Comment by sevensor
You don’t wear gloves when you work with HF? You are banned from my lab. 8 mil nitrile. Always check for cracks and pinholes before use.
You don’t wear gloves when you work with HF? You are banned from my lab. 8 mil nitrile. Always check for cracks and pinholes before use.
The MSDS at https://www.nano.pitt.edu/sites/default/files/MSDS/Acids/Hyd... doesn't specifically mention to avoid latex, so it wouldn't be a useful source of information on this point. One of the four times that it mentions gloves, it does specifically specify "neoprene" (not latex nitrile), and the other three times, it doesn't say anything. Even though neoprene is strongly HF-resistant, rereading the MSDS is probably going to be worse than useless to the Etsy moms.
Conventional wisdom is to not wear gloves when working with HF, as pedvide points out. It may not be to your advantage to ban people like pedvide's advisor from your lab, especially if at some point they're refereeing your papers—though, at least from my point of view, there should be no such personal-offense considerations involved, it would be unsurprising if someone were insufficiently detached for such a personal snub to prejudice them against you.
My teaching lab was for undergraduates who were etching oxide off of silicon wafers in a big old tub of hf. We’d have them wear a big thick apron and massive gloves; this is not an occasion requiring dexterity, and it’s one with a high potential for inadvertent splashes. We never had an exposure in the years I was there, although a grad student in a research lab got careless and took a cold, rusty shower.
Part of my PhD involved lots of fluoride synthesis using HF. I always used gloves (changing them very frequently). My advisor never used them for the following reason: if a droplet of HF lands on your glove you won't notice, but HF will go through the glove. If it lands on your bare hand chances are you'll notice it and wash them immediately. I could never follow his advise, but I did change gloves pretty much every step in the synthesis just in case.