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  1. #16
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    I have a full face clear shield. Full organic respirator. Unlimited Handgun shooters ear protectors.
    Leather bib-front welder's apron. That's almost enough.

    When you have been hit in the face with tungsten carbide saw teeth doing 180 mph, we can talk.
    Even abrasive cutoff disks turning 12,000 rpm really sting when they explode.
    I think my RotoZip turns 15,000+ rpm. I can't imagine a bit disintegrating at that speed.

    I have never drilled any metals in any of my drillpresses without eye protection. Never.
    I have heard metal chips hit me.

    Just experiences. Seems like it takes me 15 minutes to get all the safety gear on for a 2 minute job.
    BUT
    I have been hit in the shield with broken crap. It clangs off your head.
    Carry on, dude!

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  3. #17
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    One hundred years ago, timber was used to make prosthetic limbs. I can imagine it was fairly laborious to make each one individually (custom made) using primarily hand tools.

    Hope fully you won't need to make a prosthetic leg for yourself due to lack of PPE.

  4. #18
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    The week before last Christmas I put my chainsaw into my knee, surprisingly I didn't feel much pain but I sure as hell knew some damage had been done. Sure enough when I peeled the torn pants away from my knee a certain word escaped my lips. After I shimmied my way down the hill to my ute on my backside (every time I tried to stand I saw constellations), anyway after tearing my pants a bit wider at the knee I could use the clutch and drive to hospital. After some great work at Wangaratta hospital, a knee brace and some physio I went and bought the best chaps that I could find. I use them every time I use chainsaw, no matter how small the job.

  5. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Robson Valley View Post
    When you have been hit in the face with tungsten carbide saw teeth doing 180 mph, we can talk.
    An pin 3/8 CS chain at 13500 rpm = 104 km/hr = ~60 mph. Even a racing chainsaw would not usually go more than 100.

    Even abrasive cutoff disks turning 12,000 rpm really sting when they explode.
    I've gone through a couple of hundred of the 1mm thick ones and never seen one what I would call explode, most of the ones I have mangled usually break at the arbor and fall onto the bench. When maltreated a few pieces have come off but the surface area to volume ratio is so high these pieces rapidly decelerate. I found they sting but have never punctured skin, still a major threat to eyes. The thicker ones are something else but I rarely use them.

    Just experiences. Seems like it takes me 15 minutes to get all the safety gear on for a 2 minute job.
    Putting on chaps can be awkward but I found it much easier when I bought a pair of suspenders. Just clip the suspenders onto the chaps and then put the suspenders over your head and let the chaps dangle in fromt of your legs on the end of the suspenders, then clip up the 5 snap buckles. It takes ~15s to put them on.
    start.jpg

  6. #20
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    Bob is right, putting on chaps can be a bit awkward but I rekon it's a bit easier than than having to bandage up your leg twice a day for a month, then having to learn to walk all over again because you lost a whole lot of muscle and other stuff when the chain did what it was supposed to do but your leg was in the way.
    The chainsaw is about the most dangerous tool you can find for sale in Bunnings but you need no license to buy it and no training to use it. Strange, that.

  7. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by BobL View Post
    I've gone through a couple of hundred of the 1mm thick ones and never seen one what I would call explode...
    I have, whilst a couple of feet away from my face. One of the biggest frights of my life. My whole body was tingling with the adrenalin release, and realising that any damage may take a while to send pain signals to my brain in that state, I remember gently wiping my shaking hand across my face, neck and mouth checking it for blood. Thankfully there were no injuries.

    Suffice it to say, I bought a full face shield within a coupe of days and never use a cut of wheel without it. I prefer having my face and neck protected whilst using them now.

    Lance

  8. #22
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    Thought you might like to see this - it's is my home made thin kerf cut off table saw with metal dust extraction in action.
    That's a leather blacsmiths apron i'm wearing


    bestofthebest.jpg

  9. #23
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    Chaps saved my life once. Early morning and I'm walking into a big Rose Gum and about 30m short my chaps which weigh about half a ton with three days worth of sweat in them start to fall down. Drop the saw, axe, dilly bag, fuel and oil drums to adjust them up tighter, then start picking up my junk when BAM, the tree self prunes and drops a branch about as thick as your thigh. That branch would have weighed couple hundred kilos probably, and fell around 30 odd meters to land right where I would have otherwise been standing: aint no hard hat going to save you from that.

    So yeah, chaps saved my life once

  10. #24
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    Quote Originally Posted by BobL View Post
    Thought you might like to see this - it's is my home made thin kerf cut off table saw with metal dust extraction in action.
    That's a leather blacsmiths apron i'm wearing


    bestofthebest.jpg



    Hand holding stock while feeding it trough a "metal saw."

    No one in their right mind would attempt this on a table saw doing 6000 rpm. A grinder does 10k + rpm (no load).

    I very respectfully suggest that you invest in some toggle clamps and make some time to fabricate a "cut off sled" similar to cross cut sleds that are used on TS's. You even have the mitre track in the table top.



    I helped keep a mate sane after he tried to amputate his fingers using an angle grinder with a thin cut off disk when the first arrived on the scene. Many months of pain, no workers comp (at home), financial hardship, several ops and follow up surgery, rehab, no motorcycling, a very nasty depression, and for a very active bloke it drove him absolutely nuts! His wife would often give me a call - please take him fishing or something!!!! So a number of mid week night fishing excursions on Trinity Inlet. The consequences of the finger injuries plague him to this day and really hampered his enjoyment of his favourite sport - motor cycle observed trials - as it was his clutch hand!

    He was a highly skilled and very experienced aluminium fabricator at the time of his "event." The old "its only a quick job" grab the grinder, nip it off, then his whole life went to for several months. The disk bound in the cut, the rest is history!! His fingers were saved but they don't function all that well now.

    ….. that is only one of the real life events that have prompted me to use the signature line "in an instant your life can change forever."
    Mobyturns

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  11. #25
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    Back to the chaps …… definitely invest in them!

    As a surveyor working in very remote areas for over 30 years a chainsaw was a basic and almost indispensable piece of kit in my tool box. Many years back on a Friday arvo I finished up using the chainsaw, gave it the usual post use clean-up & service - drain fuel for transport (inside a troopie), thorough clean, remove bar & chain clean, sharpen reassemble etc. On the following Monday back on site recommenced the same task we were working on the Friday arvo. Ear muffs, hard hat with face screen, safety glasses, check! No chaps in the late 1980's!

    Grabbed the Stihl Farm Boss, fuelled up, DID NOT perform my usual pre use checks as I had fully serviced it Friday. Fired it up, commenced the lower cut for the scarf - then BAM! It took a little while to comprehend that the saws chain brake had activated when the chain had jumped off the bar, and had wrapped around to the inner thigh of my right leg! More what's, why's, how's!!!! Then reality set in, my newish King Gee long leg strides were quite badly ripped and had probably performed as safety chaps are designed to do - stall the saw! Next item on my self preservation agenda - what is the damage to me!! Thankfully only a few scratches from the "newly sharpened chain" or so I thought!

    After the adrenalin rush subsided I went into reflection mode and tried to work out how I had stuffed up! Then I noticed my "newly sharpened chain" was not so sharp, then on disassembly I found debris in the bar and cover that definitely was not there on Friday, and certainly no trees in my work area would produce saw dust like that!

    In those days we had a twice daily HF radio skeds for safety, so I made it very clear that the bastard that used my saw over the weekend without permission had better make himself very scarce when I get back to town as he may require facial reconstruction surgery when I see him!!! He had two weeks to mull over that.
    Last edited by Mobyturns; 5th November 2018 at 08:39 AM. Reason: auto edit removed text, my bad, so edited.
    Mobyturns

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  12. #26
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mobyturns View Post


    Hand holding stock while feeding it trough a "metal saw."

    No one in their right mind would attempt this on a table saw doing 6000 rpm. A grinder does 10k + rpm (no load).

    I very respectfully suggest that you invest in some toggle clamps and make some time to fabricate a "cut off sled" similar to cross cut sleds that are used on TS's. You even have the mitre track in the table top. ."
    I though that would make someone go . Most people that see it do the same. The folks that have used it admit is is much safer to use than an angle grinder.

    I have had a thin kerf wheel initially on a small TS at 2800 rpm and then on this home made saw since 2006 and never had any problems with them. I would class this machine as one of my most useful machines in the MW end of my shed. It's the ideal machine to cut small bolts and short pieces of rod. It's a far different animal to an angle grinder where a heavy unstable tool is waved at a piece of steel because the wheel is held firmly in place - It's the same as using a bench grinder or diamond tile cutting saw which I would hold a piece of steel/tile up to in the same way. I also have a diamond wheel for it for cutting steel but it has a wider kerf so I don't use it that often.

    The TS was limited to 2800 rpm but the home made machine has a step up pulley that allows it to reach 12000 rpm and it's not an angle grinder but a 1HP variable speed bench grinder so I can run it from ~2000 rpm to 12000 rpm. When using my hands to hold the stock I run the wheel at bench grinder speeds not because I'm concerned all that much about my fingers but because I have better control of the cut.

    Occasionally I do use the mitre slide plus also have a sled for it when running at the high speeds. It also has a spark guard that I used to before I started using the dust extraction system

  13. #27
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    Still hand holding the work piece though. In a workplace this would be a stop work order from a WH&S inspector.
    Mobyturns

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  14. #28
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    In my shed I don't take any WH&S regs as gospel, instead I analyse what I do and usually opt for the safer choice.

    I contend that holding down a piece of metal and waving an angle grinder with a blade free wheeling at 12000 rpm at the workpiece is more dangerous than the way I use my little saw. When using the saw the chances of damaging the disc are greatly reduced because the workpieces are small whereas angle grinders are much heavier than the workpieces I cut plus angle grinders have a high rotational inertia so are harder to control and keep steady even using two hands. Unlike angle grinders the cutting speeds I use are slow (~1mm/sec) and controlled much more easily than managing the weight of a high speed angle grinder. Most of the sparks are captured by an empty baked bean located can under the saw or the specially designed spark/dust catcher.

    IMHO angle grinders are loose cannons. They have one of the highest incidents of accidents of any DIY tool as they are too easily jammed, too easily able to cut electrical cords and many other parts of a human body and make great fire starters by spraying sparks all over the place. I have 5 angle grinders but rarely use them to cut steel because I have a metal cutting BS for larger stock and a plasma cutter for plate. The angle grinders are used for sanding/poishing and rust removal and with an Arbortech wheel. I went right off angle grinders for metal cutting when one jammed in a cut, broke the wheel and smashed my hand hanging onto the side handle up against the side of a workpiece and badly twisted the wrist on my other hand. I was wearing gloves so luckily I just got a few bruised knuckles but it could have been worse.

    A blanket rule of not being permitted ever to hand hold a workpiece is a typical bureaucratic lowest common denominator WH&S approach. There are many times when it is possible for an experienced operator to safely hand hold a workpiece. Let me stress the operator needs to be experienced. For example using a drill press, if the piece is long enough and the hole is small enough to hold the workpiece while it is being drilled. 90% of the long rip cuts I perform on my band and table saw are all hand held until the last 100 mm of cut when I do use push sticks. Same with fixed belt sanders and grinders - experienced trained operators can safely hold the workpieces being ground relatively close to the action on these machines.

  15. #29
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    Yeah well the problem Bob (and I agree totally about the OH&S lowest common denominator approach) is that there's a whole lot of guys who think they're experienced but they arent... and they see someone who knows what they're doing and think "hey I can do that" and wind up picking their nose with their second knuckle because thats where their finger now ends.

    I'm like that with chaps. Yeah I got a pair and yeah sometimes I wear them.... when I'm working by myself in isolated locations. But I am well aware that the biggest cause of death/ serious injury with professional timber cutters in central and northern QLD is falling object strikes EXCEPT when they wear chaps in which case it becomes dehydration/ heat stress. Because even lightweights aren't that lightweight, and that kevlar is a great insulator, and well... felling I consume about 3 gallons of water a day at the moment without chaps and i would be unable to hydrate as fast as I lose water in them. So like just about every guy in my position when working with someone about I have a formal risk assessment in place that says I dont have to wear chaps because the risk of wearing them is higher then the risks associated with not wearing them, and that approval covers me on state lands with ministerial approval and WH&S acknowledgement.

    But what I dont do is tell people not to wear chaps because yanno.... most of them wont ever have my level of certification or experience with a saw, and dont think like I do with a saw in hand about risk, and probably aren't trying to drop 40 ton a day in a sauna. So I tell my story about how chaps saved my life which is the only dammed time they've ever been useful, and mostly shut my mouth about the other 99.99% of the time because I dont want to encourage some idiot to bleed out looking at where his left knee used to be.

    Wear the hard hat, wear whatever eye protection you like, wear the boots, and wear the chaps... and thou shalt greatly improve your chance of making it home alive. For there are a lot of lowest common denominators out there, I become more and more sure of it every year.

  16. #30
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    John, given you have provided such a clear and sensible rationale I don't reckon you should avoid full disclosure about why you don't always wear chaps. You are not telling people not to wear chaps but why in some circumstances they can be downright dangerous. In fact I believe not telling them would be the wrong thing to do and if the bunnies can't fathom it I reckon they "deserve to be picking their noses with their second knuckle".

    One disclosure I rarely see regarding chaps is how limited they are in providing protection for electric chainsaws. Of course you don't tell people operating electric CSs not to bother wearing chaps but explain why they need to be extra careful when using them.

    We need to teach people to understand risks, perform proper risk analyses, and fathom things out for themselves because eventually they will come across something that is not covered by rules and regs and then they will be really in trouble. This is what I see these forums playing a great role in rather that blindly throwing in OHS rules and regs.

    Back in 2009 I wrote up a list of risks in rough order of priority that I determined for Chainsaw milling for my situation and posted these on the Arborist site.
    see https://www.arboristsite.com/communi...3#post-1890582 - I have reproduced it below.
    Have a look where sunstroke, chaps are UFO deportation are in the list.

    CS Milling Risk Assessment

    In rough order, my assessment of risks in my alaskan CS milling operations for green wood are;

    1) Driving to and from the milling site. Funny how we forget about this

    2) The Sun: In Oz, Skin cancer and Sunstroke are are serious risk.

    3) The next most dangerous thing is moving the logs, rolling logs around and setting them up on gluts using a loader. Risk minimization includes, leaving plenty of room around logs, orient the logs on slopes so they won't roll, using decent wedges to chock logs, always use two gluts and double wedge to reduce chance of rolling. Stay away from side of logs while setting up.

    4) Next most dangerous is lifting logs to create a milling slope. This depends on how it is done. Using a kangaroo jack represents high risk but even a loader has risks, and placing blocks and gluts under logs is dangerous as logs can roll off gluts and crush and operator. Same risk minimization as 3)

    5) Moving slabs, even though I usually use a mechanical loader for the big slabs they can still fall onto an operator and crush limbs and feet, back injury is another factor. Risk minimization includes, taking things easy, sliding rather than trying to lift, using knees rather than back, using a sack trolley, levers and cant hooks.

    6) Preping the logs. This is cutting off the bumps and lumps, bits of limbs etc with a CS. I do this will either a dedicated 066 or my 441. These saws MUST have all the safety fittings attached to them. Full PPE including Chaps MUST be worn during this time to minimize risk. If an operator only has one saw and they have to take the saw out of the mill to do this then obviously the saw has to have all the safety features still attached.

    7) Starting and ending the cuts. This is when the full bar is exposed and loose chains can fall off. This is also a whole topic in itself. Moving a running saw on and off the log represents high risk. This is why I use log rails for just about every cut. This means I can start the saw/mill when it is on the rails and I do not have then move a running saw. Same with taking the mill off the rails, let the CS idle for a minute or two and then stop the saw and move the mill. Just lifting my 73 lb saw/mill on and off the log without it even running also has a small risk.

    8) Milling ergonomics. Tired operators take shortcuts and make mistakes. A comfortable milling position that requires minimum pushing and fighting the mill is important in reducing operator fatigue. This is a whole topic for discussion in itself.

    9) Exhaust fumes: Standing for hours in a fog of exhaust is not going to do an operator much good in the long term. Minimization here requires things like minimizing lube use, tuning saw, exhaust modification and getting the wind behind the operators back.

    10) Noise - obvious

    11) Vibration: this depends on the saw. Old saws are still very capable of giving an operator white finger. Newer saws a better but better again are is remote throttles with soft vibration absorbing mountain bike handles or using a winch (although I don't like using winches for other reasons)

    12) Using fuel: obvious

    13) Lifting the log rails, my log rails are 4 x 3 m lengths of Unistrut joined by lengths of 3/8" all thread rod. There are very heavy but I think they are worth it.

    Then come things like cutting your hands while filing, bug bites, splinters, chain breaking, kick back, shark attack and UFO deportation.

    For dry and dusty wood, dust probably comes in around number 7) or 8)

    Remember this is my assessment your assessment may be different.

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