Alright we’ve got the wheels off and I just wanted to show you that this grime on my dirty hands is just road dust from the tires. So it’s not really a big deal .
I wanted to point out that in my grandfathers’ day. It was normal for men to just roll up their sleeves and be black up to the elbows. And not really give much concern to the grease and the grime that they were getting on their hands.
And just some guys wouldn’t even wash properly when they had their lunch. They’d get it on their sandwiches and wonder why they got stomach aches later. Fact is we now know that it’s carcinogenic. That brake dust has asbestos in it and is carcinogenic. Also any burnt hydrocarbons are carcinogenic and you’ll find that in used motor oils… exhaust.
Anyways, so nowadays we use nitrile gloves. They provide a barrier between you and all those horrible carcinogenics and mutogenics that you deal with everyday.
OK now I know what you’re thinking, alright. They’re uncomfortable, they cut down on your manual dexterity for sure. They make you less sensitive. When it’s warm out they make your hands sweat and the sweat pools up inside. They fill with sweat and when you reach over your head… The sweat runs down your arm or worse into your face or something. Yeah, they’re kind of [Laughs] they’re a drag to wear for sure. Trust me, I know.
But at the end of the day when you see all the stuff that you didn’t come in contact with. That isn’t on your hands. That isn’t being absorbed into your blood system through the skin on your hands. Yeah, look at the difference — then you start to think that well, maybe it’s worth it.
On the bright side you know you can wear them under a suede palm glove out in the cold. Even when the suede palm glove gets soaking wet your hand will still be nice and dry inside.
You know. I’ve honestly gotten up to three and four days out of a pair of gloves. And I’ve gotten only three or four minutes out of a pair of gloves. By the same brand out of the same box.
So you just don’t know what you’re going to get. But if you want to reuse them. You know if you’re just going on a short break. Or something and you want to reuse them you can turn them back right side ways. Blow them out like that and they’re ready to slip back on for reuse. So you can get extra life out of a pair and really get your money’s worth. And you know do the environment a favour too by not just throwing them away needlessly.
At the end of the day it’s really impressive to see how much stuff. And this is of course just from a few minutes of fiddling around under the hood. How much horrible, nasty stuff you’ve avoided coming in contact with. And avoided absorbing through your skin and through the tender skin in around your fingernails. You generally get them for anywhere between say twelve and eighteen dollars Canadian. So you buy them in a box of a hundred, that’s fifty pairs. I pay about you know, twelve, thirteen dollars. So call it twelve fifty times fifty pairs that’s twenty five cents a pair.
Now, you invest all kinds of money into going to work. You’re buying tools. You have to pay for gas to get to work or the bus perhaps. You’ve got to buy your lunch of bring one along. You have to buy appropriate foot-wear, you have to invest in training, in books and tools. So there are all these investments you’ve got to make in going to work anyway. It’s not much money. If you’ll buy gloves to keep your hands warm at work… Why not buy gloves to keep your hands clean at work?
Think about how beneficial this could be to your health down the road. Through prevention of problems like skin cancer. By avoiding absorbing all these carcinogens into your skin through your cuticles, under your nails.
This is a very, very small investment in something that can have a profound effect on your health down the road. Through prevention. Well, son of a gun. I thought it came in a box of a hundred but here it says in the corner “box of ninety”. So they’re a little bit more expensive, say they’re thirty cents for a pair, But it’s still a good bargain.
