Monday, October 21, 2013

A Brief Look At Work Gloves

By Elena McDowell


No matter what profession you might find yourself in, there will often come a time when you are required to wear some form of personal protective equipment on your hands. These work gloves can be found in almost any profession that you care to name, but are often worn for completely different reasons. The overall purpose, to protect the wearer does remain the same though.

As an example think about those in the medical professions. Many will have seen surgeons, physicians and dentists all wearing those latex ones. They are there to prevent contamination between patient and doctor, and serve to illustrate this idea of personal protection. These are providing protection, but due to the material thickness, no sensation of touch is lost.

Although they are not so common now, but they can still be found, there are the old fashioned butchers. They spend their days cutting up meat with a variety of sharp knives and cleavers. To protect their hands and fingers while doing this, they will often wear a covering made from what looks like old fashioned chain mail.

Also consider the refrigeration units where the meat carcases are stored. The sides of meat where often hung up on big hooks. To prevent the butcher losing his feeling in his fingers, and so possibly his grip lifting the sides of meat down, other safety hand coverings would be worn.

The military are not exempt from these requirements either. With them so much depends on where they will be operating and what their intended tasks are. So imagine a winter's exercise inside the Arctic Circle, and it involves working on modern aircraft. In just one day a variety of different challenges will be faced.

In those areas the weather can be brutally cold, and any area of exposed skin can soon suffer. Modern aircraft have metal surfaces, and an unprotected hand can soon stick to the metal once the temperature dips below a certain level. Therefore hand protection has to be worn, but it can't be too bulky otherwise some jobs would be impossible.

Sometimes these also come with small rubber blisters on the palms and the fingers. This enables tools and things to be held without the danger of them being dropped into deep snow. Also thanks to these blisters a level of control is also maintained.

Even such routine operations involving fuels and oils take on a new challenge. At those temperatures even a small splash of fuel onto the back of the hand can cause a cold burn. There has to be a separate pair of hand coverings, which are fluid safe, which are used at these times. Even generally moving about throughout the day requires the hands, and everything else, to be kept covered.

So the requirements for work gloves are many and varied, and much depends upon who will be wearing them. Too thin and they might not provide the required level of protection. Too thick and the wearer might not have the degree of touch which they would wish for. Also if they are made from the wrong material then they will not be suitable for the purpose.




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