Cut resistant gloves are gloves designed to protect the wearer's hands from cuts while working with sharp tools. They can be divided into metal mesh gloves, cut and sewn and seamless knitted gloves.
Metal mesh gloves are made of rings of stainless steel and are typically used in food applications, see chainmail for details.
The cut and sewn gloves can be made by a cut resistant material or by conventional materials with full or palm lining of cut resistant materials. The materials are cut to pieces and sewn into a glove.
Seamless knitted gloves are knitted in one piece by a flat knitting machine. The cut protection is provided high performance materials such as Para aramid (Twaron, Kevlar), HPPE (High Performance Poly Ethylene, Dynema, Spectra), special PVA yarns (SupraBlock) or steelfibre and fibreglass yarns. Thick gloves are usually knitted on a 10gauge machine while thinner and more flexible styles are knitted on a 13gauge machine. The gloves are usually coated with solid or foamed Latex, Nitrile or Polyurethane.
Cut resistance has many dimensions such as force, direction, sharpness of the blade, length of the cut and flexibility of object. Different products should be evaluated in relation to the expected type of cut risk and environment that they are expected to face. It should be noted that the cut resistance in the standards described below as well as resistance to scissors cut has no or limited correlation.
The cut resistance is evaluated by the EN388 or the ISO 13997 standard. The EN388 use a circular rotating blade of 40mm diameter that rotates against the direction of movement. The blade is moving back and forth over a small distance of about 50mm with load of 5N. The numbers of cut cycles are recorded and compared to a cotton control fabric. The cut resistance is rated between 0-5 depending on the number of cycles; “0”=0-1,2, “1”=1,2-2,5, “2”=2,5-5,0, “3”=5,0-10,0, “4”=10,0-20,0, “5”=20,0.
The ISO 13997 based on an American ASTM standard use a razorblade with higher pressure that is pushed along the test specimen. This is also a Japanese JIS standard in addition to the standards above.