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I went on a H&S HAVS presentation sometime ago and was amazed that there is no recognised standard you can rely on for real results. It depends on the person, tool vibration and finally the gloves.
Maximum improvement was 30% reduction and minimum was an increase of 5-10% vibration but was not consistent! We were told never to use gloves as a primary control factor in reducing HAVS exposure.
In my years we've never found a really effective set of gloves - with the only criteria we could use was how 'comfortable' they were.. ;(
So, are they our equivalent of 'Snake Oil' ?
You could well be right about the snake oil thing Gary. I did a similar course on HAVS and the company i worked for graded the kit into colours with exposure time. Hedge cutters and Blowers were the worse but this is going back 10 years ago to you would have thought that more would have been done by manufactures! I'm using Stihl kit at the moment and only professional stuff. I was hedge cutting yesterday and it just got me thinking.
Maybe the answer is to buy a good pair of work gloves and try to fit my work around trigger time?!
The colour coding still get's used especially if you Hire gear in.
We use it somewhat and allocate a colour to each of our machine types.
Stihl made massive improvements with blowers - just compare an early BG55(?) to the newer BG86 that has a totally insulated handle....and I'm sure other gear has improved as well.
We were taught that grip, temperature & wet gloves have a massive effect on HAVS (white finger syndrome) and the worst exposure is typically with Tree guys and those using tools like pneumatic breakers etc as everyone else would typically be changing gear thus have a 'rest' period.
There's still massive differences in the Stihl lineup. The BG86 is excellent as you say. Yet the BG56 for £30 less is so bad regarding vibration that I'm surprised it's legal. The HS45 vibes are nasty, but the HS56 much better.
All Stihl's vibration data is available online -here.... including the Red, Yellow, Green risk classification guide spoken about above.