Hi everyone, I’m having some trouble understanding exactly what I should be looking for in the MSDS in order to determine if a substance is safe to put in the GF. Specifically, I’d like to use one of the following glues for an upcoming project… Can anyone tell me if there are any red flags?
Thanks so much for your help!
I’m on my phone but I can tell you where to look.
“Thermal decompensation”
Search each for this and look for nasty stuff.
Anything that is chlorinated is a no go.
Don’t worry about CO2, that is listed everywhere!
Ah, thanks! So in this case, I’d want to avoid the E6000 (due to cabon monoxide)? I’m not sure about the halogenated compounds and the carbonyl halides.
I think (I am in no way an expert) it would be ok as long as you have it well vented to the outside. You won’t find anything that burns and is good to inhale.
Unless you plan to cut a pound of E6000 I don’t think carbon monoxide will be an issue. If you are not going to cut it, the thermal decomposition (even to chlorides) will be irrelevant. There are a few glues you might not want to lock yourself in a closet while using (acrylic glues) but otherwise the fact it holds tightly without destroying the material is the critical issue,
There is very little you can laze that doesn’t produce toxic fumes. Some fumes are more benign like from wood or paper, others are less benign like from plastics and adhesives. But toxic is toxic and even burning paper is toxic. That’s why the GF has an exhaust fan. You don’t want to breath anything that’s generated during laser cutting.
Assuming the vent from your GF doesn’t exhaust in to the window of a neighboring apartment, what you really care about is whether what you are lazing will damage the GF. For that, anything with Chlorine in the chemical composition is a no no as others have said. That includes some plastics (PVCs) and probably some adhesives.
Anything with Chlorine also generates fumes that are particularly bad to breath.
Note that halogenated compounds include chlorides. A halogen is a more generic term for the family of elements that include chlorine, fluorine, bromine, iodine, etc. so any term with “halogen” or “halogenated” in it is also a no-go.
I would like to thank you for this question. I have also wondered about this. I would also like to thank those that answered.
Thank you!
That’s true of wood as well. It’s not the CO (I mean assuming you have an outside vent) it’s the chlorine compounds. Every carbon compound you burn produces some CO2 and CO (often the CO in small quantities joins another O2 molecule to become CO2 as well, so a candle will produce CO and CO2 (just in tiny quantities). That’s not going to affect the laser, it’s the chlorine compounds combining with hydrogen in the air (water vapor) to form HCL which is corrosive to the laser (surprisingly not as horrible to breathe in tiny quantities since we aspirate stomach acid every night into our lungs (essentially pure HCl with a pH around 1); now not saying go out and breathe some HCl right now but the body is quite tolerant of acidity (intolerance of bases however) but your laser cutter is not. Not that they couldn’t have designed an acid tolerant laser cutter, but there is no reason to (unlike the human body which needs that feature) and since there are other 2.5D cutting technologies to cut things like vinyl etc there isn’t a reason to (drag knife, water jet, etc).
For folks wondering what the heck is he talking about? Well every night when you sleep your lower esophageal sphincter (the valve at the top of your stomach) loosens a smidge. That lets a few ML of acid (your stomach always has a bit of pure HCl sitting around for when you snack) leak out. Since you are horizontal and HCl is a liquid it flows up your esophagus and falls into your trachea (tube to your lungs) It aerosolizes as the air flows over it bringing droplets of HCl into your alveoli. Now this is actually a good thing because otherwise your stomach would be full of the oral bacteria we swallow all day (staph, strep, anaerobes) and you’d get pneumonia. This is why being on long term drugs like Omeprazole (which shut down acid production) place elderly patients at higher risk for aspiration pneumonia. The cilia (the tiny hairs that move crap out of your lungs) and the mucosal cells lining the bronchi are all totally cool with this pH since this happens to every mammal every night (well not aquatic mammals who breath from a tube like whales since their tracheas and esophaguses never meet). Now don’t run out immediately and stop your omeprazole if you are on it for a specific reason without talking with your doctor, and don’t think every cough you have on omeprazole is aspiration pneumonia, just there is a higher risk; and don’t make HCl in your laser cutter!
I have not been able to sleep horizontal for a very long time, and the “ole fire in the belly” has not been restrained much by Omeprazole, and the closest I have been to aspiration pneumonia was trying to breath a pint of stomach contents and then having all those cilia cells defend themselves with a gallon of thick mucus or so it seemed at the time. It was not a quiet evening.
So if your GERD is refractory to omeprazole you likely have a pretty severe hiatal hernia (incredibly common in the US). So at that point we generally move from chemical to mechanical solutions. So for my father, sister, niece and nephew I got them all in with one of my thoracic surgery buddies who did a Nissen fundoplication (an old-timey surgery where we wrap the extra stomach tissue around the esophagus to squeeze it back into shape. (Huge advantage here is the tissue is you, so will grow and shrink with you - disadvantage here is it requires an experienced surgeon as it is more akin to sculpture versus a device) and of course there is a device, which I’ve certainly gotten for my patients but I like it less - but it is much less operator dependent). The linx device is a bunch of buckyball magnets on an elastic cord (like a Smartees bracelet from Halloween, except with a clasp). Now wait I hear you cry, I thought Bucky balls were dangerous in the intestines! And that’s very true, but if your link device is inside your Gi tract that’s the least of your problems (it’s on the outside). My dad went from getting severe reflux when he hunched down onto the drops riding to being able to hang upside down. In his mid-80’s tolerated the surgery just fine.
To see if either of these techniques work for you there are 2 tests: a Bravo device and esophageal manometry, the bravo is a tiny acid sensor that is placed onto the wall of the esophagus right outside your stomach to quantify the acid leakage (because “a lot” doesn’t count), eventually it falls off and you poop it away. The next test (far more important in my book) is esophageal manometry. This tests the muscle strength of your esophagus to make sure after we tighten down the sphincter that’s you have sufficient muscle strength to push food through it (if you can’t that’s an emergency). That’s a simple, inexpensive but unpleasant test.
I will tell you all my family who have had it done are cured of their GERD symptoms. The reason all this happens is at the hiatus where the esophagus penetrates through the diaphragm is a hinge point of the soft tissue, so every time you breathe or swallow that connection flexes. After a few million times, a crack develops. Your stomach being an aggressively contracting muscle that expands frequently then has sufficient force to ram through the crack, which widens it (rinse, store, repeat). That muscle ring it’s tearing into is the muscle ring of the lower esophageal sphincter, now the sphincter isn’t round so can’t seal, so now you have pure HCL flowing around. The Nissen is a lifelong fix.
OK, you are all now board certified in gastroenterology.
I think I probably have a list of stuff that needs doing and covid put it all in a screeching halt as the hospitals filled with that. The back was supposed to be finished a year ago but one thing or another and it is not. Now we have that storm bearing down on us and the house needs work to reduce the possible damage as well and I am not sure which is more dangerous, the shelter or the storm.
Get them taken care of after you fill the bathtub…I hear it’s gonna be an active storm season. 
Spent all day yesterday helping mom get some prep items ordered. 
@henryhbk, thanks for that gastro quickie…she has started taking those OTC acid reducers and I’m not a fan of long term use of any drug, even if they are supposedly “safe” enough for OTC use. If I tell her a real doctor said it, it will carry some weight.
May I quote you?
I could read this stuff all day long. Absolutely fascinating and I never had any inclination to study anatomy or medicine. Maybe it’s how you word it? Very interesting.
The bathtub would never stay full but I have a bunch of those 1 gallon Lipton tea bottles, and those do.
Another benefit is the HCL kills the spiders that I inhale while i’m sleeping.
I did not realize this did predicting too…
The latest this evening Laura is headed your way next Wed with winds at 87mph by the nullschool map and rain at about a foot an hour near the eye 
