Beryllium cutting safety

[GSTT]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here. I used to visit a lot of watchmaking websites but kind of lost track when I actually got into watchmaking. This looks like a great source though.

My question:

I am currently heavily modifying a wristwatch. One of the things I would like to make is a balance wheel and a beryllium bronze one seems best suited. I have read a little about the safety of working with a material containing beryllium but I am unsure how this can be translated to the watchmaking field. I will be cutting the beryllium on a lathe and afterwards I will be filing it into shape. This will be one off so I unless I screw up, I will only be working on this for a few days.

Any thoughts about this are much appreciated!

Regards.
Gijs

[Ophiuchus]

Ok, this is very dangerous, as I'm sure you're aware. Anything with beryllium in it can cause sickness in even small amounts.

I would be very interested as well in hearing how anyone here, if they have, has worked with the stuff. I know Daniels and I believe Rodger Smith
have made some balances out of this material, but they have the financial means to put serious dust protection in place needed for this.

All I know is this: beryllium dust is highly toxic, and you must have a very good high exhaust HEPA filter at least to contain the stuff.
Keep it separated from normal metal shavings at all times, heavily contain the dust, and hope that someone near you has hazmat-clearance
or something to collect this dust for proper recycling/disposal. I would definitely cut this only under some sort of non-reactive cutting
fluid to keep down dust to as little as possible.

This is an excellent question, and I too would welcome some detailed answers to this, as I'd like to use it for balance wheels too at some point.
Are there practical ways for a watchmaker of non-extraordinary means to work with this material safely?

[whiskeybelly]

I've done a lot of digging on this subject and found a lot of conflicting information.

If you read the MSDS sheet it is the worst stuff on the planet. But then so is tungsten carbide, and almost anything else when splayed out on an MSDS.

Fact: pure Be can kill you in a very short time. The dust, when inhaled, and the oxides formed when heated are the most dangerous. It doesn't take much in the lungs and death can be within a year.

Pure Be, though, is rarely encountered. It is much used in the various industries dealing with nuclear devices, and as such is heavily regulated.

In horology and most other industry it is alloyed with copper at 2%. Here info on health issues gets murky, but the general line of thought from informed people (I discussed this with a engineer/machinist who worked on nuclear warheads) is the health risk is much much lower. The advice is to use a good vacuum when machining to collect chips, machine wet, and avoid grinding. If it must be ground grind it wet. The Be is bound up in the copper but is still nasty enough to do damage if you breathe it.

I've spoken with several CNC shops here in Switzerland who run it routinely and they didn't give it a second though. Machining is of course with high volume coolant and the chips are collected in a filter.

So, just use good common sense and keep it wet, and try to machine it right to shape to keep any abrasive steps to a minimum.

One last word of advice that I got from a couple of sources including Tempered's own Vianney Halter- don't get cut with it. The oxides on the metals surface do something funny with skin and the cut will take forever to heal, and in the worst case the area around the cut may have to be removed so that the uncontaminated skin can close.

[Smithy]

Thanks all for reminding us to take proper care with some of the materials we occasionally dabble with. It's all to easy to overlook these hazards just because we only work with tiny amounts.
Another example, from the restoration side of our work, is removing tritium and especially radium from old dials prior to restoration, another process that should requires adequate precautions to contain and filter the residue.