Wood Toxicity & PARTICULATE Size

[stubhead]

I posted this as an answer to another thread, and then thought maybe I should holler it from the ramparts too - it does sort of matter -

Wood dust is a rapidly increasing cause of disability, COPD, death... But, it's not so much the poison-ness* of specific woods, as it is the size of the particles. And that, in turn, is a result of modern science.... if you looked around a cabinet shop or guitar luthier or custom woodworker of any sort 100 years ago, even 50 years ago, even 25 (?) -  you would see a WHOLE BUNCH of chisels, spokeshaves, knives and adzes and saws and such - sandpaper was the very last thing only. However, because of advances in making and sizing particulates, and even more so, better glue - everybody's sanding off what they used to slice. And, it turns out that "black lung disease" and "asbestosis" and such have little to do with coal or asbestos being bad for you - it's the size of the particle that matters.

That ultra-fine dust you see gathered on your drill press or work table - hey, no problem! Snort it up, your lungs will mucus it up and eject it. BUT THERE'S A FINER DUST YOU CAN'T EVEN SEE - it's floating in the air. And when it gets in your lungs - doesn't matter if it's wood, coal, asbestos, fiberglass - your lungs will "encapsulate" it, but it won't cough out. On some woodworking site, I read that 25% of all woodworking professionals are now "retiring" due to disability? And this is all just coming up NOW, because of the wholesale move away from carving wood to sanding it down. The more responsible shops are treating this with utmost seriousness, if you look through your tool catalogs at all the vacuum apparatus, that's what they're doing.

NOW THAT YOU'RE ALL TERRIFIED:

Personally, I don't think that banging out a guitar every once in a while can hurt you, you could probably snort up all your wood dust intentionally if you're doing even a few guitars a month - it's the big guys, day-in, day-out sucking it up for 40 hours a week that are kaaking, and there are going to be a LOT of third-worlders dying from this for sure because they don't have ANY protection (and they work 400 hours a week). It's all a matter of degree. I think wiping off a sanding project with a damp towel every once in a while is probably a good idea, but the only thing WE have to fear is fear itself. If I WORKED at Warmoth, I would be careful, that's all. As they are - they won't even fiddle with cocobolo.

And the "toxic" woods really do behave as any allergen, the trick with them is that you never, ever had any likelihood of developing a resistance to them, UNLESS you grew up in a South American jungle and chewed on a lot of bark. In which case you're a scary person, and I don't even want to know.



*(F U, spell check) :icon_scratch:

 

[The Hun]

Wow, scary stuff!

I'm willing to bet the situation is made worse by hiring guys off the street and not training them. I've seen a lot of this lately and people are gonna get hurt.

Nobody wants to train anybody anymore, but issues like this one aren't common sense. If nobody tells you, how are you supposed to know?

I know diddly squat about wood, and am very grateful for this forum to learn about issues like this one before causing a serious problem.

 

[stratamania]

Here's a bit more information here. It's from the Health and Safety Executive in the UK.

http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/wis14.pdf

Protecting your lungs is a good idea.

Good thread StübHead

 

[ihavenothingprofoundtosay]

And the "toxic" woods really do behave as any allergen, the trick with them is that you never, ever had any likelihood of developing a resistance to them, UNLESS you grew up in a South American jungle and chewed on a lot of bark. In which case you're a scary person, and I don't even want to know.

Wow... there's something that could give even Stub nightmares!  :icon_biggrin:

Big +1 to all that, though: when I did my purpleheart beast, I did lots of orbital sanding w/60 grit pads because it was so damn hard.  The few times I didn't use a mask and/or leaned over it the wrong way & caught the stream of particles had me strangely wanting to cough.  Like, the particles were in my throat, but the cough instinct was kinda frozen & my mouth was really dry.  Gargle & spit w/hose water & I was fine, but I'll be a lot more careful in the future.

 

[greywolf]

The majority of exotic woods have toxic byproducts , most are skin irritants and many lung irritants .  I always wear a NIOSH mask when working in the shop and try to stay covered up as much as possible .    http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/wood-allergies-and-toxicity/ has a good reference among others

 

[stubhead]

Remember the SARS virus? And all those images of continental and Hong Kong and other island-dwelling oriental people, wearing paper masks? And a huge reason for the spread being, that virus was sized way below any particle that's filtered by a mask. But the masks make people feel safe. In the same way, you can wear a mask in a woodshop that will take out particles larger than 0.5-0.8 microns - and when you take it off and look at it, it will be covered with dust and you'll think, "Well I'm glad I didn't breathe all that!" But of course, its the stuff under 0.3 microns that's harder to flush, and unfortunately, a passive filtration system with holes smaller than that is going to get pretty hard to breathe through.

It's a real double-edged sword here. There's no doubt that a lot of beautiful woods that can be worked and finished with abrasives are more difficult or even impossible to work with edged tools. The eyes pop right out of birdseye maple, the different densities and cell structure of the streaks and grain in something like snakewood gave it a reputation as being terrible for guitars - but now, thanks to abrasives and some stabilizers like epoxy, you "can" get snakewood fingerboards that look and work great. But a reason so many of these tropical hardwoods even exist is because they're the ones that developed some internal chemistry that includes potent natural insecticides - how many other organic materials can exist for 100, 200, 300 years with all the little bugs that live in a tropical rain forest attempting to chew them up? 

This, by the way, is the biggest reasonable argument against genetically-engineered food. It's not the destruction of diverse strains, which in theory makes an entire species more vulnerable. In fact, on that aspect, having a laboratory able to tweak out a half-dozen different strains within a dozen reproductive cycles ought to be great news. The problem is that the very first modification that can save growers lots of money is to install some "natural" genetic insecticides within each plant. And how well does the human digestive tract deal with insecticides it's never, ever encountered in all of history, because they've never existed until now, and what's the long term effect of eating these insecticides, and what's the largest amount that's "safe" to eat? Well, we'll be finding out soon, won't we?  :evil4:

Again, I think on this forum, probably 95% of us have a lack of work load that will keep us 95% safe; unfortunately, it's the people who get better and better at it and begin to see a bit of profit in it that have the best reason to be cautious, and unfortunately, in paging through the catalogs it's obvious that vacuum hoses and filtration units just aren't SEXY in the same way that a planer or jointer or, especially, a hot young CNC rig are. Even the retailers who know better never show their Dadly-looking models all masked-up and armored against their svelte new CNC router, full facial nudity is still the norm at Grizzly & Rockler. :laughing3:
NObody wants to wear a chastity belt on their HEAD.... :sad1:

 

[SkuttleFunk]

want to dig deeper on wood dust, how bad it is, and how poorly 'hobby grade' filtration systems work, check out Bill Pentz's page

http://billpentz.com/woodworking/cyclone/index.cfm

As a result, when we vent almost all dust collection equipment inside we create a bad false sense of security where we get clean looking shops that particle meters show carry dangerously unhealthy invisible dust levels.

has me rethinking my shop's dust collection strategies

 

[swarfrat]

Ironically, the cyclone only gets the big stuff. It's a handy contraption for keeping heavy sawdust out of the filters. But..

Hot tip for decent dust collection on the cheap. Your average box fan is 20"x20", which is a standard furnace filter size. Furnace filters are available in HEPA particle sizes down to mold spore sizes.  You still want a cyclone on your dust collector if you have one. But a decent furnace filter higher than the "dust grade" cheapest level, on a box fan will turn over the air in your shop pretty quickly for not a lot of money.

Just consider this a separate task from keeping the shop tidy.

 

[Cagey]

What I've done in my shops has been to exhaust the intake. Costs you heating and A/C, but you end up with relatively clean air.

To be perfectly honest, I usually only did that when I was really loading the air up. Routers, belt sanders, drum sanders, planers and the like, or a lotta chemicals like you'd get from painting.

 

[stubhead]

Cagey, you & Skuttlefunk & Orpheo are the exact guys that need to be more careful because you are getting better & better at it. ALTHOUGH - age does have something to do with it. I mean you don't want to taunt the gods*, but if there's a cancer with an average 20-year gestation period and you're 60 years old, well, hell -
bombs away!

The only reason it's blowing up now is because it was 15, 20 years ago that the economics dictated the massive shift to sanding, replacing a lot of the cutting and semi-skilled carving technique. ANY monkey can run a belt sander. And the outside venting does essentially CURE the thing immediately, as long as you're not venting it right into Junior's nursery window or something. But the stuff that's spooky is NOT the poisonous wood, it's the everyday, plain old wood that doesn't cause any overt symptoms that'll get ya. Here's kind of a neat chart to feed the noids:

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/particle-sizes-d_934.html

Notice that they list sawdust as being 30-600 microns - No Problem! But that's SAW-dust, what comes from cutting wood with metal teeth. Sanding dust will go all the way down to... zilch, and that's the bad stuff. I dunno, the world is what it is... scientists have taken blood samples from... Fiji islanders and remote New Guinean "stone age" tribes (no shirt, shetlock), and found like 40 foreign contaminants, estrogen, mercury, lead, and byproducts of industrial production that you would think couldn't possibly get "all the way out there" - think again. They found pretty much everything they had a test for. Us industrialized folks have got dozens and dozens of contaminants in our blood that simply never existed in nature till we went all mad-scientist in the 20th century. And there's no way to establish a "safe" dosage for benzofluxtinantionary zublufionastemtian, unless and until it specifically starts croaking people.

But... but... but... if you ever feel the need for some hate, go find a liberal hippie chick and start explaining that she (and we) owe our very existence to DDT and other horrible insecticides, because the great economic flourishing of America in the 20th century just could not have happened if we hadn't have had such a huge drop in the price of food production that the expense of food, in proportion to income, became almost laughable. For US first-worlders only. That measurement peaked sometime in the mid-1970's, when it was calculated that the amount of income Americans would have put towards a bare-bones survival diet was equivalent to  - 17 minutes of work a day. Meanwhile, all over the globe plenty of people spend all day trying to get enough food to survive on, and it's thought that somewhere over half of the 65 billion people before us died from starvation, or malnutrition-"enhanced" diseases, or from fighting for dominance (i.e. MY food now! Nyah, nyah) or from migrating all the hell all over the place in search of... food. Can you imaging actually migrating from Russia to Alaska - because you were chasing some friggin' wooly mammoths?

"Uh, no thanks, Ogg! I'm just gonna stay in and order a pizza..."

*(DO as I say, not as I do.... :laughing3

 

[Cagey]

Notice that they list sawdust as being 30-600 microns - No Problem! But that's SAW-dust, what comes from cutting wood with metal teeth. Sanding dust will go all the way down to... zilch, and that's the bad stuff. I dunno, the world is what it is... scientists have taken blood samples from... Fiji islanders and remote New Guinean "stone age" tribes (no shirt, shetlock), and found like 40 foreign contaminants, estrogen, mercury, lead, and byproducts of industrial production that you would think couldn't possibly get "all the way out there" - think again. They found pretty much everything they had a test for. Us industrialized folks have got dozens and dozens of contaminants in our blood that simply never existed in nature till we went all mad-scientist in the 20th century. And there's no way to establish a "safe" dosage for benzofluxtinantionary zublufionastemtian, unless and until it specifically starts croaking people.

Essentially what you're saying here is there's no escape. So... whaddaya gonna do? You do your best and caulk the rest.

Staying out of harm's way is nearly impossible. No matter how good a driver you are, some dimwit is going to break some rule or another and T-bone you at an intersection while you wait to turn like a Good Boy. A bullet will come zinging through the wall when the muscle-shirted sweathog next door decides he's had enough of his raging shrew of a wife and make its way through your temporal lobe before it lodges in the kitchen cabinets.

Now, you could stop driving or living around other people, but that's hardly practical. So, you do your best to mitigate the undesirable side effects of such behavior and call it good. We're all gonna die.

 

[Re-Pete]

I probably inhaled more than enough asbestos than the average folks, when I was a kid holding the sheets of fibro for my Dad when he sawed them. So far, my lungs are clear & Dad lived to 61, being a carpenter cutting and fitting fibro all day. BTW, he died of heart failure/high blood pressure. That was the way things were done in those times.

However, if I was to make guitar building a job, I'd seriously look into the OH&S concerns with the materials used. Exhaust methods, ventilation, filtering etc. would have to be addressed.

In regards to Stub's comment about SARS, wait until Ebola hits some major city outside of Africa (where Ebola is currently jumping borders and towns).... SARS will seem like a sniffle. :help: