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Comment by TheJoeMan | Hacker News Reader

I once purchased lead weights online, and they came packed tessellated in a flat rate box. Shipper definitely got their money’s worth.

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Out of curiosity, what kind of weights were they? I was under the impression that it has been phased out of many uses because of high toxicity (including via skin absorption when handling it)

Exactly what I was thinking. Bet they're iron, about 70% less dense and a good supplement for your blood cells. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=densiy+of+iron%2Fdensit...

Lead weights continue to be widely used in diving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_weighting_system (there's a section on materials and toxicity).

They are, but as a diver I will never touch them unless they look in proper shape and are the types wrapped in some other material. Some fishy dive centers will have the old style raw lead blocks..

You breath TEL whenever you go near an airport. That's a far more pressing concern than incidental exposure through contact. If that's your threshold you may as well isolate from zinc and copper too.

That generally applies to small airports. Single-engine planes often use leaded gas, but the big jets don't.

Your risking your live going under water but are afraid of some lead?

In fishing too, although they are starting to be banned in some areas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_sinker

Does lead actually absorb through the skin? I always heard the main pathway was getting lead dust on your hands and then eating/inhaling that.

Seconding this question, as unplated lead is very common for handgun-caliber bullets.

It's also in the brass

Yes, wash your hands after handling gun rounds (especially after firing them). Both the bullets and the primers are usually manufactured with lead. Also, don't use shooting ranges with inadequate ventilation.

Yes, I do wash my hands with lead-off. That's to prevent me from ingesting the lead. My question was about skin absorption, not whether or not the lead actually gets on my hands.

people buy bulk lead for sailboat keels and such all the time, you just have to handle it properly.

I'm a tennis racquet tech (side gig) and we use spools of Pb tape for weight and balance tuning of frames. It's uncoated, so following installation I (a) scrub my hands down with a brush and dish detergent and (b) shellac the tape where it is on the customer frame with two coats of clear nail polish.

They make rubber adhesive strips with four or five wee bits of tungsten in them, but they are too expensive for general use, nor do they offer the precision you get from a continuous length of lead tape. They are also too thick to install on the handle pallet under the grip, which is no problem with lead tape since it's about 0.3 mm thick (rough guess, I haven't actually mic'ed it).

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