If the gloves fit - Why wearing gloves is a good thing. - Tool Tips

Spend any time working on an old car and your hands will get dirty. It used to be this real macho thing to not wear gloves while working on cars. “The pros don’t, why should I”. Well the pros do now. You can absorb chemicals through your skin and the stuff oozing out of your car engine, transmission and axles is filled with nasty chemicals. Which you should avoid getting into your body.

Black nitrile gloves, don’t buy the cheapest, but you don’t need the most expensive either.

Depending on the job I’m doing I use two types of gloves, a black powder free nitrile gloves in a 6 - 8 mil thickness. Not too thick you can’t work with them and not to thin they rip every time you touch something. These are good for the really greasey jobs, repacking an axle boot or using RTV gasket maker to reseal a pan. When you need to move on to the next task, you just pull the gloves off and get a fresh pair and leave any grease or RTV behind on the gloves, not smearing it everywhere else. Now the downside, your hands can sweat in these, especially in warmer weather.

Nitrile dipped gloves after being cleaned with dish soap, hang them up to dry and they are good to go for another job.

I’ve recently moved onto using cloth gloves with a nitrile dipped palm, you can buy them in packs of ten, while they don’t provide full fluid protection, they breath better. I also like that they give some abrasion resistance, so if you have a tendency to hit your hands on things while wrenching, these give some scuff protection. The other thing I love is that when these get dirty, you can use some dish soap and wash your hands with them on, they usually clean up pretty well and you can get few uses out of them. This means less waste than burning through basic nitrile glove so thats nice. I always keep a pair in my road side tool bag and a pair just in the back of the car. You never know when you need a pair of gloves.

-Andrew