On Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:40:36 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:

question, I own a home and just started renting a room out to a friend. I have been helping him sell some gadgets online (he makes them himself). he purchased hard plastic tubing to make the items (it's pretty small tubing). he buys the tubing in bulk. he uses pure acetone to remove some manufacturing numbers that are stamped on one side of the tubing. he uses a cotton swab and dips it in a pint bottle of pure acetone and then uses the swab to blot out the stamped number. I think that's great. however, he's doing it on my living room floor which concerns me. and what concerns me even more, it he spreads out some newspapers to work on and lets the area of the plastic tube dry (the area where he blotted out the stamped number). is this safe? sorta safe? or not safe at all? and when I say safe, I mean safe on the living room floor of someone's home. I really thought laying newspapers under it is a stupid idea. I know nothing about pure acetone other that I read it is
flammable. my roomate just told me it was fingernail polish remover (which women use all the time in the house) so it should be no big deal to use in the house. all responses are much appreciated. I asked him to take it outside, but he told me he would be extra careful. it's starting to get cold where I live (that may be one of the reasons he doesn't want to take it outside).

thanks

I have some but not much experience, and no academic knowledge.

I think it depends on the details. How many instances of the stamped
number are on each piece of tubing? If the tubing is one foot long
it might be one or two, but if it's 10 feet long, 10 or 20. How many
pieces of tubing.

I'd guess, guess, that it takes about as much acetone to remove one
finger's worth of nail polish as one instance of the number and girls
do 10 fingers at a time. OTOH do they use Q-tips, which hold a lot
less than a cotton swab? I forget. It's been 30 years since I had a
girlfriend who used to remove her nailpolish, it seemed like every
day, in front of me.

When I use acetone, I close the bottle as soon as I wet the cotton,
because it will evaporate right out of the bottle, and so I won't
spill it. Does he do that? I think I would have him keep his
bottle, esp. when it's open, in something like a dishpan, the kind of
rubber pan as big as two loaves of whiite bread side by side. Then
if he spills it, he can take the whole pan outside, pour as much as he
can back in t he bottle and spill the rest on the ground., I have
used dishpans this way.

Maybe he can put the tubing in there when he's done with it and have
it rest outside too, although there may be no point to that . The
acetone probably has evaporated within a minute, so there is nothing
to dry. .

Maybe for the whole project he could go his bedroom and close the door
and open the window for the 15? minutes it takes to do all this? If
you don't smell it in the rest of the house, you'll know it's not
getting there. He could do it on the bed with a dishpan to hold the
bottle of acetone. Check a part of the pan to see if acetone
dissolves.

Although of course if you do smell it and stop smelling it, it may
well only mean your nose sensor for that smell is tired. How long
does it take until a nose stops sensing a smell, 15 minutes? Isn't
that why a person doesn't know when he has bad breath or body odor?