Treted Pine - ACA ACQ and CCA sawdust

[soundman]

As usual BOBL turns a relativly simple question into a long winded spiel on the Evils of "invisable dust" and other solutions that are way beyond most home workers.

The original question was about treated timber.

By far the best solution to the hazards of chemically treated timber is to not use it at all.

If you must use it, avoid working with it in ways that produce fine dust...and definitely avoid sanding the stuff.

In many situations the use of treated timber is pointless and superfluous.

Afterall the only reason we use treated pine at all is because it is cheaper than good weather durable timber.

In pine the various treatments penetrate quite some way into the timber..there are some that claim all the way to the core..but in practice that is not the case.

In hardwood, the treatment barely penetrates the surface.

SO as soon as you cut or machine treated timber, you need to retreat the cut portion to maintain effectivness.

so use of treated timber for turned or machined work is not a very good choice.

If you are dead set on a treated timber end product, the best way to do it is to machine and finish sand the item THEN treat it.

In manufacturing that is easy enough..the items are machined and put thru the treating process like all the other treated timber.

For us mere mortals, we can not use the same process, but there are similar but not the same products that we can use like "Selleys combat green" ( if it still exists).

Unless these finials are to be fitted and left unpainted, by far the best treatment is good old fashon paint and plenty of it.

Chemical treatment will not prevent splitting,cracking and being weather effected......but good old paint will.

All even better if you start with a weather durable timber rather than the pithy rubbish that they sell as treated pine.

cheers

[doug3030]

A more community wide example of use of PPE is mains electricity. instead of having some laws that govern who can install electrical connections (oh the expense!), covering conductors with insulation (more expense), suspending conductors from high poles or putting them underground (even more expense), we could just lay them uninsulated on the footpath and tell everyone to wear gloves and boots and allow anyone to connect into the line with a couple of battery clamps.

Wont they earth out?

[Mobyturns]

This sort of thing worries me a bit because this line of thinking leads to many more injuries and deaths than are needed. The first thing wood workers should do when they think about taking on something new (ie buying that big router) is take a coffee break and think about what they are going to do and apply the hierarchy of control. .....

Bob,

I did say originally that PPE must be used in conjunction with other high order controls.

Yes, the heirarchy of controls are proven to work in industry when it isn't a mindless tick and flick paperwork exercise. It will work in recreational pursuits if it is a genuine attempt to reduce risk and if people have the knowledge, means and resources to implement them. Very few hobbyists have the knowledge plus a sympathetic minister for finance and the luxury to own new machines with modern safety features, or to be able to bear the cost to engineer out many commonly encountered hazards. They can learn to implement the eliminate, substitute, isolate processes etc with what they own or have access to and they can afford good PPE. Not ideal but practical and affordable and will reduce risk. A HQ pair of medium impact spectacles (say uvex) and face shield (Armadillo) are arround $45.

Education about recognising and minimising risk with a focus on implemention of affordable and practical solutions is long overdue in recreational wood hobbies, and metal for that matter.

The available Emergency Department presentation statistics support my my reasoning for HQ PPE. A very significant number of the presentations to ED's are for eye, facial, brow and head injuries that the severity of which most definitely would have been lessened and perhaps even eliminated had the DIYer or hobbyist been wearing what is enforced as mandatory PPE in almost all similar "work" environments - eye protection and face / head protection. Both of which are a rare sight in many home & club workshops.

The other common injuries for wood hobbyists are tangles with operating machinery, powered and hand tools suffered from an oversight or ignorance of safe working proceedures! Catastrophic injuries and deaths are also frequent enough, and rising in my opinion, to be a very significant concern.

PPE will not stop the major injuries or deaths but education on how to recognise hazards and risk will and so will raising awareness through discussions on forums like WWF. Putting on the PPE may also prompt hobbyists to stop and think a while, and start the hazard identification / risk mitigation process.

You can't implement high order controls unless you know how, and have been trained to use safe work proceedures, how to recognise hazards and how to implement hazard controls ..... but hang on aren't education and training lowly administrative controls in the heirarchy pyramid!

Soundmans comment above is a very good example of hazard awareness & identification, risk analysis, potential controls - elimination (don't do it) or substitution (alternate processes or products) then an assessment of the controls practicality, effectiveness (are we just taking on another hazard of similar risk) etc in a hobbyists application / situation. Good one!