How many times can Jake Frith get away with wearing one pair of single use gloves? He tries the Black Mamba disposable gloves
Black Mamba disposable gloves tested on messy boat jobs
Nitrile or latex workshop gloves are an undeniably useful thing to have for any messy jobs that require a reasonable level of dexterity.
Usually though, the slightest nick in the gloves and they split open, often meaning they don’t even last one job.
A friend with a gardening business put me onto these much better Black Mamba ‘Industrial Strength’ nitrile gloves.
While a pack of 100 nitrile gloves usually costs around £10, these are twice that, but apparently last five times as long, rendering them a worthwhile buy.
Having used them for about six months on jobs ranging from fibreglass repairs to sanding and an engine strip-down, I have been highly impressed.
While they are supposed to be single-use, I reuse them (come on, we all do it!), often up to five or six times.
The Black Mamba disposable gloves were great for dexterous jobs like handling glassfibre. Credit: Jake Frith
If they get a small nick in them on the job, they usually don’t split.
To reuse them, I blow them the right side out again so whatever was on the outside stays there.
I recently wore a pair of Black Mamba disposable gloves for a messy job on my Swift 18; the addition of a hardwood reinforcement prop behind the keel from the sole to the front of the cockpit.
The trailer-sailer bouncing about on its trailer had caused small movement cracks behind the keel box that this hefty mahogany prop would help solve.
Handling scissors to cut fabric reinforcement, applying messy epoxy and smoothing fillets were all jobs where it was handy to wear the one pair of gloves.
Dexterity seems fine with these, so indistinguishable from thinner, lesser gloves, and the job went well without me ending up with sticky epoxy all over my hands.
Plus, the gloves lived to fight another day. I pulled them off, leaving them inside out, and then the next day, blew them the right way round which meant all of the cured epoxy sprang off.
Buy Black Mamba disposable gloves from Amazon