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  1. #16
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    Default Safety

    today I experienced a situation where a new member to our mens shed was attempting to trim a piece of material on the panel saw doing it the wrong way where he could have lost his fingers i have said he should not be cutting material without having a full understanding of the proper method on how how the machine can be used with safety'
    I am sorry to see the damage caused and only hope your wounds will heal
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  3. #17
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    Wishing Seth the best possible outcome from his unfortunate experience.

    I have a little rule that works for me - I still have all my fingers and thumbs and have not suffered an injury of any consequence in the shed.

    If I am feeling:

    -tired,
    -distracted,
    -consumed alcohol, or
    -just not in the right frame of mind

    I leave power tools alone and either do something else like clean up, planning, or get right out of the shed.

    If I make the smallest mistake in the shed I evaluate my ability to go on against the above points.

    I will never know if this rule has saved me from several accidents or none at all. It might have and that is good enough for me.

    I also know that I still need to be alert and work safely all the time. There is no 100% way to ensure that you do not have an accident, but we can all do the best we can to minimise the risk.

    I would hate to be sitting in the emergency room telling the doctor "That was my second mistake today. I should have taken the warning."

    Cheers

    Doug
    I got sick of sitting around doing nothing - so I took up meditation.

  4. #18
    Mobyturns's Avatar
    Mobyturns is online now In An Instant Your Life Can Change Forever
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    Quote Originally Posted by doug3030 View Post
    I will never know if this rule has saved me from several accidents or none at all. It might have and that is good enough for me.
    Great advice.

    That is the difficult sell about safety programs and hazard management - how do you prove that the safety prevention programs and hazard controls that were put in place did prevent an accident?

    At Turnfest I was discussing this very issue with the Mark Baker, editor of Woodturning magazine. He made a statement that in the USA for example there are approx. 16k members of the AAW yet over 1 million lathes were sold - where do they all go, who is using them? We discussed the safety topic at length over a hearty breakfast.

    The reality is that we don't have any reliable figures on how many hobbyists turn regularly, what they turn, how many man hours per year they turn, if they are injured, or perhaps even killed, we don't have any base line figures to work from. Injury statistics for Emergency Department treatment and Hospitial admissions don't drill down to the level of detail specific to wood turning, and in fact most don't even have coding for "wood lathes" etc. Fatalaties on scene don't get recorded in those stats.

    A few years back there were four deaths attributed to wood lathes in an 18 month period, one subsequently proved to be a metal lathe (Yale Uni), since then none to my knowledge
    and very few reported cases prior. From my research it appears that fatalaties from wood turning are very low they do occur regularly enough to be very concerning. So what conclusions can we draw from that small dataset? Why three in such a short period of time? Lots of questions, not many answers. Not much of any statistical credibility. We could postulate that modern more powerful lathes and turners taking advantage of their capacity and power to turn large blanks with lots of natural character are the cause - but the reality is we don't have the facts. We do know that the fatal injuries suffered while wood turning involved severe head trauma - so there is a message in that - avoid being hit by large fast moving pieces of a blank!!!

    With table saw injuries however there is overwhelming and irrefutable data on the staggering numbers and type of injuries suffered, the causes and mechanisms of injury, length of stay in hospital, estimated cost to the community etc and a very concerted lobbying effort to reduce the numbers of injuries.

    Only a fool ignores such conclusive evidence that we must implement reasonable controls to prevent injury.
    Mobyturns

    In An Instant Your Life CanChange Forever

  5. #19
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    Jan 2013
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    Default

    The problem is determining what are "reasonable controls to prevent injury".

    There is a mindset that says that every step that can be taken to remove risk should be taken. Which is fine so far as it goes I guess except that it takes away from the most important tool for injury prevention which is what lies between the operators ears. (Well that and a bit of luck) Tablesaws are unforgiving: You can guard them all you like but so long as you have a high speed rotating blade there are things that can go wrong that no amount of guarding or automatic shutdown can save you from. Do you really think that bit o plastic guard is going to stop half a TCT tooth departing at speed?

    The only way to completely safe a table saw or bench is to remove the blade and use a handsaw. Or remove the operator and use CNC controls. Then we can all get RSI and tennis elbow making great long ripping cuts if we arent rich enough to buy the CNC machine.

  6. #20
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    When an apprentice and learning my way around circular saws, one old tradesman told me, "Keep your hands well clear and use your head."

  7. #21
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    Apr 2012
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    Melbourne
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    Seeing this makes me appreciate sawstop even more...
    I know it is a bit more expensive comparing to your standard saw but then again... I rather replace cartridge and a blade and walk away with possible bandaid worthy scratch than not being able to use my hand for very long time..
    I wish Seth speedy recovery and all the best

  8. #22
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    May 2010
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    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by doug3030 View Post
    I have a little rule that works for me - I still have all my fingers and thumbs and have not suffered an injury of any consequence in the shed.

    If I am feeling:

    -tired,
    -distracted,
    -consumed alcohol, or
    -just not in the right frame of mind

    I leave power tools alone and either do something else like clean up, planning, or get right out of the shed.

    If I make the smallest mistake in the shed I evaluate my ability to go on against the above points.
    So... based on my rule above, I kicked myself out of the shed today.

    I was crosscutting some large pieces of recycled, very old hardwood, believed to be ironbark. I was using the Triton workcentre with the maxi-extension table, breaking down to oversized lengths for trimming after being jointed, thicknessed and laminated. The piece I was crosscutting at the time was 11' 6" long, 5.5" wide and just under 2" thick.

    So there i was about 3/4 of the way through the cut when there was a loud bang and the workpiece was thrown against my hands. I hit the emergency stop button with my knee. When I removed the timber from the blade the front of the cut closed right up very tightly. I must have released some internal tension in the workpiece. I finished the cut with a handsaw and made a mental note to treat that piece of timber with extra caution as the job progresses.

    I was quietly congratulating myself for following the right procedures, thereby getting away with something that could have been serious with no real problems as I set up to crosscut the next piece. I started the was and as soon as I advanced the workpiece into the blade there was another loud bang and I stopped the saw immediately - again.

    So what happened? Well the first kickback had dislodged the circular saw in the triton from the bracket that holds it from sliding along the mounting tracks and the saw had made contact with the aluminium at the back of the slot in the table that the sawblade pokes through. When I advanced the workpiece into the blade it pushed the saw back into the aluminium again, deepening the cut that had been made on the kickback.

    My mistake was, obviously, I had not checked to make sure the equipment was still ok after the kickback. Time to go and play with something that does not have 60 tungsten carbide teeth. Tomorrow is another day.

    Cheers

    Doug
    I got sick of sitting around doing nothing - so I took up meditation.

  9. #23
    Join Date
    Mar 2010
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    WallsendNewcastle
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    I wish Seth all the very best for his recovery.

    His story reminded me of how lucky I was with my little brush with my 12" table saw last week.

    While ripping about 1100 mm of pine with a push stick the wood stopped and I foolishly some how reached over the blade to move the wood and touched the still running blade. I removed about 2-3 mm from the end of my 1st and index fingers. The index finger stopped bleeding after 3 says.

    While I still have (nearly) all my fingers there are very tender on the end. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they get painfully bumped oh so very often!

    Unlike Seth I know my missing bits will grow back in a few weeks/months.

    Caliper Ken

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