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Old 2009-05-21, 9:12am
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Sue in Maine Sue in Maine is offline
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Join Date: Jun 14, 2005
Location: The Rocky Coast State!
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Cool to know tumbling can work too. Thanks!

And I'm doing a lot of copy/paste today but want to add this here cuz it's related to keys. My question is do we have any metal fumes to worry about with putting beads on keys. I posted in both the safety forum and the potty (cuz it gets a lot of traffic in there). The link below is to the safety forum. The "quote" below that is NMLinda's reply in the bathroom. I don't want her post to be lost at midnight so... copy/paste. The dinosaur can learn!

Sue

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I posted a question in the safety forum on keys and fumes from keys. Dale replied and I'm posting the link here.

http://www.lampworketc.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=130099

I also posted the same question in the bathroom cuz it gets a lot of traffic and NMLinda posted a reply that I'm doing a copy/paste of because it's important information.

Sue
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Hi Sue - I saw your thread in Safety, as did Dale. For the benefit of folks here, he pointed out that the keys you are using could be coated with such common metals as zinc, nickle and chromium, zinc being fairly bad stuff. Because I was interested in your question, I looked up chromium - always thought of it as being pretty inert, and was surprised to find that the fumes have a toxicity level that also needs to be considered. If you are using brass keys, you'll probably want to look up the constituents - brass is an alloy of copper, zinc and other traces (like lead). Copper, like zinc, can also have toxicity levels that can be serious to lampworkers (I credit Amy Oulette for sharing her experiences on health concerns with copper inclusions in her work). In heating the metal, it may no longer keep the inert chemical composition it has at room temperature.

In working with keys, you're heating up a larger mass of metal than is typical for most lampworking, so you would be releasing more fumes of the constituent metals than is typical. I'm no expert in how much exposure is safe vs not - you'll want to do your own research - but in addition to understanding the health risks, I would research how workers in industries that use these materials at very high temperatures protect themselves. You might gain some insights as to whether your ventilation system is good enough for what you're doing, if you need to beef it up - or, even if it's great, do you also need to wear a very good fume-filtering face mask.

Great question, by the way. It's so easy to pick up common or found items that are perfectly safe at room temperature and forget to consider what happens at high temperatures.

Linda
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