Welcome to my experimental chamber. Let me introduce you to Dave the welder, not
very human looking except for one thing, he breathes. Look, his plastic lungs are
inflating and deflating. When they do this Dave breathes in the air from
inside the chamber, together with anything else that's in the air.
The chamber can be sealed and from this tube we can introduce fume. As you can
see, the plume rises into Dave's face just as it would during welding and unlike
yours or mine Dave's lungs light up when fume gets
inside. The problem for Dave is that when he breathes this stuff in it's
potentially dangerous and if he does this regularly it could make him ill,
he could even end up with a career-ending disease. We're gonna take a look at how
Dave might be affected. Let the experiment begin.
Think of this box as your workshop, once it's sealed Marty will start the fume.
Keep an eye on where it goes and on Dave's lungs to see if any actually gets
inside. Okay Marty first dose please.
Yep, I can see it's going right in his face. The fume rises straight up in a plume.
Like any welder, if Dave does nothing about it, it gets right up his nose.
Another shot please.
And one more. Oh, there go the lungs. The lights show that the fume has got into
Dave's lungs. Because his head is in the plume and because there are no controls
such as extraction to stop Dave breathing in the fume, he's potentially
at risk. Whether Dave gets ill or not depends on what he's welding and how
long he's doing it for, now and again, for a few hours every day, or all day every
day for years. It also depends on whether Dave's body reacts to the fume or not.
He may be alright but why take the risk?
Dave's decided to do the right thing and is using an extractor to control the
fume, but has he got it positioned correctly?
The smoke reveals that Dave hasn't got it quite right. So Dave's got his head
out of the plume and the extractors working but it's not doing a great job
for Dave, he's got it positioned too high so some of the fume is escaping and
getting right into his lungs. If he keeps using extraction incorrectly, over time a
welder like Dave could potentially breathe in enough fume to make him ill.
He's gonna try again. The extractor is just over seven centimeters across, so
Marty will put it about twice that distance from the work.
With the extraction positioned properly the fume is all being taken away and
doesn't get into Dave's lungs, but as he moves when welding his extraction should
move too. Seeing how the fume works has been really interesting. If you want to
reduce the risk of it making you ill, you have to stop it getting into your lungs
and that means keeping your head out of the plume. Extraction really works, but
only if you position and use it correctly and you must move it as you
weld. I don't know about Dave, but if I thought this stuff could do me harm I'd
want to do something about it.