Just been doing some welding (or more accurately applying slag randomly to a defined area)on my boat trailer below the treated pine walking boards. Heat from the welded area charred the treated pine a bit. Smoke comes off the pine. After a bit more welding the pine oozes some stuff. I know you don't burn treated pine 'cos it's bad for you. But I'm happily working away in treated pine smoke and who knows what else coming off my cheap Chinese arc rods and the paint scorching off the trailer and the galvanising going off and who knows what else. My dry throat and the funny taste in my mouth is probably just imagination.<br /><br />I've worked occasionally with asbestos when it wasn't dangerous according to the companies which are now having to pay for the damage it did to countless people when it wasn't dangerous. <br /><br />I've worked occasionally with various farm and industrial chemicals, none of which I can remember, but I'm sure they were all harmless too. Like what was probably agent orange derivatives we sprayed on blackberries and other hard to get rid of weeds. Never used a glove or respirator.<br /><br />Read the instructions and ingredients on a can of spray paint and other workshop aerosols. Some of them could kill villages if sprayed in quantity from the air.<br /><br />MDF board is a known carcinogen of a very nasty kind and might be the next generation's asbestos, but a lot of people who use it in home workshops and renovations don't have the faintest clue about its dangers.<br /><br />Wood dust, and for that matter flour dust, is explosive in the right concentration in air with an ignition source. Hardly any amateurs know that.<br /><br />A lot of what we work with probably doesn't do any or much harm to people, at least if they're not genetically or otherwise susceptible to it, but I wonder how many diseases and deaths are attributable to the cumulative effects of an excess of bad stuff inhaled or absorbed occasionally by amateurs? <br /><br />We'll never know because usually there's no records of the stuff we've used and most of us couldn't remember it, but I suspect a lot of us are quietly chipping away at our lives by using things we don't understand or not reading the instructions carefully. And which the manufacturers don't bother telling us are risky in some cases.
