potentially hazardous material precautions

What potentially hazardous materials have you come across on these planes that you take a little extra care working around?

- backstory -

I bought a bunch of screws as replacements for ones I've stripped a bit while removing & replacing various panels on my RV-3B. I'm new to this stuff, so for part numbers I found the wing inspection plate fasteners specified in the plans as AN509-8R8.

On receipt, I noticed they were bronze-coloured vs the stainless items they were replacing. I read up on why one would use cad plated steel, and why you'd use cad plated vs stainless: galvanic corrosion prevention, and 125000 psi tensile strength vs 80000 psi. I also read up on Cadmium Poisoning on Wikipedia.

It's probably overboard, but I think I should be careful with the dust if I strip a cad plated screw - I really don't want to breathe that stuff in or ingest it. I've noticed other bronze-colored hardware inside the panel/interior, and I'll be more careful washing my hands after working with that. I'll also minimize buying cad plated hardware as much as I can considering I don't want to bring more of it into circulation / eventually end up as scrap.

I learned this one pretty cheap - a few dollars. I'm curious - what other potentially hazardous materials have you come across on these planes that you take a little extra care working around?

You?ll have trouble minimizing the cad plated hardware - it?s pretty standard, for the anti-corrosion and anti-galling properties you mentioned. But in normal use you don?t generate Cd dust. Any plating that comes off is left behind in the nut?s threads. I would advise a dust mask if you need to cut or grind one of these fasteners. As to other hazards: the worst is probably paint, starting with the acid etching primers up to the highly toxic top coats.

Cad plating is standard on AN bolts unless is corrosion resistant or aluminum bolt. Those are both pretty rare in structural areas.

Cadmium plating has been the industry standard for AN bolts pretty much forever. You're not going to get away from it unless you never touch another airplane.

Lead, when drilling the counterweights
As noted, all the liquid stuff...Acid prep, alodine, paints...use a good mask and gloves, at least

If the stainless hardware was on the exterior the builder probably put them there for both esthetic and corrosion reasons. If they were on the interior they might have been for magnetic reasons.
The fact you mention replacement due to some stripping is pretty normal for stainless hardware. Keep plenty of new stock on hand and just toss the old ones as they become worn. I have friends who just order a slug of new stainless hardware to have on hand as part of their prep for annuals or condition inspection when they will inevitably bugger up screw heads.
In an effort to remove toxic cad plated hardware from your airplane, do not go on a wholesale replacement with stainless binge. Be cautious where you put stainless vs a structural cad plated steel fastener.
As others have noted, you won't easily find non-cad plated aviation hardware. Even most hardware store bolts/screws have cad or zinc plating.

One unexpected hazard was the fine aluminum dust created when I used my disk sander to sand out the tooth marks on the parts I cut with my bandsaw. It's so fine it floats in the air for a while. I expect that using a Scotchbrite disk would do about the same thing.

Dave

Don't forget about Tetraethyllead that is in your tanks. Maybe a hazmat suit is in order for each flight?

Many hazards are only that when continuous exposure rates are above certain minimums. Osha standards are usually set for 8 hours/day for the whole year.

Perhaps someone on this forum works at an aerospace assembly company and can chime in on how their firm limits potential cadmium exposure for people handling AN hardware a couple thousand hours per year.

Pushing the throttle forward and leaving the earth is a much more hazardous undertaking than handling a few cadmium plated parts a handful of times per year.