others do the same and check that there use by date is not exceeded !!

 

I see young guys at the shipyard do stupid things all the time...even when proper safety equipment is available. You just cant follow them around all day telling them to wear a respirator, clean your hands, use a dust shield....

When the cats away the mice will play.

One way to straighten up a young guy is to make him have a blood test every quarter. The test picks up all the toxins and the doctor tells him hes gonna die if he doesnt clean up his act

 

Its always done as a teaching add ! dont try to hide things !!

Now days i have something that tells no lies !! Its a pocket sized digital camera with a powerful zoom and takes pictures as well as video .
Take video and pictures first then ask questions later !! had some very red faces after totally denying they had any thing to do with the problem created and then show the video or the pictures !!.
Same with any potential glass problems after they been working I do a walk around while guys are at tea break of lunch and also after work ! that camera doesn't lie and is amazing what you can make a simple glass problem look like when you computer enhance and get up close and very personal with a zoom or macro !!

Simple to remember!! the problems you cover up today could be the repairs or law suits of tomorrow !!
Poor Workmanship is possibly the biggest single problem with glassing !! followed closely by bad choice and use of materials used !!

 

Thats Ok if you do factory work and set the rules for your men, but so much of the Marine industry are Free Range repairs.

Unknowns.

The guys that I see who are taking a real beating are the steel scaffolding men. Huge enclosures on Mega Yachts.

When they install them , the gear is clean...4 months later when they disassemble the tent and steel work every square centimeter of plastic, scaffold boards, steel is contaminated with toxic waste.

These guys have a hard time protecting themselves.

 

your heart is in the right place, what you said came out harsh that's all. I have been guilty of the same thing plenty of times.

 

I see GrtHammerHd was last here three days before I posted, so my warning hasn't been heard by him. As for the controversy, I'd never worked in an industry that made fine dust, though I knew from general reading it was bad for your lungs. If I knew then what I know now,,,,,,I'd have been gone after a couple of days.

The hull laminating foreman was sloppy and lazy. He made the cloth easy to roll out by wetting it down too much, and the best time to trim the "leather hard" cloth during the cure was when he took his crew out on break. I was on the crew that fitted the inner liner into the hull and foamed them into a one piece unit.

The few months of experience I had with fiberglass boat building was at a safely run plant that had other problems. Unemployment was high, the pay was good and the commute short so I tried the proper channels to get management to lean on the forman to send my work station good product. At one stage he left a man back from break till the leather hard period came to cleanly easily cut the excess off the mold, but after a couple of days he refused to divide his crew at break time and I had to go back to using a diamond saw to cut the excess cloth off the mold. The razor edges gave us cuts if we just left it.

Further talk with everyone showed my area was always going to be covered in dust so I gave notice and quit. They had two proper grinding rooms but taking the mold out of the building and bringing it back set the flow of the line back over an hour. Everybody with more experience in boatbuilding was saying it's no big deal, and it took four months for the quiet little voice in the back of my head to convince me to give up the paycheck and by then the damage was done.

(Edit)I'll add that what I knew about lung damaging problems was smoking several packs a day might cause cancer 30yrs down the road and Black Lung desease hit coal miners after twenty years in the mines. I think part of my warning should be that just 4 months of severe exposure to fiberglass dust lead to my problems. My total time in fiberglass boat building is a year spent at two different companies.(>edit)

I didn't have the internet to get me info on the dangers, and hearing that little voice come in and say the OP was making the same mistake I did is why I posted. Being so short of breath I need the O2 is no fun at all. Tunnels needs a few lessons in tact, but his message amounts to the same as mine: "That dust is deadly, slow but deadly!"

Hopefully some lurkers that need the warning will see the title of the thread and take heed of the warnings.

 

If saying what i said wakes up a few dormant braincells i would do it all over again!

Tact is ok and has its place !, but when you have to say what you have to say it gets in the way and no one really takes any notice!.
Look how many people have replied already and I wasn't even really trying !!
But I will ask what are you going to do about your workplace situation ??? All supervisors and most bosses want dragging out of there cosy offices and made to stand and be amongst the crap they expect there people to work in day after day !!
I am a little unique and have my feet in both Camps management /supervisor plus teacher / hands on worker !!

 

As I said, if I knew then what I know now,,,,,,.

As soon as I started getting resistance from management I should have dropped the dime on them to OSHA and whatever florida's worker safety department might be. Thats what I would recommend today to anybody caught in the trap I was in. But I was more ignorant 15 years ago and in fact, it didn't occur to me until I was diagnosed last year. I don't think the OP has any of those agencies to go to.

I still vote for tact. Once you piss people off they tend to resist your proposals just cause they dislike you. Pissing people off is a falback tactic for me, used only if all else fails.

 

Solve one problem and end up with another !!

One of the biggest things to me is Knowing what the materials are that we have to work with !! everything is dangerous even crossing the road in busy traffic But you have a choice to step out in front of that fast moving bus or wait till its gone past .
So what about the work place ?? you have a choice put up with it !! or do something about it !! you make up you own minds !! but don't leave it to late and tomorrow is to late its not only breathing the crap its touching and being exposed as well .
One company we laid woven roving soaked in resin with our bare hands and our fingers acted like squeegees to push the glass into strakes and corners etc !! Later we used surgical gloves!! , so there's skin absorbs-ion to consider and you face is very sensitive and you eyes have a direct path way to your throat and flush all the stuff straight inside !!.
Resin infusion is a very large step in the right direction but there still the fine glass filaments that float in the air when you are handling the rolls and lengths of glass cloths when fitting to what ever job you doing and laying the glass in place !!