*Podcasts may contain explicit material*
Batman didn’t have super powers, he just had some bada** tools. Remember ol’ Alfred? He used to serve up all those cool devices and save Batman’s behind over and over again. Quad City Safety’s kind of like Alfred. We’re here to save your a**.
Listen in to today’s episode of Dave & Bacon’s Safety Tales for a little back and forth on Erik Estrada, leading edge fall protection and why we should actually use the tools that give us the superpowers we need on the job site. Dave and Fred also take some Q&A on guardrail systems, anchor points for restraints and personal fall arrest systems. Tune in now for real talk on fall protection systems to be the superhero you feel inside!
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Press play below to listen to the episode!
2:18 Shooting cars into space vs wearing safety glasses to keep from getting maimed.
9:11 When Dave went through a barbed wire fence (moral of the story, don’t wear counterfeit safety shit!)
15:59 Safety education through Netflix binge-watching
16:26 Dumbass of the Week: Everybody has a buddy Carl who ruins everything. He gets up on a leading edge, hangs past the flag without fall protection — and gravity wins.
Intro Speaker: |
Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales, the only industrial safety podcast that brings you commonsense advice on job site safety, standards, regulations, and industry best practices without putting you to sleep. |
Fred: |
Here we go. It is Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales here. It's Fred Radunzel and Dave White here with Quad City Safety. We're back again. I'm a little bit spent all day in the car today, so my brain is a little bit fried. |
Dave: |
You've developed a speech impediment driving across Iowa. |
Fred: |
I can really talk. We're here, we're back, we're ready to rock here for another episode. We're gonna go back to where we started with this whole project. We had an episode we tried to record back now six months ago or so, maybe not quite that long ago. It didn't go so well. The recording didn't catch. My voice sounded weird, your voice sounded weird. We weren't in the same room with one another. |
Dave: |
We were learning, though. |
Fred: |
Yeah. It was a learning experience, so we had to shit can that episode. We're going to take some of that and bring it back into this one, and try it again, because we thought there was some good stuff in there that we didn't want to miss. |
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Once again, Fred and Dave, we're here on all your social media outlets, so Quad City Safety on Twitter and Quad City Safety on LinkedIn. We're both on there, Fred Radunzel, Dave White, so hit us up if you have any questions or just want to say hello. |
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Dave, originally I had a big bullet point on here that the reason we were doing this podcast is because we want to be doing Batman shit. What you got? |
Dave: |
Wanted to do Batman shit. We want to go out there and give people, you ever remember Batman, every time he got into areal hairy situation, he was a superhero, but he didn't really have super powers, he just had like super assed tools. |
Fred: |
He's like Elon Musk, a tech guy. |
Dave: |
Yes, he was. Elon Musk puts a $60,000 car on a rocket and shoots it out in space because he's just fucking rich. The rest of us don't have that, but hopefully we can go out and afford to buy a cool pair of $5 safety glasses and not come home maimed. That's Batman shit. What was the quirky old bastard that lived in the cave under the mansion? |
Fred: |
Alfred. |
Dave: |
Alfred, so we kind of need to be that Alfred guy, serving up cool assed shit to Batman. |
Fred: |
Have you seen Lego Batman? |
Dave: |
Yes, I have. I just can't get into that. Those all just disturb the hell out of me. Even when I was a kid, I never really liked Lego people just because the whole face and body thing, I just couldn't get over that. |
Fred: |
My two-year-old son, his grandma sent him some Valentine's Day money. |
Dave: |
Is he Lego addicted? |
Fred: |
No, he's not Lego addicted at all, but he's superhero addicted. |
Dave: |
My girlfriend's son is Lego addicted. It's ridiculous. |
Fred: |
He's got tons of Legos? |
Dave: |
Oh, Jesus Christ. I mean buys things and puts them together, and it's literally like I don't get it, and so you have all these little things that people have put together and buildings and things, but no. |
Fred: |
My kids will do the magnet tiles. I don't know if you've seen those. They're like very thin tile, probably like a McDonald's hamburger patty thickness, and they have it'll be square ... |
Dave: |
Did you just measure something in patty thickness? |
Fred: |
How do you describe via audio the thickness of something? I don't know. That's about it, right there. What do you call that? That's about a McDonald's single. |
Dave: |
No, that's not a McDonald's single. |
Fred: |
That's Happy Meal patty, no? Too thick? |
Dave: |
That's like a Quarter Pounder, dude. |
Fred: |
No. Anyways, they got a magnet ... |
Dave: |
That reminds me of somebody would always explain to me it's like measuring like a one-armed fisherman, it's about this big. |
Fred: |
Yeah. So magnet tiles. |
Dave: |
Magnet tiles, okay. |
Fred: |
Yeah, it's basically these thin blocks, thin tiles, they're square and triangle and diamonds, and stuff like that that have magnets going around the perimeter of them, and so they connect to each other and you can build a big cube out of magnet tiles. A little bit easier to work with for a little kid to be able to use, but really cool. |
|
Anyways, my original thing was he got a gift card from grandma to go get whatever he wanted at Target, because we live quite a ways away, and so he steered right in for Batman Lego DVD, went right to it, and it played a lot in the car like on repeat for a while there. |
Dave: |
Auto loop. |
Fred: |
Yep. Not quite on the Trolls level that my daughter was at, but Batman Lego, I've seen that a few times. |
Dave: |
I haven't had to sit through that one yet. |
Fred: |
It's a good one. It's pretty funny. |
Dave: |
You gotta give them street cred, they're changing the whole brand into whole Lego people toy movies. Gotta love it. |
Fred: |
Kind of who we hope listens to the podcast, kind of refresh. We're looking for people new, people old, just a different medium to be able to help them sharpen their tools. |
Dave: |
Yep. A lot of what safety is is just common sense, and a lot of us just don't have common sense. Just going back there and reminding yeah, man, I really shouldn't do that. Despite the fact that I've worked in the safety industry for twenty-fricking years, I'm still that dumb ass that finds myself going did I really just do that, oh, man, hopefully the neighbors didn't see me or take a picture of me. That's what I'm always scared of is somehow I'm gonna be framed on one of those ... I will be the dumb ass of the week at some point in time. It'll be something like a grill burn or something like that, or he was cleaning out the gutters. |
Fred: |
Yeah, I saw a photo on the internet this week. We still have a lot of ice around, so you get the long icicles hanging from the gutter, hanging from the overhang. It was a college aged girl and she was right underneath it with the mouth open underneath this icicle that's two-foot long trying to take a cool Instagram picture. That's not how you want to go out, impaled with an icicle down the throat. |
Dave: |
Then it becomes that whole mystery because it melts. |
Fred: |
The perfect crime. Yep, when the instrument can fade away. |
Dave: |
Yeah. |
Fred: |
We're gonna do back to story time. We did a little bit more. Dave's got a story here on CHiPs.
|
Dave: |
Yeah. We're talking I want to say it's circa 1979, 1980, and it's right around ... |
Fred: |
I was still chillin' in my dad's balls. |
Dave: |
Right on, hadn't shot out yet. Okay. I had been projected into the world, and was terrestrial, walking around here, and kind of became like really fascinated with the whole CHiPs thing to the point where back when you didn't really have ... I wouldn't say we really had a store that would like Toys R Us or something like that, that really didn't quite exist, so you always kind of had like an aisle at a drugstore or something, so in the aisle I became affixed on this whole CHiPs thing. |
|
You would watch CHiPs, and you would get into these Friday night television shows, and it was Dukes of Hazard and shit like that, but it became like you had to be part of it, and they had like a CHiPs set, so it had this cheesy assed blue hat with a fold-down visor, and it came with all the other stuff, but how it kind of went is I damaged my face a lot, and this goes into how I damaged my face, but the whole thing was my brother, God bless him, he kind of convinces me that that CHiPs helmet is bad assed, and it's pretty much gonna save your ass from just about anything. |
|
We live we're in Kentucky, so we're on the top of the hill, and somehow I'm just gonna get on this rusty assed bike and ride it to the bottom of the hill, and I have no idea what the hell I'm even thinking. It had the brake set where you kind of had to roll them backwards, no hand brakes. You know what I'm saying? You had to kind of spin them, and I don't even think they worked, and I'm going down a hill, so who knows what the ... |
Fred: |
And when they do you skid for at least another ten feet [crosstalk 00:09:01] trying to stop. |
Dave: |
Yeah, it's not gonna be good even if I had brakes. The whole thing is I had convinced myself, my brother had convinced myself, but I had obviously done shit for research, so I didn't know anything, so I throw my CHiPs helmet on, I get on the bike, I come speeding ass down the side of this hill in Kentucky and blast through a barbed wire fence, and I ended up on the other side of the barbed wire fence. So if you could only imagine, I took ... It ripped, it completely destroyed my CHiPs helmet, but I kind of got ... You got your barbs on barbed wire, obviously, and unfortunately it kind of caught me on the side of my face and kind of ripped my mouth open, and I was a hot mess. |
|
It kind of goes into a lot of fake safety gear that's out there. You could buy stuff that's how to say, who knows where it comes from or what it'll actually do, but somebody doesn't believe me Google it, counterfeit stuff. You can go out there and buy Ray Bans that ain't Ray Bans. I'm sure that you can buy safety shit that's not, maybe may look like safety gear, but it's not. |
Fred: |
Or even safety gear that's not specific for the job that you're doing, and not rated, doesn't have all the ratings and testing for the actual job. |
Dave: |
The story goes to kind of back twofold is one is that you need to make sure that you buy it from a reputable source and that it is what they say it is. Make sure it's not out of date, make sure that the standard hasn't changed since you started using it, all kinds of stuff behind there. You couple that with the fact that my brother and I through zero market research and zero understanding of barbed wire fences, bicycles, hills in Kentucky, gravity. We had it all figured out that the CHiPs helmet was enough, that was all I was gonna need, man. I was literally going to blast through that. Didn't work out so well. |
|
That became another one of the battle scars that I have.
|
Fred: |
It didn't have that ANSI rating. What's the hard hat number? Usually you can pipe them off the top of your head. |
Dave: |
Z89. |
Fred: |
Z89, yeah. It wasn't rated Z89. |
Dave: |
That was the hard hat, and then Z87.1 plus, that should have been the eyeglass [crosstalk 00:11:31] |
Fred: |
For the visor. |
Dave: |
Yeah, so I didn't really have ... And then it should have been tested as a group. I had none of that. |
Fred: |
I'm thinking one of the past episodes we talked about you should probably had on eye protection underneath your visor. |
Dave: |
Oh, definitely should have. The long and short of it is yeah, could have might have well been the dumb ass of the week. But the story going into the whole things, and everybody has to remember Ponch, he was kind of like the now he's making he always comes back because Eric Estrada I think his name ... |
Fred: |
Yeah, Eric Estrada. |
Dave: |
Yeah, so obviously he's part of he's gonna be affix-iated in pop culture for ... |
Fred: |
Yeah, he's like the Surreal Life guy, any of those ... |
Dave: |
Yeah, he kind of pops back. He's made more goddamn money off the cameos that he's played in shit since then. |
Fred: |
Still has pearly whites and that head of hair. |
Dave: |
Oh, yeah, good little tan on him and all that stuff. |
Fred: |
Did you see the CHiPs remake? |
Dave: |
No, I didn't. |
Fred: |
I heard it was funny. I haven't seen it. |
Dave: |
I heard it was funny, and he made a cameo in it. |
Fred: |
The original story, and I think it was the other guy, not Eric Estrada but whoever the other guy is ... |
Dave: |
Yeah, the white guy. |
Fred: |
The white guy with the mustache, that he got kind of pissed when they were talking about doing it because like he didn't want the legacy of the show to be blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. |
Dave: |
Yeah, that's ... Yeah. |
Fred: |
That's usually how it goes with the old timers. |
Dave: |
Yeah. Nothing worse than a shitty fucking seventies and eighties sitcom that, yeah, we don't want to mess the art of it up. I mean it's real. |
Fred: |
Yep. |
Dave: |
Could you imagine in a hundred years how many ... I mean you're gonna be looking at like Star Wars will have been remade for like the fifth time or something. I mean there's no real good new stuff out anymore. |
Fred: |
Hey, who knows? Everything goes in waves, though. Don't you think? |
Dave: |
Yeah. |
Fred: |
I'd say fifteen years from now, you might have a wave of great movies, or something that we don't even know. It might be a YouTube, might be the ... |
Dave: |
Oh, yeah, it'll probably just be like ... |
Fred: |
Because there's great TV being made right now. I'd say better than ever, like new television that comes out. |
Dave: |
I will tell you, man, I can shit the bed. I mean I love some Netflix binge watching because I just started Stranger Things. That is ... |
Fred: |
Yeah, season one? |
Dave: |
No. Yeah, end of season one. |
Fred: |
Okay. |
Dave: |
So just literally like they finally killed the thing, and ... |
Fred: |
Spoiler alert. |
Dave: |
I'm sorry. I digress. But long story short is I don't even like sci-fi stuff ... |
Fred: |
Yeah, but that's good. I don't like it either. |
Dave: |
Because it's like enough mix of stuff, but yeah, there are a million shows out there that you're kind of like I don't remember watching that guy in such and such TV show, that'll be okay, and then all the sudden you're like whole Saturday's passed, and you're like ugh, okay, not real proud of that. |
Fred: |
Before I had little ones, that was the case. You'd throw away a Breaking Bad Saturday, and then a Breaking Bad Sunday. |
Dave: |
Oh. |
Fred: |
Especially when my wife was pregnant, I just remember laying there, ordering pizza, and watching 20 straight episodes. |
Dave: |
That's one that you could do that, though. There's not many that you can sit there. What was my daughter watching? I got home last night, and she was watching Pretty Little Liars. |
Fred: |
That is a show. I'm aware of the title, but I don't know if it's reality show or not. |
Dave: |
No. |
Fred: |
It's a script show? |
Dave: |
Yeah. I'm literally going ... She like clicks back because I'm like I'm taking the TV off, I've been gone all day, time for me to ... You know, I rule this house, so ... |
Fred: |
Time for daddy to get the big piece of chicken. |
Dave: |
Yeah. I back it up, and I'm like Sug, did that say season five, episode 25, and you were like in minute 36, so these gotta be like 45 ... I mean she's spent more time in her life watching this show than she has learning English. |
Fred: |
Right. |
Dave: |
I mean shit. |
Fred: |
She's probably learned a learned some English, though. |
Dave: |
Well, probably. I mean you would have to, but I mean how many hours ... I mean gosh, somehow we need to trick people into education through Netflix binge watching. I think that there's something there. |
Fred: |
What? |
Dave: |
Education through Netflix binge watching. Somehow if you could just build your vocabulary with watching Breaking Bad 2.0, where we insert words where you go what the fuck is that, and we play it at the bottom of the screen, oh, okay. |
Fred: |
Yeah. |
Dave: |
I don't know what algorithm means. |
Fred: |
Follow the bouncing ball. |
Dave: |
There you go. |
Fred: |
All right, let's switch up gears. We'll move on to our dumb ass of the week this week. |
|
I don't even know, we might have even covered this at one point. We got a guy, he's working on a leading edge. He's got flags set up around the building. |
Dave: |
Yeah. His name's fucking Carl. |
Fred: |
Carl, your buddy. |
Dave: |
Carl ruins everything. |
Fred: |
Yep. It looks like Carl decided to lean out over his flag, get some work done. |
Dave: |
Yeah, so basically working on, leans over to do something on the soffit or whatever, so literally beautiful flag system set up with the stanchions, and it looked like it was spaced right. Without any fall protection on, he gets on it, crawls under it, leans around of it, and of course it's like a concrete parking lot under him, and it was at a local high school so it would have been a bitch to watch this poor guy squish his head, but it goes to show you that sometimes we put in controls, administrative controls that people still go around. |
|
You'll see it all the time, people leaning over guard rails, misuse of a ladder. I think we had some Facebook posts this week that show don't do this with a ladder, and just the stuff that people decide to do. |
Fred: |
I just visited a site today that they were putting on the big master lock steering wheel covers over their machines so that people won't drive them, it's basically a big stop sign that goes over the top of their steering wheel and gets cinched up, and their safety director decided that was not good enough, that technically people could still grab on and be driving the machine with the big stop sign ... |
Dave: |
Big thing that says stop on it ... |
Fred: |
Right over the top of it, it's not actually preventing them from doing it. That was an actual concern for them, and we got to come up with a different solution. |
Dave: |
I get that. |
Fred: |
That's one of those it's an obvious thing that everybody that's working on that job site should be able to look at this guy and say hey, dummy, that flag is there for a reason, you're supposed to stay inside the flag. It's not like you don't lift it up or you don't reach over it. It's there for a reason because if you reach past that flag you are in serious danger. |
Dave: |
Yep, you have the potential for gravity to take over, and it wins. |
Fred: |
It's undefeated. |
Dave: |
Yeah, tends to always win. |
Fred: |
Yep. So a couple questions that we got for the week. Number one, I'm gonna go off script here because it was just a question I was asked today, and I haven't even asked you it yet, so right off the top of head I'm gonna throw you a curve ball. |
Dave: |
I hope it's not real technical. That's good. |
Fred: |
They had restraints set up in their facility so there's a guardrail that the guardrail can then open, and technically someone could then fall off of this platform where this guardrail is keeping them in. When they're working and they need to open up this guardrail, they were talking about using restraint so they couldn't get to it. Is there a certain length that you cannot use restraint? |
|
So like could you be using restraint tied off from a hundred feet away, and go all the way to the edge? |
Dave: |
If theoretically you could never make a leading edge with it. |
Fred: |
Okay. |
Dave: |
Meaning if you tethered yourself, and let's say you were in the middle of a perfect circle, and the radius of the circle was a hundred feet, and you had a 99 foot ... Well, technically you wouldn't want to get there because you want to fall ... |
Fred: |
We could go with their example, it was literally like 25 feet. It was about 25 feet. |
Dave: |
Yeah, you theoretically could have a 25-foot tethering restraint device. It doesn't matter from a restraint standpoint, you don't really have anything other than there are requirements for your anchor point. |
Fred: |
Okay, even in restraint? |
Dave: |
Yes. I mean you have to have an anchor point for a restraint. It's just not required to be a 5000-pound, because you're not gonna stress it. |
Fred: |
Yeah. I mean they had a bolted D-ring, it was like attached to [crosstalk 00:21:02] |
Dave: |
Yeah, as long as you got something that ... If you got that, you know, if you have a non-certified anchor point, so it's rated 5000, you got that first part. |
Fred: |
Okay. |
Dave: |
But you just gotta make sure that they know that they can't use it as a PFAS. So yeah, they could if that was 25-foot away ... |
Fred: |
It had to be measured out perfect. So if it was 27 feet, then your restraint needs to be shorter than that. |
Dave: |
Shorter than that, yeah. |
Fred: |
Okay. Would you say that ... I mean obviously that then creates other hazards if there's other people working there, and there's a 25-foot cable that's just stringed across the workspace. |
Dave: |
Then you got a trip hazard because people moving around, no doubt about it. |
Fred: |
I thought still ... |
Dave: |
You still have a device that some dumb ass can go take and use somewhere else. |
Fred: |
Yeah, because there was a beam that was overhead, and I thought still the more logical choice was probably to have a beam anchor and attach an SRL to that, or would you say in your opinion that it's better to engineer out the faller in the scenario like that, would it be better to use a PFAS? |
Dave: |
In that situation [crosstalk 00:22:10] |
Fred: |
My thought was like eight-foot overhead, like ... |
Dave: |
Yeah, if you've got a beam like that that you can pull down and tag into ... |
Fred: |
Yeah. |
Dave: |
Because if that guard rail is movable and it's coming up, somebody is exiting or they're putting something in there where at some point in time somebody is gonna step out of there. Otherwise it does ... Because I've seen that where all the sudden it's like holy shit, what's that overhead door out there. Well, every now and then we have to put a pallet of shit up there. |
Fred: |
Right. |
Dave: |
And inherently dumb ass, you know, he won't see it. It only happens like three times a year, but somebody at some point in time gonna put something into that, again, that overhead door that nobody knows what it's there, and all the sudden it opens, and oh, we have a hazard here. |
Fred: |
Okay. That's good. Question number two. Can we wear our hard hats backwards, and can we put stickers on them? |
Dave: |
Let's deal with the first part is the first one that you're talking about is reverse donning. |
Fred: |
Okay. |
Dave: |
Reverse donning, if you pick up any hardhat, and you kind of look around the brim, somewhere you're gonna see kind of like two arrows chasing each other, going in a circle, and that will tell you ... Or if you keep the owners' manual, but nobody keeps the owners' manual to safety ... You know, safety stuff, it's worse than like Ikea fricking furniture, you know. You get the shit and all the bags of fasteners and Alan wrenches, and you throw all the directions that tell you how to put it together or use it. So either in those directions or specifically on the cap it should be marked, is you'll see that set of trailing little things. It'll basically tell you that you can reverse don it. There will be a sticker or a mark that tells you that that is able to happen. |
|
Once you have that, the suspension that came in the hard hat, you just pull it out, rotate it 180 degrees, and if let's say I'm a welder dude, and I don't want to have the bill in front of my cap, so I want to pull down a weld shield or something like that, there's different reasons that people want to do it. |
Fred: |
Okay, that was gonna be my next question. I was like why would they really want to wear a cap backwards. |
Dave: |
Most of the time, that's what you're seeing, is people want to be able to pull down the weld shield, and if you basically have a bill on the hat obviously you're not gonna get it all the way down, it's gonna kind of be [crosstalk 00:24:39] |
Fred: |
Don't some weld shields accommodate for that, though, some of them? |
Dave: |
Yeah, some of them do. |
Fred: |
Okay. |
Dave: |
But again, just depends. Some people just wanna look ... You know. |
Fred: |
Bad assed, Ken Griffey Junior with the backwards cap, hitting homers. |
Dave: |
Yeah, I have to be some ... At one point in time, people were wearing their jeans backwards. |
Fred: |
Chris Cross? |
Dave: |
Yeah. |
Fred: |
You weren't that neo, were you? |
Dave: |
Dude, I'm a chubby little white guy. I mean that would be ... |
Fred: |
Yeah, but you were in Kentucky. I'm assuming it was a predominantly ... |
Dave: |
No, but I couldn't get my pants on backwards if I tried. I mean that's not how their built. |
Fred: |
Sweatpants, maybe your sweatpants on backwards. |
Dave: |
Yeah, I might been able to get my sweatpants on backwards, but trying to get jeans, ugh, I could only imagine. |
Fred: |
Yeah. Showing a real FUPA. |
Dave: |
Oh, yeah. There you go. Thank you there. |
Fred: |
Question number two, or three, three. |
Dave: |
No, no, no, we didn't get through the [crosstalk 00:25:32] |
Fred: |
Oh, yeah, our stickers. |
Dave: |
You had part B. |
Fred: |
Yeah, appendix B. Go ahead. |
Dave: |
Appendix B, yeah. |
Fred: |
Our stickers. |
Dave: |
Stickers, it gets into everything related to safety should require some level of an inspection. When we get that hard hat, you should take a look at it, make sure that it's not discolored, because again most of them are plastic, so if you take ... I mean everybody has taken something like a Frisbee or something, and left it outside all summer, and then you pick it up one time and you go throw it to your buddy and he catches it and it fucking destroys him to a million pieces. Well, that's what's happening, UV does to plastics, just weakens them. |
Fred: |
Yep. |
Dave: |
So when you get the stickers, part of the problem is the sticker covers up space so you can't see what's going on in that space. The second part of it is that you've got to make sure that you know what kind of chemicals were used in the glue on the sticker. You just need to make sure that you're not all the sudden been putting something on there that when it attaches to the cap it's not causing a weird chemical reaction. |
Fred: |
Is this something that like they sell stickers that are specific for hard hats? Because otherwise what you're saying, nobody is gonna do that. Nobody is hey, what kind of glue do they use on that sticker, you know? |
Dave: |
Most of the time as long as people are telling ... |
Fred: |
I don't know, it's Peppa Pig. It came in the back of a coloring book. I don't know. |
Dave: |
I'm just telling you basically what you gotta look for. Obviously people are out there doing whatever the hell they want to, but ... |
Fred: |
Okay. Is that something that they make that you're aware of, make a sticker? |
Dave: |
Well, most of the stickers just have ... How to say? |
Fred: |
Specific for PPE? |
Dave: |
Think about a two-part epoxy that you don't know what the hell is in there, I'm just saying make sure that the adhesive is not some weird assed ... You know. |
Fred: |
Some corrosive [inaudible 00:27:35] |
Dave: |
Yep. |
Fred: |
All right. How about how do I know when to change my respirator cartridges? This seems like a pretty, it's a pretty easy one, right? |
Dave: |
Well, the easiest one is when it becomes tougher to breathe, because when we're talking about that cartridge based respirator, obviously there's cartridges in PAPRs and stuff like that, but even though those will know kind of when to change is the biggest rule of thumb is when it becomes hard to breathe, because that's basically telling you that the filter media has filled up with whatever, whether it's a particulate, whether it's whatever else you want it to be, an organic vapor, an acid gas. As it pulls those out, it's basically limiting the amount of space for air to travel into it, because we do require a little bit of oxygen. |
|
But you can ... How to say? When you talk about change out on respirator cartridges, there are calculations that you can do. Most manufacturers will have it, but it will be a bunch of stuff that you will go well, shit, I don't know. |
Fred: |
Right. |
Dave: |
People would be like well, what's your concentration, what's your parts per million that you're inhaling over an eight hour day, and what is the relative humidity, and then they'll go 45 hours, and they'll shit out a number that they've kind of figured out that sounds good, the math is right, it should be able to filter that out based on that parts per million and the fact that thing gets a little moisture in the filter media it causes a little tasking agent there. Some manufacturers, even like 3M now, are making they kind of have like a service life indicator on the cartridge, so it kind of signals that hey, look at me. |
Fred: |
Yeah, this thing's coming to an end. |
Dave: |
Yep. But, you know, that's all relative. It's not doing it, it's not literally going I'm a hundred ... It's not like running out of gas. When you run out of gas, you run out of gas. |
Fred: |
Right. |
Dave: |
How to say? Where that end of the cartridge actually doing what it's supposed to do, eh, that's a little bit tougher one to really measure. |
Fred: |
Yeah. Hopefully you've switched it out by the time that you need it. |
Dave: |
Hopefully, but that doesn't happen. |
Fred: |
All right. Here's my PPE gift for the ... Not gift. I'm trying to think of what's the word I'm looking for, my hard-to-find PPE. Let's throw it ... I'm gonna go off the top of your head here. Now, hazard number one, we need an over-the-glass. We're looking for an over-the-glass glass. It's gotta go over the glass. |
Dave: |
OTG. |
Fred: |
An OTG with foam attached to the OTG. You ever seen anything? |
Dave: |
No. You're gonna be more into a goggle. |
Fred: |
I saw one today, first one I ever seen. I think it was ... First one I'd ever seen. It was an over-the-glass, so it had the sides on it to go over the glass, and then it had foam line built into the glass. I'll show it to you. |
Dave: |
Okay. Interesting. |
Fred: |
Yeah. That's something that I saw today that I have never seen before, and ... |
Dave: |
Typically you'll have I've seen people just use like a stealth, they make a bigger stealth goggle, so you can get your big assed coke-bottle glasses into there. |
Fred: |
Yeah. Originally I ... He's like you ever seen ... He's like can you get me something like this, and handed it to me, and I looked at it and it looks like a foam glass. I'm like yeah, man, this technology is not new, and I kind of looked at the side, the side profile of the lens. He's like no, it's an over-the-glass. I was like well, they probably don't make many of these. Most people must not want them, but we're gonna investigate. |
Dave: |
That seems like that would be a fogger upper. |
Fred: |
We'll see what happens. |
Dave: |
Yep. |
Fred: |
Anything else going on in life you want to chat about? I'm heading off to Decatur, Illinois tomorrow, original home of the Chicago Bears. |
Dave: |
No, I've been traveling. Let's see, here. We were just at the Common Ground Alliance, 811, Call Before You Dig. That was an interesting show. But I'm really super excited about one of our upcoming shows, which is the American Foundry Society, AFS, which is gonna be in Fort Worth Texas, and so how to say? We do a little bit of business in casting and steel. I mean those are really ... I mean every time I go into a foundry or steel mill, I'm scared shit-less because they are aggressive, nasty, mean environments. You actually learn a lot about safety from those guys because they've kind of got it down. |
Fred: |
All right. Well, have fun with that. |
Dave: |
Yeah. |
Fred: |
All right. That's gonna be it for us today. We hope you like the episode. We went back. That was the one you should have heard first, but we just couldn't make it happen. |
Dave: |
We failed. |
Fred: |
Glad to see ... Yeah, we were the dumb ass of the week in original episode one. |
Dave: |
It would have been really awkward, and you would have never made episode two. |
Fred: |
Yeah. We're back next week with more safety stories. If you wanna reach out to us on social media, we're on pretty much everywhere. It's at Quad City Safety, so if you have any comments or questions or anything, please reach out to us on those. Have a safe day. Safety has no quitting time. See you next time. |
Outro Speaker: |
Thanks for listening in to Dave and Bacon's Safety Tales, brought to you by Quad City Safety. Send us your questions on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, at Quad City Safety, #SafetyTales, or email them to Fred@QuadCitySafety.com. He's the guy keeping this mess of a show in line. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes. It's a kick ass way to show that you care about safety. |
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