Franting About Asbestos 

Asbestos makes for absolutely fantastic gasket material for exhaust systems.

As someone who watched their father die from a combination of asbestos/lead (worked in removal of it for over a decade), welders lung, and smoking, you can't be afraid of the world around you, just use your brain, and be smart about it, avoid it where you can, and when you can't take the necessary precautions.

It is fairly safe in it's inert state. It is when you star busting it up and stripping it away that it becomes a real hazard.

9/11 : when the Twin Towers came down, much of lower Manhattan became heavily contaminated with asbestos and heavy metals. First responders and site workers have paid a heavy price medically for their bravery and hard work.

I remember those Bunsen burner pads from the science lab in school. Of course we were never told those were made from asbestos. And since the main building of my high school was built in the 1950s, I'm sure it was full of it. I'm also not too far away from the town of Manville, NJ that was named after the Johns Manville asbestos factory that once was there (torn down in the '90s and replaced with a shopping center). If that wasn't bad enough, Maville was also home to a creosote wood treatment site, which was replaced in the 1960s with a housing development and shopping center without doing any environmental remediation to clean up the badly polluted soil and groundwater. In the '90s the EPA came in and tore down the shopping center and some of the homes and removed 275,000 tons of contaminated soil.

Man, the USA is such a nice place. They still put asbestos in brake pads, exactly where you absolutely positively do not want any asbestos.

My house was built in the 1920's and the asbestos insulation has been removed, but after watching this video i realized that the wires in my home are still insulated in asbestos. This whole time i thought it was just regular cotton or something. Thank you for the information!

We still have a saying in the UK, if you can drink very hot drinks you were called asbestos mouth, lol

Asbestos is most dangerous in it's friable state. Otherwise it's relatively safe to handle. It can also be encapsulated with paint, when it isn't feasible to r&r it.

Asbestos is the best insulator ever discovered! Unfortunately it's a killer! In 1984 a co-worker and I had to shovel an entire boxcar, derailed train of asbestos in Barstow California behind the Barstow station. Maybe East 1/4 Mile? They did not give us anything except a paper mask, a snow shovel & a bunch of trash bags. It took us two days. I was 14 years old did not know anything about this stuff. I had to get my first work permit. Thank you California for looking after me!

We'll just deal with it asbestos we can.

Fran: Saving the world one video at a time!!! ❤️❤️❤️

A friend of a friend of mine wrote a nationally used guide for dealing with asbestos. He said the important thing is to keep the substance inert and out of contact with people. Particularly in schools, the problem tends to be that work crews may refurbish or rebuild walls, floors and ceilings without understanding that their methods can unleash the asbestos.

Have been around asbestos containing materials practically all my life. Didn't realize what it was until much later. I remember as a kid playing amongst discarded cement siding (Transite), removing floor tile with a scraper, knocking down loose acoustic ceiling tiles with a pool cue (for the hell of it), finding a box of wicking, and operating old stage lights. Also my great uncle was an inspector for the FAA and later died of mesothelioma.

Hi Fran! Thank you so much for this video. I just bought a 1933 home likely filled with lead and asbestos. I've been spiraling for days! Your video has eased so much of my anxiety around this. Seriously, thank you.

I once worked for a woman that was the head nurse at a mesothelioma ward in a hospital. She told me that every person that had treated in that ward ALSO smoked. She said smoking makes you draw the particles in deeper into your lungs and they almost always go together. I wonder if anyone else can corroborate my statement.

Taking sensible precautions and not overreacting is what the world needs a lot more of in general. Thanks, Fran!

Oh boy. In India, it's everywhere. Neon bulbs joints, joints inside soldering iron, electric inside heaters, roofing sheets etc etc And the roofing sheets aren't even handled properly, specially when they are cutting it

My father was a car mechanic in Morocco، they used asbestos for isolating truck, bus and car cabins from the heat coming out if engines. It was cut by hand to make it for. He worked with this stuff from the 50s until the 00s. His lungs are not doing great now but that more from smoking and but from asbestos.

I used to work as an asbestos lab technician testing all kinds of products for it, the most surprising thing I found it in is toilet cisterns which shouldn't really be that surprising as it can be found in over 3000 products and has been used for thousands of years. And the thing with talc as I understood it was that small amounts of Tremolite can form naturally in it. I actually quite miss working with it, it's fascinating material and it can be very pretty viewed through a polarised light microscope, in fact the most dangerous thing about working with it in lab conditions is the chemicals used in the RI liquids to identify which form it is.

My grandfather was a builder from the 50's through till the late 80s, basically the height of its use in the Australian construction industry. There were 3 builders in his small town, who all had men working for them. Somehow, he found out and knew about the dangers of the stuff. the other 2 builders and there crew made a boat load of money doing renovations. Pop never did renovations, he only built new spec homes (that were asbestos free). These other blokes made a shitload of money doing reno's, they had the cars the houses all of it, pop never made a great deal of money, and lost what he did have in a business deal that went bad and essentially died with nothing. These other two blokes died decades before in there 50s and 60s from asbestos, pop lived to 90. He lost a shitload of mates to the stuff. it is criminal what went on. I have always know about the stuff, long story short, I inherited an old motorcycle, everyone it basically born with the knowledge about brakes and clutches, and i took great care with that stuff, as far as i knew asbestos was only found in 2 places on bikes, I never knew about the gaskets. when it came time to do the motor everyone talks about soda blasting aluminium engine cases, when i did it, I still vividly remember thinking, jee wiz, they say baking soda is safe, but does anyone really know what happens bother short and long term when you inhale it so i wore a mask anyway, 2 years later I found out the gasket which i had half arsed scratched off with a screwdriver was asbestos. the thought of doing such thing now petrifies me. now I know so much about the stuff it is abit ridiculous, also every city has some background level, which means we inhale literally thousands of fibres a day, which represents about a 1 in a million cancer risk apparently, but i question that because there are areas with naturally high background rates and people living in those areas are exposed to more. my school had an old building that was essentially all fibro cement, i remember it had air quality monitors throughout.. which basically means it is in the air as the walls shed., across the road from school was a big industrial warehouse estate thing with 10 acres of super 6 roofing on it. in australia they used it extensively for water piping aswell which represents about a 1 in a 100,000 cancer risk. it is just one of those things.

When I was in high school we definitely had those asbestos wire mesh things for Bunsen burner‘s. And the teacher even said this is asbestos so be careful, yet they still kept them in the school

Did someone say asbestos? It’s due for a comeback. I can feel it.

Very nice - combining your technical acumen with a rant, combining your audiences. Excellent.

Growing up, the hotpads in the kitchen (for placing a hot pan on) all had asbestos on the bottom. The first calibration lab I worked in had a variable carbon pile load resistor. Slabs of carbon about 2 inches square and 1/2 inch thick supported by a solid asbestos tray. The asbestos insulated the pile from the metal framework. Wire connections on each end, and a screw on one end to compress or relax the pile to vary the resistance. Like so many other things, as long as you treat it with respect it won't be too dangerous.

I look forward to my regular dose of FranCam!

Asbestos was also used in filters for respirators. :-) Robertson once had a coating for their trapezoidal sheet metal which was called Galbestos, a 500 µm coating containing Asbestos as support material. There's one building in my town (a power plant from the late 1960's) that still has that kinda coated sheet metal on its roof and that building is located next to an Autobahn and is located in an industrial area. Two years ago we've been up on that roof for inspection and you cannot believe in which fantastic condition this old roof still is. This roof will easily last for another 55 years.

My memory of aspestos was my dad mixing a whole bag of it to make my train tunnel. I remember him sculpting it very carefully so there were places for little houses in the valleys and places for all of the artificial trees. Now I didn't read all of the comments I admit but I wonder if anyone else got to play with the x-ray machine in the shoe department. When shopping with my mother that was a real treat for my sister and I. We usually could be found x-raying ourselves in the shoe department.

Idea for video... Franting About Asbestos, but each time Fran says asbestos it gets 10% faster. :D

I've had asbestos removal training, and it's only harmful when asbestos dust is inhaled. Don't make dust with something made of asbestos(like cutting asbestos tile with a grinder setup with cutting disc or demolion of old construction where everything is asbestos containing ). If you wear adequate respiratory protection you are fine but dust contamination is always a HUGE problem(Contaminating clothing, home or work area.) Proper handling and disposal should be done by professionals.

I've recently scrapped a hairdryer, and it never occurred to me that it could contain asbestos. Turns out that I've just checked it out, and (yes!) it's used in the heating element for providing electrical and thermal insulation, as well as some mechanical support.

My grandma was a scientist and a big collector of rocks and minerals, and one thing she had on the shelf in the hallway was a big ol' chunk of natural asbestos. I always thought it was really cool. After she died, we found she also had a big like 1 litre glass bottle full of mercury. That was pretty awesome too. I was sad that my dad took it to the toxic waste disposal place.

Thanks Fran ! :)

This was a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be! Thanks Fran!

I think there's a distinction between things made of asbestos and things that can contain traces of it. the talc case boiled down to people using absurd amounts of it and talc itself containing traces of asbestos

Twenty years ago, I worked for a charity which gave support for those with Asbestos related disease. There was a client, lets call him Billy. He had a summer job in 1976, sawing insulating board for a job for a week. He was diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma aged forty. His rapid decline still haunts me. He died aged 42. A ghastly, horrible illness.

Good perspective, thank you

I agree about how much asbestos used to be in daily use. In my home when I was around eight years old, I can remember an asbestos teapot pad which was crumbling, spreading its fibres. Electric bar heaters had asbestos mounts for the bar. As well as that, water pipes were made from lead and I remember playing with my finger in the DDT dust, to kill flies, accumulated on the window sill. I gained a soldering iron when I was eleven when leaded solder was all there was and I have used one ever since. How did I manage to still be alive now I'm 74?

Thank you for helping raise awareness of this issue!!

3:11 I remember removing these tiles from our home, and several others when I worked construction.

I knew an old fella worked in the shipyards in the NE of UK before WW2, they used to lag the boilers with it. He said it hung in the air like snow and got into everything, he lived into his 70's.

When our labs were being re done a few years ago the work had to stop every 1-2 weeks because they would find extra asbestos that wasn't on the plans. Apparently it was crammed in as many places as possible, often for no discernable reason.

This was theeeeee best informational video on asbestos!! Thank you kindly 🙏

My school found out that the tripod stands used in our labs have that asbestos in them like the exact ones you mentioned. This was after everyone had scraped away at it... that explained the dust in the air afterwards. The whole school had to be tested for asbestos poisoning. To my knowledge, no one had it. The one thing they did say was we were more likely to be killed by the gas leak in one of the labs. We still use these tripod stands, just with the windows open now and no one picks at them now.

A great informative Video!!! Asbestos clad houses were built in Portsmouth UK during WWII (because of the air raids using incendiaries). My parents moved one to their property in 1967 and it's still there, being a garage workshop.

Don't worry too much about asbestos. That car that just drove by spewed, out it's exhaust, things just as fun. ;)

I purchased a roll of asbestos 50 years ago from our local hardware and still have most of the roll to this day. I was a 10 year old kid and used it on my mini bike exhaust to keep my leg from getting burned.

My school had those bunson mats. We use to use them all the time in science. This was in the 2000s. Have no fought they are still using them as most of the kit used in science was decades old. 80s - Shame there were no 80s computers left. I scoured that whole place looking for them.

When I used to be involved with asbestos abatement people would ask me if it was as bad as they say. My response was not unless you are one of the people affected by it. Then it is very very bad. You show a good understanding of the subject.

Asbestos is fine if you don't disturb it. Bakelite is manufactured from asbestos and formaldehyde, but it's only a threat when you grind it up or break it into pieces. I think the problem with asbestos is that the asbestos companies knew the problem with it, but did nothing about it for years.

Just finding out that Rust-oleum is adding disclaimers in their Talc paints that say they may contain asbestiform or non-asbestiform Tremolite. I sanded this primer paint in the past having no idea there was asbestos potential. They just recently added this statement. The world is getting nuts.

I will be wearing N95’s and P100’s (when they’re available) as well as gloves and long sleeve work shirt whenever I dig into old electronics form here out, I don’t really have any clue just how much asbestos I’ve been exposed to and I don’t think I really want to know. Thank you for the great video, very helpful!

How am I only just now discovering this channel!?!?!

Like the Godfather told Santino "don't tell anyone outside the family what you are thinking" BUT I had to tell you I absolutely adore your show !! Thanks Fran

Great video, i think that genetic predisposition also plays a big part in who succumbs to asbestos , smoking and drinking related problems

Good video, Fran. I’m one of the last ones who grew up with lead, asbestos, mercury, etc., so I don’t panic over it, either.

Hello Fran, I like your videos and have been watching them for a year now. Thank you for the technical information. You have a Great New Year. Jay :)

Darlene Coker, sued Johnson & Johnson in 1997, and alleged that the company's baby powder had given her a rare form of cancer, mesothelioma, which is closely linked to asbestos She died from mesothelioma in 2009.

We live in a complex world full of things. 5:20 Yes! I was thinking the same thing. Good overview 🎉

killed my dad, nasty, painful and - for a man who was active his whole life - humiliating way to exit this mortal coil

Nice and clear explanation, and you had examples I had never seen before ! Keep on Franting.

i live in a house built in 1972 and there are asbestos popcorn ceilings in some rooms so if we sell the house in the future it might be a good idea to inform the new owners not to disturb the popcorn ceilings if they want to renovate.

I work in a school that had to have that asbestos removed,from floor files to sealing tiles,insulation .it was used in car brakes,so many things,like you said glad it's going away.

I worked in plumbing and hvac for over 40 years, and I try not to worry about all the asbestos exposure I've had, not to mention lead, PVC cement, etc. I still try to limit my exposure now, but I know of a lot of fellow workman in the trade that died of various types of cancer. I'm retired but careful!

I see you are closing in on 100,000 subscriber nice!

Very interesting as always Fran. I remember being at school in London during the early 80's, playing with the fire resistant Bunsen burner mats. Braking them up and cracking them. We all did it. Asbestos every single one of them. How times have changed. Thankfully. 😁

The other thing to beware of in some electronics (high power RF: transistors, magnetrons etc.) is beryllia - you do NOT want to break or abrade it as it is highly toxic

In office buildings they lined the air duct work with asbestos batting so that the duct work wouldn't transfer sound office to office. Your air supply actually passed directly over the asbestos.

In the late 90s I rented office space in a downtown highrise that was undergoing asbestos abatement. The building was only 20 years old, but was having the facade replaced with new glass and fancy stone, and the asbestos in the interstitial space between floors. My suite was the last one to be done on my floor. When they were done, it was eerie walking the rest of the floor. It was stripped absolutely bare… all the wiring, telcoms, hvac ducting had been removed, and the concrete and steel remaining had been scrubbed to within an inch of it’s life. I had publishing deadlines I couldn’t push back, and had to work through the weekend they were scheduled to do the elevator lobby area. They built a sealed tunnel from my door to the one elevator they left operation on that floor. Airlocked and everything. I had been naughty and had popped up into the ceilding to run some networking cable, and the space was literally filled with loose blown cellusose+asbestos, and the ceiling and steel floor trusses were coating a sprayed on adhesive fibre coating for fire isolation. No wonder they were going to great lengths to remove it.

Thank you for this. Had no idea it was in core wire insulation.

Very interesting vlog Fran lab .

Interesting thoughts about asbestos. I didn’t know that there were so many appliances for it. And also nice to see a frant again. It might help the RU-vid algorithm to do the „right“ thing.

God bless the old Irish asbestos play area. Excellent poster!

I lived in Midtown Manhattan in the late 60s-70s and walked home from a bus stop that had me walking between three giant "new" office buildings being built at the same time. Exxon, McGraw-Hill and The Miller Bldg (now things are fuzzy-- all three had a near-matching strong linear facade -- and now Avenue of the Americas seems pointlessly over-insisted on...). I believe, this was just at the time when asbestos was sprayed on all the ope steelwork! I used to trudge on the street, between the hole-in-the-ground walls of plywood and the completely open diesel air compressors, lined up for most of the site. There was no escaping it either.

I agree completely! My best friends father who is like a second dad to me taught me how to restore antique electronics. Asbestos everywhere! Do you have any upcoming horology/watchmaking videos? Said friend is a watchmaker and after I showed him your pocket watch he gave me a really 1897-199 Elgin after as a token of appreciation. It means the world to me.

it's been 10 years since I had seen my first and last Asbestos Fire Blanket!

A frant a day, keeps the doctor away...

Thank you for an honest discussion. I have very much the same life and professional experience with this and other items frowned on today. I also agree with your view of the risk adverse nature of young people which also I believe contributes to a culture too afraid of failure and negatively speak or treat those who reach success after several failed attempts. Some of the greatest discoveries were made from mistakes and failures to achieve desired results early on.

I disagree with your statement about not knowing how bad asbestos and especially lead was. Especially lead in petrol, they did everything to discredit the scientist who pointed out how bad it was, worse than tobacco companies. Good video though.

Asbestos always make me think of this: Martin - "a state inspector found 1.74 parts per million of asbestos!” Bart - “That's not enough! We demand more asbestos, more asbestos, more asbestos!"

As a geology student in the 1980s, we had a field trip to Asbestos, Canada where we saw the mine, the mill, and the refining facility that was literally raining asbestos from the ceiling. No PPE in sight, to include on us. I didn't die, but acute exposure is less significant than long-term exposure. Generally, diseases from materials like asbestos are identified in an industry setting first where exposure is constant. While studying for my master's in international environmental science, I learned that the US has to have asbestos limits in drinking water due to the prevalence of asbestos cement in water pipes in the country. Other countries don't even bother testing since their pipes are made from plastic. An unexpected source of asbestos exposure is from old gas mask filters. Especially ones from Warsaw Pact countries where the use of asbestos in filters was common up to the early 1990s. Many people use these as cosplay for video games where the faceless minions often wear gas masks (the "gas mask mook" phenomenon). It is particularly worrying since they are right in the respiratory path and the filters are old, breaking down, and channeled right to your lungs. One way to tell fiberglass from asbestos was to look at it under a polarizing microscope. Glass in fiberglass is anisotropic and remains dark with no extinction angle while asbestos is a crystalline mineral that gives a colorful birefringence under crossed polarizers. As a community service in our college town, we would analyze samples and receive half credit for doing so over the semester.

I grew up in a house with asbestos shingles on the house (that are still there today, only painted over). Add to that the asbestos insulation on the pipes of the heating system. Old houses - asbestos is largely unavoidable. Like you say Fran, be cautious, excercise care, take precautions.

Canada still mines and exports A LOT of it still to this day...

In Sweden we banned the more dangerous asbestos in 1975, and 1982 we banned it totally. Today construction workers that still are at risk in Sweden so yes we still discover it in buildings and ventilation/insulation/tiles and so on.

Evaluating risk should in my opinion be public education in schools atleast for a segment of the population like me who stresses out of their eyeballs and panic about every little exposure to things like this. Yes these things, asbestos, lead etc are dangerous and should be respected as such and one should try to take precautions as much as possible but I feel many of us suffer far more greatly from the sheer stress and panic. I am a big example of this, I've probably shortened my lifespan more from thinking too much than any exposures I think I've had.

In elementary school I bought loose asbestos at the hardware store, then used it with water to mold projects for school. And "yes", all our pipes at school were insulated with asbestos... it was everywhere.

"Hi it's Fran, in the Frant Lab, Frannnnt Lab"

Hi Fran loved ur commentary. I was born in the 50s and I know that yes, there was a lot of asbestos.I do wonder if they used asbestos to build movie sets.I know they use it for snow.But I wonder if they used it for walls or powder for a fact.Would you have any idea

I worked in a building with asbestos fireproofing for years. They monitored it and at one point sprayed something on it to keep it from becoming airborne (the real danger). Honestly nobody really worried that much about it. .. as long as the testing looked good.

Again, this was interesting, when I didn’t think it would be. 📻👍🙂‼️

Asbestos Pre-Fabs left holes in city landscapes when they came down as most were buried on site and covered over. There's one I know no-one will touch and it was lived in til the early 1990s. I have asbestos flashing between the roof and the outside walls of my 1970s timber-framed house even now; costs too much to remove it. I remember my Grannies both had asbestos mats for the electric cooker hobs so anything simmering didn't get too hot....it's quite a list.

Most old toasters and hairdryers that I've seen used mica where Fran's pictures clearly show asbestos. Maybe asbestos was more expensive than mica over here.

Apparently the warehouse I worked in as a teenager had asbestos in and around the heating and air ducts. To make matters worse someone partially crushed one and it was never repaired so the dust was constantly getting blown all through the building.

I remember being in rooms that looked like a blizzard of asbestos when I worked for another company, no masks or nothing. When I found out how bad it was and said no more he just said, than go home, and I did. He cared so little that he had his children working in it also...

When doing refurbishment on my very old house I found virtually all of the original wiring was lead clad cable with a woven (possibly asbestos) material insulation beneath the lead and finally a copper wire conductor, my local scrap guy was totally unfazed weighed it and paid me. I'm in the uk and my house is well over 100 years old and is quite close to a factory that for decades turned out asbestos products......................I'm still alive......happily.

Well said, I used to deal with sustainability, health & safety. Building a safety culture starts with awareness and alternatives to poor material choices as well as safe handling. Everyone please educate yourself prior to handling chemicals and hazardous materials.

Thanks for the informative bad news Fran! :) I wish that I knew this 50 years ago! Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it would have made a difference since it sounds unavoidable.

I just got a hosue with asbestos duct work tape and I was so scared. This made me feel SO much better. I am just putting flexi-seal over it and then metal duct tape type stuff. If anyone has tips to better that encapsulating process PLEASE let me know.

I can still remember the furore regarding blue asbestos.

I recall at the start of the asbestos problem, my pathology professor said that there were 2 types of it, amphibole and chrysotile. The chrysotile form was the more dangerous type. He believed that mesothelioma was promoted when lung macrophages tried to clean up the pointy asbestos dust in the lung and couldn’t because of the physical shape and size caused the phage to die. That was 30 years ago and I haven’t kept up. I’m sure the etiology of the disease is much better known.