[TheForge] Re: gloves

[Mike Spencer]

I wear an unlined, gauntleted all-leather glove on my left -- holding
-- hand nearly all the time at the forge.  Y'all know all the reasons,
whether you agree with them or not.  But here's another little glove
bit:

Doing hot detailing, such as a gargoyle face on the end of a 2" round,
I have a couple of dozen punches, chisels, fullers etc.  Some of them
are kinda short.  Held, palm up, between thumb and forefinger with the
struck end over the palm of the hand, your knuckles don't get in the
way of seeing what you're doing.  But it puts the knuckle and proximal
phalanx of the forefinger so close to the workpiece that I've raised a
blister right through a heavy leather glove, just from the radiant
heat.

So I cut out some strips of 1/2"-thick ceramic batt, the stuff you
line gas forges with, put them over the affected part of an old
leather glove, and contact-cemented a cover of garment leather over
the bits of batt.  Makes a glove stiff, clunky and useless for
anything else but now I can hold those little hot-chasing (is that an
approved term?  :-) tools right up there close to a gargoyle's
red-hot nose.  The leather may char a bit but no more blisters on my
forefinger.

I know there are gloves -- someone just mentioned them -- that allow
you to directly hold very hot stuff and they'd probably be better but
I haven't seen them (except at an ABANA con umpty years ago, where
they were very dear.)  My little glove hack works well enough for it's
single purpose.

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^