Does anyone have a really strong allergic reaction to nickel silver?
I was organizing my copper and stainless foils last night, and I stumbled upon a piece of nickel silver, or german silver, that is a useful solderable material that covers low frequencies, unlike copper. This was a old unfinished partially finished shield can that I stopped working on a decade ago. Anyway, I had to bend it a little and use a rolling pin on it to flatten it out for storage. Since then I moved onto just doing stainless shields, which I torch braze, rather then nickel silver (its expensive compared to the free stainless sheet rolls I found a while back... I am not keen on buying more nickel silver, but it is convenient since you can easily solder it).
And today I have a rash on top of my finger, it looks like little bumps and its fairly itchy on top of the length of the finger. I put some ointment on it.
I semi regularly handle both the copper and stainless foils without problem, but the nickel silver was untouched for a long time. It consists of zinc, copper and nickel. I suspect it because when I was sorting my materials nickel silver stood out as the odd ball material of the bunch. I think I rubbed my fingers on it when I was flattening out a bend with my knuckles before I got the rolling pin to sheet it.
It just seems bizarre because i regularly use stainless steel and copper stuff without problems. Could it be a zinc metal allergy or some problem relating to the alloy? It feels a little bit like a bad itchy shave, but obviously I did not shave my fingers.