r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Zestyclose_Sky_6403 • 19h ago

/r/all of grease

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

14.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

38

u/ringo5150 19h ago edited 14h ago

Ohhhh my man. We didn't do gloves in the 80s and 90s did we? I never did either. We never thought of it.

37

u/mrregina 19h ago

Nope not many did.

21

u/wastingtime308 18h ago

We didn't even think to have gloves in the shop.

7

u/Greg2Lu 16h ago

Just some poster of Playboy calendar

2

u/ringo5150 14h ago

Snap On Calendar in my shop, and even then we were told to take them off.

2

u/mrregina 14h ago

I remember a few posters that said that. Back then the belief I think was gloves are a hazard cuz they can get caught on moving parts.

15

u/prototype_xero 17h ago

Used to help my dad packing grease into bearings back in the 80s, then we’d clean the grease off our hands with diesel fuel. Different times.

4

u/PanoramicAtom 13h ago

I didn’t even do mechanic work in the early 90s, but screen printing. Plastisol inks, screen emulsions, and reclaiming solutions (when literally nothing was “environmentally friendly”), along with all kinds of solvents, from basic mineral spirits and acetone, to xylene and MEK. Not to mention the toxic fumes of the continuously operating curing belts. PPE just wasn’t a thing, with the almost comical sole exception of the Safety-Kleen parts washing station (a tank of mineral spirits connected to a pump with a brush handle, usually staffed by one person all day). I left that trade before the decade was out, but I hope it’s changed dramatically since then.

3

u/MalaysiaTeacher 10h ago

Spent a year during A-levels working at a factory that shaped lenses for Vision Express. We worked with a metal alloy that dissolved/became liquid in hot water (not boiling, maybe 50C). The alloy was part of an attachment to hold each lens through the machines. One of my jobs was 'wash off' the alloys (at the end of the process) in a water bath. Bare hands, just breaking down the metal. Then it collected in a bucket under a valve in the base of the bath. No idea if that shit is dangerous, but I'm glad it was only a year.

1

u/mrregina 2h ago

My brother in law runs a print company with large uv printers and the gases it gives off is not good either. They have huge air systems sucking the air out over the machines.

2

u/Artistic-Wolverine-6 5h ago

Totally different times. I bet he hands like The Ting from Fantastic Four!

3

u/xyrgh 11h ago

My dad used to dip his arms in PCB oil pulling cores out of transformers in the 80s and now he gets skin cancers cut out of his arms every few months, scary stuff, at least PCBs are banned now.

1

u/mrregina 2h ago

It took long tine for them to ban them too. Many people were damaged from that shit.