HF rant about their Nitrile gloves..

These are the gloves our coroner's office uses. They are not as expensive as I thought, and lots of folks sell it. Open the link and scroll down for the specs. Here are the thickness areas reported:
  • Fingertip Thickness: 0.15 mm (5.9 mil).
  • Palm Thickness: 0.12 mm (4.7 mil).
  • Tensile Strength: 21 MPa.
Seems pretty reasonably priced to me. Of course, you usually get dinged for shipping and handling with an internet purchase so price might go up. Likely doubled (or more) with the cost of shipping these days…
 
Seems pretty reasonably priced to me. Of course, you usually get dinged for shipping and handling with an internet purchase so price might go up. Likely doubled (or more) with the cost of shipping these days…
True. Amazon Prime
 
Is there any standard on what constitutes a "large" glove. I have issues in that I can barely squeeze into most of the X-Large gloves, and I literally have to try them before I buy, 'because most won't fit. It used to be bad. It's impossible now. And I don't think my hands have grown. It seems that making the gloves thinner isn't the only way they're saving on materials.
 
Things are changing quickly in the world of published standards. All protective clothing standards at the moment are fee-for-access, these run $150-500 per document to view.

I have all of the NFPA standards, too large for anything but hosting, not particularly useful for industrial processes.
NFPA has scrubbed all publicly accessible standards previously incorporated by reference from the web.

ASTM has scrubbed all publicly accessible standards previously incorporated by reference from the web.
ANSI has scrubbed all publicly accessible standards previously incorporated by reference from the web.
ISO has scrubbed all publicly accessible standards previously incorporated by reference from the web.
EC/EN standards are also now locked down due to the cost of translating the documents into all EU languages.

These changes have been happening slowly over the last few years. Cease and desist letters abound to anyone making this information public via the web. You can access the incorporated by reference standard from their original promulgators now, but you have to beg them in a request form, one at a time. They made it hard on purpose. I used to get any of the standards I needed from the law school, like Cornell, or law.resource.org used to host all of them and more. Even the US gov't publishing office is referring requests for standards back to the originators instead of hosting them like the used to.

I still have access by official means, but I'll need to ask around a little first.

If you wonder why the information is not obvious or easy to find, the answer is it's complicated. There has never been a simple standard for skin/hand protection due to the range of conditions, business sectors, treaties, and trade agreements, and national/global adoption prospects, so there are instead ten thousand pages worth of technical-legal stuff to go through before you get an easy answer to which glove is right for...

The best references I have are printed and bound right in front of me, but I can't exactly read aloud the chapters you want to hear. These books are more expensive than Swedish tungsten carbide, pound for pound, but I can answer specific questions very well if you want to know what to choose when using a particular chemical.
 
Another thing to be aware of is there are no standards for exam gloves. Only gloves bearing the EC logo are rated. Exam gloves have no thickness standard, and are for general precautions only. If you are looking at bona-fide USA made medical exam gloves, you will find that the mil thickness is not written on the box, and is not visible on any manufacturer's literature. Only gloves designated for occupational chemical exposure are rated. For example, I use rated butyl rubber gloves in my stoddard tank. Butyl is generally incompatible with stoddard, but the breakthrough time for the rated milsurp chemical gloves I use is many hours, so I get months of periodic use out of a pair before the rubber goes soft.

This is the EC rating symbol system for chemicals:
csm_Standard_EN374_2016_50df146b5f.png


They are printed on the cuff:

114.0630-Screen-RGB-01.jpg


This is a highly abbreviated table- very little detail, but the key is matching the right chemicals to the resistance you need. The book that supports this chart is over 300 pages of data and references, but it has Wiley Publishing written on the cover, so you'll want a company expense account to bill access to it against. This says nothing for thickness or breakthrough time, and if you don't know your organic chemistry it does not help you predict resistance to unlisted chems. If you do know your chemistry, it becomes very easy to see what holds up and what doesn't, based on chemical class. For example (generalization), strong nucleophiles are resisted by viton, aliphatics resisted by nitrile, weak nucleophiles are resisted by butyl, etc.

glove_chemical_resistant_chart.jpg
 
These are the gloves our coroner's office uses. They are not as expensive as I thought, and lots of folks sell it. Open the link and scroll down for the specs. Here are the thickness areas reported:
  • Fingertip Thickness: 0.15 mm (5.9 mil).
  • Palm Thickness: 0.12 mm (4.7 mil).
  • Tensile Strength: 21 MPa.
nice... seems reasonable that the thickness is rated at the palm
 
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