Safety
Rags, cloth, and paper saturated with drying oils may combust spontaneously (ignite) due to heat released during the curing process. This hazard is greater when oil-soaked materials are folded, bunched, or piled together, which allows heat to accumulate and accelerate the reaction. Precautions include: wetting rags with water and spreading them away from direct sunlight; closing them off completely in water inside air-tight metal containers designed for such applications; or storing them immersed in solvents in suitable closed containers.
Although spontaneous combustion has been said to occur rags soaked in paint thinners, this is not true unless a drying oil is used as a thinner. However, classical paint thinners do not include drying oils. The danger is due to rags soaked in oil based paints, as it is due to the drying oils in the paints (or varnishes), not thinners per se unless they have been mixed with drying oils such as linseed.
Read more about this topic: Drying Oil
Famous quotes containing the word safety:
“A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion. He becomes a perjurer, all his thoughts and emotions being directed with reference, not to an accurate and just appraisal of the real world but rather to the safety and exaltation of his loved one, and the madness with which he pursues her, transmogrifying his attention, blinds him like a victim.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“Can we not teach children, even as we protect them from victimization, that for them to become victimizers constitutes the greatest peril of all, specifically the sacrifice—physical or psychological—of the well-being of other people? And that destroying the life or safety of other people, through teasing, bullying, hitting or otherwise, “putting them down,” is as destructive to themselves as to their victims.”
—Lewis P. Lipsitt (20th century)
“There is always safety in valor.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)