Do you wear gloves while planning?

[Carl Beckett]

Im in the middle of a batch of chairs from hard maple. Besides a reminder of just how much of a pain it is to work with hard maple, I started wearing gloves while planning.

Usually I dont like gloves at all. I like to feel the surface, the fit, etc. But for working down the surfaces/shaping the chair legs, its been useful having the gloves on. Just for handling the pieces with the sharp edges if nothing else (a 90 degree corner draws blood if you run your hand across it).

I keep flipping around between a smoother, a scraper plane, a scraper blade, a skew block, regular block.... and back again (tearout is the enemy on this stuff and I can never predict what its going to do - I havent found any one method to work on every piece, so its a roulette game to get it to smooth out).

Im a little surprised, but have been liking working with the gloves on (just regular leather work gloves - that fit proper).

[Patrick McCarthy]

Sometimes, if my palm on the back side of the knuckles is bothering me. Technically i believe it is the tendon sheath areas.

When my son was pitching baseball in high school i would catch his practice. I got a Franklin baseball glove (like a golf glove) that has a pad across the palm, and is worn inside the mitt to help cushion the impact from the faster balls. It helps ease the pain when planing if my tendon sheathes are in flamed or acting up. Also using it some when pounding nails during the remodel.

[Jim Matthews]

I wore gloves when prepping stair treads of Angelim Pedra by hand.
That stuff was prone to splintering and tear out - after the third finger tip splinter, I put on the gloves.

I would think that a fingerless glove for bicycling, or shooter's glove would be good for working with wood.
I had to take the gloves off occasionally to feel how things were going.

I like to think that my bloodthirsty projects will last longer for the sacrificial drops I have provided.

[Jim Koepke]

I mostly wear gloves during the colder month.

Insulite gloves with the finger tips cut off work well. They are a lot less expensive (at Grocery Outlet) than bicycling gloves.

jtk

[Sam Takeuchi]

I wear gloves whenever I'm using hand tools. I don't like how ebony dust makes my hand feel, nor do I want spots of finger grease on rosewood. Also my hands are generally safe from splinters and slight bump against edge of sharp tool (that is slight enough not to cause injury over gloves, but cause bleeding if without them). I don't feel right without them.

[David Keller NC]

I wear the inexpensive pig-leather gloves that come from the BORG the entire time I'm in the shop, and that includes working with power tools.

There are three main reasons - The first is that the only wood I buy is rough stock, and my hands are no where near tough enough to resist the punishment that the rough surfaces can dish out. The second (with hand tools) is to keep my sweat and skin oils off of the metal planes. Despite wiping the metal surfaces down with an oiled rag after I'm done with the tool, the L-N alloys in particular seem to rust if you just look at them wrong, and that's in a humidity controlled shop.

The 3rd reason is the power-tool case. While it is true that cloth or non-woven, high-tech textile gloves have the potential to pull your hand into a spinning blade if you make incidental contact, that's not the case with leather gloves. The leather will cut just like skin and flesh (a disconcerting thought, but there it is), so there's little additional risk to wearing the gloves. And I have considerably greater grip and control with gloves on, which makes an accident much less likely.

[John Coloccia]

I will often wear gloves, especially when I'm doing a lot of planing, carving, rasping, etc. If you just do it for an hour, it doesn't really matter, but if you do it all day several days in a row like I do, you can wear your hand raw just from guiding a rasp. I wear fingerless biking or lifting gloves. The lifting gloves are especially nice for using planes because of the padding in the palm.

[Ken Shepard]

After planing a large piece of rough-cut maple for a table top, I started to have pain in my wrists and fingers. My doctor suggested I wear weight-lifter's gloves to cushion the impact. These gloves, readily available at sporting good stores, are fingerless and have padding in the palms. Big improvement! I don't wear them every time I plane, but if I will be removing a lot of stock, or flattening a large piece of hardwood, I always wear my gloves.

[Trevor Walsh]

I think most work gloves would be too bulky to be useful in hand tool manipulation.

Gloves any power tools are horribly bad practice. The risk of a tool or spindle catching the glove and pulling a hand in is high. Every place I've worked/managed explicitly bans them any time power is used.

For hand planing or sanding/scraping I think something tight fitting like a golf glove would be the only possible glove solution. My hands are used to the work, I don't even like to use gloves when working outside digging etc. I'll use them if poison ivy, chemicals or particularly splintery wood is around but not during actual work.

[Dave Anderson NH]

I do wear them when using a rasp for a protracted period of time. I also use a glove on my guiding hand when using my L-N chisels since the sharp arrises on the flat of the blade will draw blood when used for any length of time. Handling rough cut lumber before four squaring it is also a good time for gloves and can prevent splinters.

[Jim Neeley]

Wow, I'd never have guessed that gloves would be as popular here as they seem to be. I like the increased sensitivity I get working without gloves.

[Trevor Walsh]

Agreed Jim, but I think my aversion mostly comes from an early introduction to workshop practices in a machine shop. The instinctive association I make between gloves and tools is high risk of sever injury.

[Jim Koepke]

Gloves any power tools are horribly bad practice. The risk of a tool or spindle catching the glove and pulling a hand in is high.

That is the main reason I cut the tips off of the fingers. I did have a quick moment of terror when a finger tip of a bulky glove got pulled into the lathe.

I tend to avoid gloves at the lathe now.

I might look for some of the lifting gloves since long periods of planing or sawing tend to cause some flair up in my joints.

I used to be into bicycling and really like bicycle gloves. The ones I had many years ago didn't have much padding.

jtk

[Zach Dillinger]

I never use gloves when working. My hands are pretty tough and I have built up the callouses necessary to protect them. I do draw blood every now and then, but its pretty minor. I've only seriously hurt myself one time and gloves wouldn't have saved me.

[bob blakeborough]

I dont like to wear gloves in my wood shop nor my automotive shop. I am very tactile when working and rely on touch to give me feedback on how things are working and gloves interfere with this. The only times I wear gloves is loading and unloading dump runs.. Haha

[Joe Cunningham]

Sometimes in the winter months or when I am working with rough stock, but not work gloves. I have an old pair of motocross gloves that fit nice and tight and have some palm padding. When I am planing rough stock I tend to work pretty hard and the gloves help keep my tools from exposure to salt from my sweat. [edit] I should add that I never wear gloves with power tools. But I hardly use power tools except my lathe and occasionally a circular saw.

[Zach England]

You guys are weird. If I did not have heated workshop space I would quit woodworking. I guess I am too much of a pansy. I cannot stand working when it is cooler than 65 or warmer than 75.

[John Coloccia]

I never use gloves when working. My hands are pretty tough and I have built up the callouses necessary to protect them. I do draw blood every now and then, but its pretty minor. I've only seriously hurt myself one time and gloves wouldn't have saved me.

For me it's more about carpal tunnel (and cubital tunnel too...lol) than anything else. The extra padding and extra tackiness of the gloves really help because I don't have to hold on as tightly and I can get my hands into a more comfortable position. It's also really helped my tennis elbow. I've been going through my processes and have been trying to machine as much as I can as opposed to hand work. I know a lot of luthiers that have really beat themselves up over the years. I don't know why it affects us more than most. I think part of it is that we're typically dealing with small pieces and there are very few straight lines, so there's rarely a comfortable way of working. It only started bothering me when I started building guitars full time.

One advantage to instrument work, though, is that I have a great excuse to keep my shop 70 degrees @ 40% humidity year round. :)