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Archer
··Omega Qualified Watchmakerthats scary.. makes me think about the vaping thing people use instead of cigarettes. Imagine in the future will have some scary side affect we don't know about yet.
Unfortunately history is rife with examples of things once thought safe that we now know are not. A few years after I first started as an engineer, we went through the process of removing all PCB's from the production facility that I worked at, and creating on site storage. The electrical engineering guys handled the PCB work (identifying all sources in the plant), but I was involved in the structure to house them on site. I recall having a conversation with an older electrical contractor at that time, and he was going on about how ridiculous all this was, since he had worked for 40+ years on transformers and was armpits deep in PCB laden oil regularly. About 5 years later he died of liver cancer, and although you can't make a really direct connection to occupational exposure like you can with some cancers (asbestos and mesothelioma for example) it is one of the cancers linked to PCB's.
I was also involved in certifying the structure we built to house the PCB's on site as PCB free so it could be repurposed or torn down. I recall the firm we brought in to do the sampling and being out there while they swabbed the dust off the walls in small sections while wearing protective gear and sent the swabs away for analysis for trace amounts of PCB's - quite the contrast from having your arms in a transformer full of that oil up to your armpits.
Years later we went through a very similar thing with getting rid of all mercury containing devices in the plant, and that has carried over to the watch industry with mercury free batteries for quartz watches. Some of the chemicals used for cleaning watches can be dangerous - I refuse to use One-Dip at my bench for example. Many watchmakers keep a ground glass jar of it on the corner of the bench for quick cleaning jobs, but it's highly volatile and carcinogenic, so I'm not interested in working in those fumes all day as it disappears from the jar. If I have a part that needs cleaning, I take it back to the cleaning machine for that - not only do I avoid the fumes, but getting up and walking around a bit isn't a bad thing when you have a job like this, and the part is cleaner than using a jar of stuff at my bench over and over...
Cheers, Al
