Just wondering do any of you take precautions when handling lead castings, i.e. Neal’s N Gauging or Stewart Products or Railway Express Miniatures. I know GHQ and some others use Brittania Pewter, I’ve read, wash hands after handling, wash face and DO NOT EAT or DRINK after handling. Any ideas?
What is common practice, or am I just worrying too much?
Hello Rudywa,
You should be worrying,lead is pretty nasty stuff. I would use latex gloves when handling lead products,just in case. If you grind figures or shape them using a dremel or other tool, be sure to wear the correct face mask for this task.A particle mask should do the trick. After wearing latex gloves I would still wash my hands just to be sure.
Patrick
Beaufort,SC
Dragon River Steel Corp {DRSC}
My answer here is that if you feel uncomfortable in handling lead anything, by all means wash up afterwards, wear rubber surgical gloves, what ever. On the other hand, years ago before all the hype about lead and other chemicals, we melted lead from old batteries and made sinkers for fishing, slugs for shot gun hunting, and even Monopoly games had lead pieces in them, and a lot of toys were made of lead. We never used any special precautions then and we all made it so far and that was 55 years ago. Now, after saying this, I do not advocate not takeing precautions, as we didn’t know better back then. Anyone old enough here to remember dipping dimes in mercury to make them shinny? It’s kind of like smokeing while filling a gas tank. Nothing may happen, but then why chance it? Ken
My understanding is that you should simply wash your hands well after handling lead.
I captured a set of old mercury vapor lamps from an old high rise we were remodeling back in the early 1980’s, complete with a quantity of liquid mercury. On arrival at my folks house, where I was living at the time, my dad, a retired PhD chemist with about 40 US patents to his name captured them from me and to this day will not let me have them back. I’m bigger than he is, and I could liberate them easily, but I respect his judgement.
Mercury is nasty stuff, and my dad is a careful guy.
On the other hand, he gives me lead ingots whenever I ask for them. He says lead has to be ingested to be dangerous. He says lead make a very poor dust or aerosol, and it requires effort to breath in enough to cause a person harm. He does recommend that I wash my hands after working with it, and that I refrain from eating or smoking while working with it, but he is otherwise pretty blase about lead toxicity. He says most of the problems come from people eating lead, like children gnawing on wood covered with lead based paint.
I’ve asked him about this several times, just to be sure, and my overall take on the matter is that if you keep it away from your mouth, you’re reasonably safe.
I been handlin’ lead for years and I haven’t died of lead poisoning yet.I do throughly wash my hands with soap and water after I finish working with lead.
However,if you are that concerned then use plastic gloves and a respirator.
i wear the throw away latex gloves anytime i use something toxic, paint remover, some paints, lead ect.good to be safe and it helps with cleanup too.
I’ve been handling lead with no protection of any sort for nearly 60 years. Now I do notice myself drooling a bit lately, drifting off to sleep when I should be awake (and vice versa), and can’t seem to remember anything but that’s more likely a result of my age … which I can’t remember. [:P]
But seriously, I handle lead sheet frequently to replace or add to the steel weights in many freight cars. I have started wearing latex gloves (they’re less than a nickel each) and I wash my hands well after handling lead. The latex gloves are probably unnecessary but they impress my grandsons and make my wife and daughter feel better.
Chuck
Unless you are licking the lead castings on a regular basis I wouldn’t worry about any health effects from handling them. I have been casting lead bullets for 25 years mostly from wheel weights. Which require them to be melted down to remove the steel clips,trash,oil, and dirt in a seperate melting pot before the lead can be put in another melting pot to cast the bullets. This first melting to clean up the wheel weight lead puts off a lot of smoke and lead fumes. Then handling each bullet to lubricate it before it could be used to reload ammo.
In the mid 90’s a couple friends and myself would get togeather on a Saturday afternoon every couple of months and cast several thousand bullets. During this time several readers wrote letters to gun magazines about the health dangers of handling lead. So having read these letters I became concerned about elevated lead levels in my body due to the amount of lead bullets I was casting/handling. So I had a blood test done to check the lead levels in my body. Which my doctor said was a waste of $40 as I showed no signs of lead posioning. Well I insisted on the test and of course it showed that I had no more lead in my body than the normal back ground amount. My doctor said that as long as I avoided breathing the fumes,didn’t eat any of the bullets,and washed my hands when I finished handling them that it would be all the precautions I needed to take to insure that lead levels in my body didn’t become elevated.
Common sense prevails…its not anymore dangerous than those petroleum based paints you are using…
1: Don’t snort the lead fumes when melting, or the shavings when filing.
2: Kindly refrain from tasting and ingesting the lead.
3: Clean your hands with your scrubby and wash your face after handling and working with lead with running water and this stuff called soap (I don’t suggest eating or sniffing the soap either).
Wait a second – all the above applies to doing anything in the workshop…so… Do that and you should be fine…all this stuff about lead being dangerous and putting on a hazmat suit to work with lead is over-kill…
I handle lead in various forms on a regular basis and have no trouble or poisoning or problems…don’t do anything stupid with it and odds are in your favor that you’ll be fine, unless you unknowingly find a way to get enough inside you to cause a problem!
I used to participate in pistol competition and have my own shooting range (oh! the joys of living in Idaho) which I use as a mine for MRR wieghts. I used to cast my own bullets until I decided it was more trouble than it was worth. I use sheet lead for some wieghting applications. I process salvaged bullets by melting them down in my paint shop and casting ingots for future use. The only precautions I use are to keep the ventilator fan going and dedicating a small cast iron frying pan for lead melting (to avoid unadvertently using it in food preparation) This Chicken Little panicking at the first claim from some crisis monger (of which there are legions) is leading to the wussification of America.
Apropos of which is the TV commercial with a senior citizen and his (?) grandson riding scooters (the kind you put one foot on and propel with the other foot) while wearing helmets!
I have been a plumber for years, we used to melt lead pucks to fill in hub joints on cast iron pipe. We never thought of any health problems. However the companies I deal with now for model railroad details and castings claim to be lead free! You may want to look for those.
David
I think working with AC glues are more dangerous.[2c]
Ain’t it the truth!
I hope everyone has bought MIG welders, because the lawyers are ramping up for a lawsuit blitz against stick welders.
Greg, Rockaway, NJ ( the slip and fall lawyer state)
I’ve been handling lead for nearly 60 years and have never had any adverse side effects from so doing. As long as you clean your hands and don’t put it into your mouth, lead is not as dangerous as the EPA naysayers would like us to believe. The same applies to asbestos and creosote. I’ve handled both and so did my father – he worked with all three as a contractor.