Hands down, gloves offer best protection

Gary Willis has been fixing cars all his life. But you could never tell by looking at his hands.

He holds them out with pride. His mitts -- both sides -- are smooth and clean. They show almost none of the battle scars most technicians and body-repair professionals sustain working underneath damaged and broken vehicles year after year.

For many auto-repair professionals, saving their hands from injury and keeping them presentable for social occasions is a sensitive and rarely talked about topic. But, anecdotally at least, there's been a growing trend among technicians to protect their hands from caustic chemicals, sharp objects and other hazards on the job that can cause cuts, gashes, scrapes, scars and other problems.

"I can't go home all cut up," says Willis, who had been a body repair trainer at the former Prestige Collision Center in Burlington, N.C. "You have to take care of your hands just like you take care of the rest of your body. A lot of people think that just because they are in the automotive repair field, they can forget about taking care of their bodies. Well, guess what: If my body doesn't hold up, I'm not going to be in the field."

Steve Godziszewski, a technician at Marx Collision in suburban Detroit, a body shop that also offers mechanical repairs, wears gloves every time he works on a car -- now. But six years ago, he didn't.

One day a battery cable caught and tore out a fingernail on his left hand. Godziszewski bandaged his wounded digit, put a rubber glove on his hand, and went back to work. Then, he says, the wound got infected. Doctors eventually removed part of his finger. Godziszewski, a 39-year auto body repair veteran, says he's seeing younger technicians wearing gloves full time.

"When I started nobody wore gloves. Nobody," he recalls. "No one knew any better than to stick their hand into [lacquer] thinner."

The National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence, or ASE, which tests and certifies technicians, strongly encourages the use of gloves. But it is up to each dealership and repair garage to set its own policies, says ASE spokesman Dave Cappert.

Willis says his shop requires technicians to wear gloves and safety glasses. "You have to have those core values because you want your employees to be around," he says.

The liquids in cars -- radiator coolant, motor oil, battery acid, brake fluid, power steering and transmission fluids -- are poisonous. So are the chemicals most shops use for cleaning and for mixing paint.

"Time was it was real common for guys in a shop to wash their hands and arms in the solvent tank and think nothing of it," says Cappert. "That was almost like a black lung mentality -- that it wasn't going to bother me. But the fact is it does get into your bloodstream because your skin is porous. Incidentally, your skin is the largest organ in your body, and you need to care for it."

Another reason for hand protection has nothing to do with caustic chemicals.

Hybrids and electric vehicles can also be extremely dangerous to work on, especially those that have been wrecked, says Cappert.

But many technicians still don't wear gloves because even the thinnest nitrile synthetic rubber gloves can make such tasks as threading nuts onto bolts more difficult.

Gloves also make hands sweat, which makes technicians uncomfortable.

Companies such as EMM International, of the Netherlands, which sells safety equipment and supplies to garages and body shops, is seeing a spike in the demand for hand protection products, says Thomas van der Kooij, managing director of the company.

EMM offers numerous varieties of rubber gloves, including some that have powdered insides for comfort.

"We're pleased to see a new awareness that when techs are working on vehicles they now know their skin is in contact for many hours a day with things that are really not good for them," Cappert says.

"And when you add that up over the course of a career it can cause problems. Dermatitis (an inflammation of the skin) is pretty common with technicians that are exposed to greases and solvents."

Willis, the body shop trainer, says, "For me, there's life after work, and I don't want it looking like my body has broken down. I don't want to spend my time going to doctors. I'd rather be in the shop."

So in addition to keeping his hands covered, Willis does one other thing to keep his hands healthy. "When my wife goes to get her hands done," he says, "I go, too."