Looking great as always Robert.
Just an observation if I may.Both your apprentice and mine tend to put there face up against the weld. Directly in the fumes! I'm trying to break that bad habit with my son. I keep reminding him..
I would think that even wearing the proper lens that it would still cause eye damage being closer than further away.
Aside from that, and I don't know how true it is as there has not been that much research done on it.........Pick's disease. If you do either a Google or Bing search, there is a lot of hits concerning it and the symptoms. This is from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick's_disease
The reason I bring it up is that my neighbor developed it, and they say it was from years of welding and breathing in the fumes. He was a welder at our shop. He was also a Reverend, and was a real decent person. He reached a point when he was preaching on Sundays that he was getting sort of scatterbrained during his sermons. This developed to the point that he basically couldn't talk, but was still working. That progressed to the point that he couldn't comprehend directions. He was walking up the road one day from a flea market a mile from the house. He had bought a BB Gun and was walking home. Someone reported a man walking along the road carrying a rifle. The city police came up behind him and told him to drop the gun, but Reverend Dave kept walking. So now this went from someone walking with a gun to something really odd. The officer called in for backup so two more showed up. Reverend Dave could not comprehend what was going on, but went to show the locals that he bought a BB Gun. Just by pure luck, another officer that went to his church, knew that Reverend Dave had medical issues. They could have easily shot him down. And there are so many things he was doing. He would come down to our house. He couldn't speak or converse with anyone, and he had reached a point where drool would just run out of his mouth. Twice, the wife and I came out of the back part of the house, only to find Reverend Dave standing inside of our house, in the family room.
Then he went into the neighbors house behind us a couple of times. Tina and her son lives in the house. Her son was gone one day, she came downstairs, and there stood Reverend Dave. She said she screamed, and grabbed a gun until she realized who it was. She told him to go home, and he left. Plus he was caught walking **** on quite a few occasions too. One time was 2:00am, walking into town. Other times was broad daylight.
All of the specialist, and not just one, but 3 or 4, once they found out what he did as a job, tied Picks Disease and the welding fumes together as the cause of his problem. After he was first noticed slipping a little bit brainwise, he live just a little over a year afterwards. However long before that, he was developing the disease is anyone's guess, but myself, I would say it was a couple of years coming, then he really hit the peak and it was downhill afterwards.
And Pick's is not like Alzheimers. Reverend Dave went from speech impedements to not being able to talk, to not being able to comprehend, to drooling, to shitting himself, to ******* in kitchen cabinets, walking around public in the ****, to not being able to walk at all, to becoming a vegetable.
It was sad to see a person go from being in total control of his faculties, to not having any control of anything. Basically I blame it on the shop. A multi-billion dollar a year company, but didn't have money to put into ventilation hoods to draw the fumes up and out. Once Reverend Dave got bad, then they decide to put vacuum hood in.
So Nasty and Robert, and anyone else for the fact....show this to your helpers and/or kids, and try to get them away from the fumes. Have them research Pick's a little on the web. Will everyone get it that breathes the fumes? I doubt it. But then again, who decides who gets the disease and who doesn't, and why take a gamble if you can prevent it?
