Thread: "flash" from using cheap helmet??

I have come up with another possible cause of the problem.....almost too embarrassing to think of but I'll give it a go! I know all the young blokes out there will be saying "silly old fart", but wait, your turn is coming! As stated earlier, I have 2 helmets. The helmet I was using on the day of the eye injury is my older one that has to initially be turned on manually by push button and turns off automatically after about 10 mins of no welding. Maybe????? because I was in bright sunshine I did not notice that the auto-darkening had turned off, and then continued welding without the auto darkening activated.
In the workshop you notice straight away if it is not on because you cannot see the job but in bright sunshine the job is quite visible without turning it on!!!!

My newer helmet does not have to be manually turned on at all. Easy to get confused.

I think you're talking to an audience of old farts here, there but the grace of god type of thing.... I did something similar when tig welding at 10 or 15 amps. My old helmet goes down to 8 but my new good one only goes down to 9. So i used the old helmet and thought it wasn't much use, not easy to see the puddle at all and i was having to squint funny to see what I was doing. The new helmet has Xmode which detects electric field and cuts in at even low current, but the old one doesn't so it turned out the shade wasn't cutting in at all. I found out you can actually weld at 15 amps with the shade not working if you squint, although it wasn't deliberate. Anyway, your helmet should stop UV even if the shade is switched off, plus you would get both eyes affected most likely. I'm not convinced by the other theory that your eye got a UV reflection coming in the back of your helmet, because you'd most likely get a visible light reflected the same path and you'd know all about it. I have another theory, you might want to read up on iritis. About 10 years ago I walked past a demolition site and got dust in my eye. it started watering later and by the middle of the night was agony. I was sure I had glass fibers from the demolition dust, stuck in my eyeball. I went to the eye hospital in the middle of the night but they couldn't find anything. They give you drugs to dilate the pupil which made the pain go away. Anyway, because i was certain it was something in my eye, it was years before i got it diagnosed as iritis. I get it once or twice a year always in my left eye only. In my case its due to sarcoidosis. Iritis is a symptom of an autoimmune response, so even if that's what you have, it doesn't help you much to know it, because you don't know what's causing it. In my experience with doctors, if you have anything more complicated than a broken arm, they look at you as a new set of golf clubs or a holiday in BoraBora. Test after test and no diagnosis. Anyway, you might find it comes back, and it might have nothing to do with welding. The dust was enough to aggravate my iritis, and just oridinary welding could be the same. Just another theory though.

Originally Posted by gpigeon

I have come up with another possible cause of the problem.....almost too embarrassing to think of but I'll give it a go! I know all the young blokes out there will be saying "silly old fart", but wait, your turn is coming! As stated earlier, I have 2 helmets. The helmet I was using on the day of the eye injury is my older one that has to initially be turned on manually by push button and turns off automatically after about 10 mins of no welding. Maybe????? because I was in bright sunshine I did not notice that the auto-darkening had turned off, and then continued welding without the auto darkening activated.
In the workshop you notice straight away if it is not on because you cannot see the job but in bright sunshine the job is quite visible without turning it on!!!!

My newer helmet does not have to be manually turned on at all. Easy to get confused.

In a related way one of my helmets has one shade setting knob and another switch that sets the ranges of shade, 5 -8 for plasma cutting and 9-13 for welding and I sometimes find myself wondering why things are too dark or too bright.

It's still strange that you only got the grittiness in the one eye.

Originally Posted by gpigeon

Maybe????? because I was in bright sunshine I did not notice that the auto-darkening had turned off, and then continued welding without the auto darkening activated.
In the workshop you notice straight away if it is not on because you cannot see the job but in bright sunshine the job is quite visible without turning it on!!!!

That sounds back to front to me. Your helmet is dark then goes darker in use?

When the auto-darkening failed on one of the ones here, the arc was white, was sort of like looking at a star with a cross effect - pretty unmistakable I would have thought. Biggest problems with the cheapie helmets seem to be battery life, solar's die within a short time, year or less perhaps in my use, replaceable batteries last months rather than years, that you see on the expensive brands.

Yet another possibility.....at the time of the welding, a levelling laser was also operating. I do actually recall seeing the revolving red light at one point! Have any of you heard or experienced retinal burns due to these now fairly common lasers?

btw. 90% of the soreness has gone from my eye after 6 days but I still have blurred vision in the affected eye. I read that blurred vision can last up to a year with a burned retina whereas the burned cornea repairs itself after a few days.

I have been flashed very quickly with just a laser pointer. You really know about it, your eye gets overwhelmed with red light. Plus your blink action would save you from a lot of damage, because its visible light. I didn't have any issues afterwards, but you would certainly remember if you got flashed.
Your symptoms sound very like my iritis. Just in case it does come back and you've not been welding, consider going to an optometrist to get it diagnosed when it first comes on (where you get your eyes tested for glasses). From your location, I doubt you would get to an eye hospital easily. If you go to the gp, he will send you to an Ophthalmologist and you'll need to wait days for an appointment. It gets hard to diagnose if its not at its worst, even thought the pain lasts for days. Get to an optometrist immediately, and they should be able to diagnose it, and subsequent specialist visits will be much easier and cheaper to get you treatment. Drops will get rid of the pain in half the time, and you get to know when it is coming on and using the drops early will make it much less severe. You won't get proper drops until you are diagnosed because they can do damage if they are not needed. No-one told me about optometrists until after years of me complaining that no-one could help me, because it was gone by the time i got to see a specialist. I still wasn't diagnosed because it always came on worst friday night and no chance to see anyone. The best thing is if you can get to an eye hospital immediately. Hopefully it never comes back though.

On the matter of glass polycarbonate or anything else blocking UV or any other damaging radiation ........ they simply don't block enough.
Both Glass and pollycarbonate may have what seems to be low transmission of UV ........BUT it is not enough.

The notion that anything even semi-transparent blocks all light or all UV or even "nearly all" is simply false

It's not enough to prevent the curtains fading, prevent sunburn and certainly it is not enough to prevent UV damage to the eyes during welding.

The amount of UV produced by welding in particular MIG and TIG is massive a small persentage of a massive amounts is still more than enough to burn your eyes

Here is a bit of a relativity

A shade 8 lense equates to about 10 camera F stops each F stop is half the light of the previous stop the tenth F stop is F:1024 .... that is 1/ 1024 ... or less than 0.1% light transmission.

As we all know if you are welding too hot for your lense shade you can get eye damage.

Shade 10 is approximately 1/10 000 light transmission about 0.01%
Shade 12 is approximately 1/32 500 light transmission about 0.003%
Shade 14 is approximately 1/262 000 light transmission about 0.0004%

Now when we are talking about MIG and TIG, they produce far more UV than stick welding because the arc is unobscured.
To give some relativity .... a good friend did a session of fairly heavy TIG welding on cylinder heads without an apron ..... when he looked in the mirror after his evening shower, he had the print of his shirt pockets buttons and seams on his chest ... that was a cotton drill shirt.


With MIG and TIG in particular you need all the UV protection you can get, the shade filter alone may not be enough, you need the UV protection offered by the clear lenses in the filter stack ..... that is what they are there for.

Please please do not underestimate the amount of damaging UV produced by MIG and TIG ..... and please do not overestimate the protection provided by you safety equipment.

cheers

ANSI Z81.1 2003 and above state that 99.9% of UV and IR must be filtered regarding of settings on a welding helmet. I read this on a 3M welding helmet spec, but i've lost it now. I don't have access to that standard for free so I can't quote exact words. There's plenty of references to this figure on the internet. All my helmets claim to be ANSI z81 compliant.
Here's Lincoln electric on their own welding helmet
"Many people mistakenly think that the lens shade number corresponds to the amount of protection that is provided to the eyes and hence the higher the number, the better the protection. But in reality, all well-constructed quality welding lenses, have a screen that filters out 100 percent of the harmful ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) wavelengths and provides protection to the eyes."
I guess they say 100% of harmful are fitlered because the 0.01% is not harmful.
Welding Helmets and Eye Protection

The issue of UV outputs in welding has been hammered out before in this thread //metalworkforums.com/f160/t198...ts-ok-outdoors

If you are interested have a look at the last two pages where I present some research data on comparisons of UV exposure to an operator by various welding methods.

FWIW from the ANSI standard

Shade 10 can have a max luminous transmission of 0.023% , a nominal value of 0.0139%, and a minimum transmittance of 0.0085, but a max for far UV transmittance of 0.001%

Shade 14 can have a maximum of 0.00044%, nominal 0.00027, and a mimimm of 0.00016, max for far UV transmittance of 0.0001%

AND

The near-ultraviolet average transmittance shall be less than one tenth of the minimum allowableluminous transmittance except for clear lenses

Originally Posted by sossity

ANSI Z81.1 2003 and above state that 99.9% of UV and IR must be filtered regarding of settings on a welding helmet. I read this on a 3M welding helmet spec, but i've lost it now. I don't have access to that standard for free so I can't quote exact words. There's plenty of references to this figure on the internet. All my helmets claim to be ANSI z81 compliant.
Here's Lincoln electric on their own welding helmet
"Many people mistakenly think that the lens shade number corresponds to the amount of protection that is provided to the eyes and hence the higher the number, the better the protection. But in reality, all well-constructed quality welding lenses, have a screen that filters out 100 percent of the harmful ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) wavelengths and provides protection to the eyes."
I guess they say 100% of harmful are fitlered because the 0.01% is not harmful.
Welding Helmets and Eye Protection

Not so, see previous post.
UV protection is 0.1% for only the first 3 shades which no one really uses, for shades after that the UV transmittance drops steadily
I have a copy of the ANSI standard which is the same as the AUS standard and the max far UV transmittance at shade 10 is 0.001%, Shade 12 is 0.0004% and shade 14 is 0.0001%

This is necessary because the UV output function for all welding increases primarily as a function of current.




UV output increases by a factor 10 between welding at 50 and 250 A. so greater eye protection is needed.
Note how MMA (stick welding) produces high levels of UV. The reason TIG produces higher levels of sunburn probably results from operators working much closer to the weld.

If anyone is interested I can post the complete ANSI shade table.

Thanks Bob, my bad. I missed that whole thread somehow.

It bothered me why so many helmet manufacturers claim UV and IR protection regardless of settings.
When a company like 3M specifically claims that the UV/IR filter is the same regardless of settings, I couldn't believe they making false claims. I don't know where the 99.9% came from, that could be technical writers doing their marketing thing.
I finally spent some time and got hold of ANSI Z87.2003

I've highlighted below the relevant section of ANSI Z87.2003 which I think the helmet manufacturers are working to. Table 1 which it refers to, I think is simply a list of transmittance for each shade number.

10.12.3 UV and IR Transmittance
Automatic darkening welding filter lenses shall be tested in accordance with section 14.12. The test specimen shall meet the requirements for UV and IR transmittance as specified in table 1 for its designated dark shade number. An adjustable shade lens shall meet the table 1 requirement for its highest designated dark shade number. The test specimen shall be tested in the dark state, light state and unpowered at a temperature of 23°C +/-2°C (73AOF +/-3.6°F)

My interpretation of this is that the UV/IR transmittance must ALWAYS meet the requirement of the highest designated number. There is no provision for it meeting lower numbers even if it is set to a lower number anywhere in the standard (by my interpretation)

If you think about it, why would they not incorporate a fixed optical bandpass filter completely separate to the LCD screen? At first I thought the better manufacturers were doing this anyway, but having got hold of the standard, I now think it does cover the requirement.

The standard also says words to the effect that the UV/IR filters should not be removable by the customer, so my interpretation of that is they must be incorporated into the LCD screen module.

Table 1 shows that if your variable shade welding helmet goes as high as shade 14, there should be at least a fixed 64dB (or 0.000044% if you prefer) bandstop filter covering near UV.

The table only gives a maximum allowed value of transmission for far UV but the standard says near UV must be less than 1/10th of the value for visible light, so that is what determines the actual value of filter required.

Or am I wrong again

Originally Posted by sossity

10.12.3 UV and IR Transmittance
Automatic darkening welding filter lenses shall be tested in accordance with section 14.12. The test specimen shall meet the requirements for UV and IR transmittance as specified in table 1 for its designated dark shade number. An adjustable shade lens shall meet the table 1 requirement for its highest designated dark shade number. The test specimen shall be tested in the dark state, light state and unpowered at a temperature of 23°C +/-2°C (73AOF +/-3.6°F)

My interpretation of this is that the UV/IR transmittance must ALWAYS meet the requirement of the highest designated number. There is no provision for it meeting lower numbers even if it is set to a lower number anywhere in the standard (by my interpretation)

That's not how I interpret it. The way I read it is, if an adjustable helmet provide levels up to level 13, it must meet all 13 levels to meet the standard. It can't just meet the standards up to level 12 and then be sold as meeting the standard up to level 12.

Table 1 shows that if your variable shade welding helmet goes as high as shade 14, there should be at least a fixed 64dB (or 0.000044% if you prefer) bandstop filter covering near UV.

The table only gives a maximum allowed value of transmission for far UV but the standard says near UV must be less than 1/10th of the value for visible light, so that is what determines the actual value of filter required.

Or am I wrong again

That bit sounds right.

Hmmm, it is talking about UV/IV transmittance (the title of section 10.12.3) and it says a variable lens must meet the table for its highest designated shade. It doesn't say it must meed the requirement for its current designated shade. Plus, there is no reason to make the LCD screen more complicated and have to filter UV separately. it makes a lot of sense to use a fixed optical bandpass filter for visible light only. I'm kind of thinking the LCD screen would benefit from being protected by the UV light which is much higher power level than the visible light. It surprised me how much higher the UV light was from your graphs.

Originally Posted by sossity

The test specimen shall be tested in the dark state, light state and unpowered at a temperature of 23°C +/-2°C (73AOF +/-3.6°F)

Just what does this part mean? That even is the filter doesn't darken it still needs to pass the test?


Stuart