I do so little car repair (or other grease-dirty work) any more that any jelled hand cleaner I get turns liquidy – so, messy and not very useful – way before I use it up. I discovered that the spray-foam sneaker cleaner – available at the myriad “footwear” stores in shopping malls – works great. And it is even good for cleaning sneakers.
(My late Dad also taught me that I could use motor oil to dissolve the grease on my hands, then plain soap to take away the oil. But oil doesn’t work on all the kinds of dirt, and I have the sneaker cleaner by the laundry sink anyhow.)
+1 for gloves. I bring home used nitrile gloves from work. After I take them off, I just put them in my rear pocket. They would just get thrown out anyway, even though they are clean for just about any other kind of work.
I have one of the old wall mounted Go-Jo pump dispensers and the hand cleaner seems to stay homogenized indefinitely. A regular size container lasts me many months if not a year. I really don’t recall when I last replaced the can. Once you shove a dirty hand into the cleaner it will begin to seperate quickly.
Sherwin Williams paint sells a product called Liquid Glove that can help to keep hands clean but it can be a pain to deal with. And there is a cloth tape made specifically for wrapping fingers when doing rough work and it keeps grease from getting under the nails. The tape was available from NAPA’s industrial supplier Motion Industries.
For hand cleaner, I think a handful of full strength dish soap lathered up and then a scrub brush followed with hot water cleans as well as most hand cleaners out there. If you’re doing auto repair and have a can or two of brake cleaner handy that will also dissolve most of the greasy grime on your hands, but some people find that their skin is sensitive to that.
In the shops where I worked Joe’s Hand Cleaner was always provided and it works great.
At home I keep a bottle of Dawn dishwashing soap around for hand cleaning. With the really nasty, hard to get off gunk I use a bit of Dawn combined with a dash of Comet scrubbing powder.
Lava soap works well too. I personally think the jelled hand cleaner works well even after it is liquified. I have a large jug of Orange DL hand cleaner with grit I have been using for probably 20 years.
Like Rod I have the Go Jo dispenser and lasts for years. I also use gloves and keeps the grease out of my fingernails. One thing with the shoe cleaner is that you may want to check to see what exactly is in it. With certain chemicals you can go for years being exposed to it with no problem then all of a sudden you reach the point of being sensitized to it and can never be exposed again without a problem.
I knew a guy who flew and fixed powered parachutes, and he recommended using shampoo–but only the cheap stuff.
He reasoned that shampoo had strong detergents in it to remove the natural oils in human hair. Better-quality shampoos have aloe, lanolin, etc in it, to try and restore a healthy degree of oil to the hair, which is why he stayed away from them. Just something with detergent to rip it ALL out. (For obvious reasons, also not a “combined shampoo/conditioner,” either.)
I tried it: it worked acceptably well, I suppose. Not as good as pumice-based cleaners, but probably as good as dish soap, which was always MY standby, if I didn’t have any Orange with Pumice handy…
Just a couple of years ago some guy (a.k.a. yokel…) here in OK left a pan of gasoline on the kitchen stove with the gas being used to clean a few parts and his hands.
The ensuing blaze wiped out the trailer house. That’ll teach him to roast a chicken in the oven with gas parked overhead…
That’s worse than the woman here who set off a number of bug bombs in the 3 BR brick rental home she had moved into. She activated the bombs and took off for a few hours while they did their job.
She failed to read the instructions about shutting off A/C and heating units, pilot lights, and so on.
The A/C kicked on and the resulting explosion blew out most of the windows and doors including the 16 foot wide garage door.
Another great cleaner . . . this one for cars that will take bugs and road tar/grease off is cheapo dryer sheets. Put one in a spray bottle and fill it half way with plain water, then get another dryer sheet and after spraying the mixture on your car finish, wipe with the other dryer sheet. Works like magic, no kidding. My favorite hand cleaner is gojo, cheap and easy, buy a plastic tub at the farmers market for a buck, lasts me awhile. Rocketman