Part of my job as a consultant is to help clients establish a “methods & standards” program (aka Time Study) in some of their plants. You wouldn’t believe how many companies don’t use time study in their production plants, then don’t know how to set up the operation when they decide the need it.(Usually it’s an industrial consultant like me who convinces them they should have it).
Anyway, for the next 2 weeks I’ll be in this factory going over records of how many parts are now produces over what period of time, yadda yadda, etc, and training & son on, real exciting stuff, right?:rolleyes:
This plant makes aluminum die casts for farm machinary. There is a lot of steam & water vapor (not smoke) in the air that smells just like the melted aluminum. I’m wondering if breathing this in could be really bad for a guy, especially if he were breathing it in for 20 years. Of all the safety equipment the workers are required to wear, face masks isn’t included. Can anyone provide some info?
Sorry, no real info on this for you… but it is a good question that I’d like to see answered… so back to the top!
BTW: while I was in college, the story going around was that aluminum (inhaled) could cause Altzheimer’s disease… dunno if that is true or not, but it cause me and my budies to switch to copper pipes! Uh… for tobacco, of course…
Astro, copper gives off a few nastys too when heated. When I was a young man and smoked “tobacco”, I always used a nice big red apple. I would dig a little bowl in one end and poke a hole through the apple to it. It had a nice taste and the moist apple stopped any fire and ash from going down my gullet. It could also disappear in one bite if any “non smokers” came to the party.
As a trivia note, the reason Jack Haley plays the tin man in The Wizard of Oz is that Buddy Ebsen (who was hired to do the scarecrow, but persuaded to swap roles by Ray Bolger) got sick from breathing the aluminum in the paint being used to color the costume. Reportedly when Louis B. Mayer heard this, he said “He can’t be sick – that’s pure aluminum!”, which mirrored the belief at the time that aluminum dust was harmless.
I wonder whether the tin-foil helmet people know about this? We need to determine whether breathing through Reynolds Wrap 24/7 generates enough aluminum dust to cause a spontaneous reaction with the electromagnetic waves. Cecil may need to update this column.