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  1. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by riverbuilder View Post
    “Based on another source ~40-45% of TS accidents are kickback related something a Sawstop won't fix.”

    this is a solid point, which shouldn’t be ignored.
    Thats right .
    And what the new user needs to be told straight away is kickback doesn’t just mean getting cleaned up by being hit with wood flying back at you . The big mistake people make is falling into the bad habit of reaching over the back of the blade and especially crossing the line of the blade while teaching over, to pull wood out while still standing at the front of the saw. Wood easily gets jammed doing this and the hand is thrown back through the blade when it kicks back .
    It’s a common Horror injury.

    It’s not just new users who didn’t know better. Some guys get slack even after learning the correct ways of use and doing it right for years. It’s the sort of accident that takes the thumb, index and middle finger in one quick hit.

    Some of the most important tips I can think of now.
    Don’t ever reach over the blade . Don’t cross the line of the blade except where you have to when feeding at the safe distance. Stand to the left and feed to avoid getting hit on kickback . Feed smaller bits with push stick . Hold the wood confidently and firmly when feeding . Walk around the back of saw to tail out and learn how to tail out by slightly lifting the wood as it leaves the blade. That’s very important when two guys are using the saw too. Take extra care when the blade is tilted . Things get jammed more easy and fly on kickback .

    There the main ones I think ?
    What have I forgotten ?
    Edit . knots and nails are dangerous. Invisible splits that release halfway through a cut is another .

    Ive made one guitar and I’m a full time cabinet maker . I couldn’t believe how much time was spent jig making for guitar work . And new jigs are required for each new design . The Table saw is great and fast and not dangerous if you use it the right way. You can really confidently pump wood through them when you get used to it and never get hurt if you stick to the golden rules . The kickbacks and wood jams will definitely happen but if you use it right you will be fine . Six months of owning one and asking questions and you’ll be an expert .

    Rob

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  3. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by auscab View Post
    It’s not just new users who didn’t know better. Some guys get slack even after learning the correct ways of use and doing it right for years. It’s the sort of accident that takes the thumb, index and middle finger in one quick hit.
    A timely reminder is this story.

    A friend of my parents had spent 45 years as a cabinet maker and was all set to retire within a couple of weeks and looking for a well earned trip around Australia in their newly acquired caravan. It was late Friday afternoon and it had been a busy week so he was tired. Everyone had left for the week end and he had been finishing off a job and then as a matter of routine he walked around the workshop and tidied up to his more meticulous level of satisfaction. He spied a couple of pieces of waste wood on a bench but they were a bit too long to fit in the firewood box so he went over to one of the TS and fired it up and cut them to length and switched off the saw and went to pick the pieces up and for some reason his hand touched the blade while it was still spinning down.

    Instant retirement!

    He spent the next three months in and out of hospital and never recovered full function of that hand. It was a year before the were able to go on their trip.

  4. #18
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    Feb 2007
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    blue mountains
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    Its always a never ending argument about what saw you need most. Table or bandsaw? They all cost good big wads of cash too. They both have their places and I found over the years that with both you find new things to do with them you never considered when you first got them. Its taken me a long time to build up the tools I have and I worked on advice I got early in woodworking of only getting a new tool or machine when you cant do what you need to do with the tools you already have.
    As to the safety side, any machine that cuts wood can cut flesh and bone no bother at all. They all need to be treated with respect and it is on the user to be fully aware of the risk and the proper safe usage of the machine. My first job just out of school was a sawmill and almost every sawyer in the place was missing a finger or two. That image always makes me think before any cutting gets done on any machine. The router is the thing I am least comfortable with so it gets extra respect.
    Regards
    John

  5. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Camelot View Post
    Bandsaws injuries can be very severe if the blade snaps and the broken end goes through your hand, I have seen this happen, the operator didn't bother to lower the top guard to just above his work piece, thus allowing the blade to travel wherever it wanted once it had snapped.
    Thats the first time I’ve heard of someone being injured by a snapped blade by an actual eyewitness
    I worked at Ballina Slipway and Engineering As patternmaker back in the 1970s
    Had to use an ancient no name 36” bandsaw in the shipwrights breakdown area.
    It broke a blade per week on me, they’d hit the table and spear off to the right if they didn’t get wrapped up in one of the wheels.
    I later trained students at both UNSW and USYD and when they gathered round the bandsaw for a demo would suggest those in the line of fire find somewhere else to stand.
    My replacement had at least two student bandsaw accidents due to use of metal cutting and wood cutting bandsaws without adequate training on the use of push blocks etc and the vastly different amount of effort needed to cut thru steel or timber.
    H.
    Jimcracks for the rich and/or wealthy. (aka GKB '88)

  6. #20
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    If a large roundish piece of timber is being cut on a powerful, low TPI band, bandsaw the piece can easily rool/rotate and self feed, plus the band can dive sideways. If your hand is in the way it can take off your whole hand. I though the self feeding thing would only happen in softwoods but it happened to me when I was cutting a spotted gum branch about 200 mm in diameter. It missed my thumb by just a few mm and happened so quickly it gave me a serious fright.
    It also put a bit of a double kink in the band which I was able to get out using a hammer and anvil followed by close inspection for cracks.
    For the next cut I attached the branch to some MDF with some Tek screws so that it could not roll.

    The big bandsaw mill at the tree loppers yard can be a bit of pants stainer. It uses a 50mm wide, 5.3m long 1 TPI band, and when that comes off the wheels under full power it makes a hell of a racket. I've done this 3 times but fortunately none of the bands have broken instead they wrap themselves in between the wheel and drive pulley and have to be cut off with an angle grinder. $240 a pop every time this happens - fortunately I'm not paying for them. The boss was of course miffed until he did the same thing and realised how easy it can happened if one is not careful.

  7. #21
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    This is it, isn't it Bob.

    I do work professionally that occasionally involves dips into workplace risk and analysis on safe systems of work.

    There is a view out there that if you know what you are doing and pay attention, then certain tools which can be dangerous, are rendered safe, and therefore that additional mechanical safety features and precautions are both unnecessary (or a variation is that are counterproductive as they take focus and attention away from user responsibility).

    That might be a user's individual experience but when you gather the data from a lot of workers over a period of time (typically best gathered in an insurance context) you see a more detailed picture. Also for every story of someone who has used a table saw without a riving knife or guard for 40 years and still has all their fingers, there is a tale like yours.

    When I was in the army reserve (early 2000s) the OHS requirements were so pervasive (and based on stories, a radical departure from practices up through to the late 80s) that they were regularly mocked and pilloried. The jokes were always trotted out about what we actually do about safety if we were having a proper war and being shot at. While I have not specifically researched it, it seems inevitable that the real reason is that the army counted up the costs it pays when a soldier gets injured or disabled, not only in paying for medical treatment and compensation, but also having to restore the capability after having spent $10,000's to $100,000's of thousands training each soldier or officer up (in cases of permanent disability), and worked out that given how darn expensive any injury is then it is absolutely rational to be pedantic about OHS. Not as a matter of modern sensitivity - but maintaining warfighting capability with the budget to hand.

    Chris

    Quote Originally Posted by BobL View Post
    A timely reminder is this story.

    A friend of my parents had spent 45 years as a cabinet maker and was all set to retire within a couple of weeks and looking for a well earned trip around Australia in their newly acquired caravan. It was late Friday afternoon and it had been a busy week so he was tired. Everyone had left for the week end and he had been finishing off a job and then as a matter of routine he walked around the workshop and tidied up to his more meticulous level of satisfaction. He spied a couple of pieces of waste wood on a bench but they were a bit too long to fit in the firewood box so he went over to one of the TS and fired it up and cut them to length and switched off the saw and went to pick the pieces up and for some reason his hand touched the blade while it was still spinning down.

    Instant retirement!

    He spent the next three months in and out of hospital and never recovered full function of that hand. It was a year before the were able to go on their trip.

  8. #22
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    Bob it doesn’t have to be low TPI and large dia.
    I watched the new professional officer push some 1/2” dowel into a 14” woodfast bandsaw with a 3/8” blade. Whilst lab craftsman at UNSW IA teaching lab.
    He didn’t have a tight grip on the dowel.
    The dowel spun, accelerated to the speed of the band climbed up a few inches until a tooth hooked it and broke the band when it returned to the table at speed.
    Was quite loud.
    He never came back into the workshop after that.
    H.
    Jimcracks for the rich and/or wealthy. (aka GKB '88)

  9. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cgcc View Post
    When I was in the army reserve (early 2000s) the OHS requirements were so pervasive (and based on stories, a radical departure from practices up through to the late 80s) that they were regularly mocked and pilloried. The jokes were always trotted out about what we actually do about safety if we were having a proper war and being shot at. While I have not specifically researched it, it seems inevitable that the real reason is that the army counted up the costs it pays when a soldier gets injured or disabled, not only in paying for medical treatment and compensation, but also having to restore the capability after having spent $10,000's to $100,000's of thousands training each soldier or officer up (in cases of permanent disability), and worked out that given how darn expensive any injury is then it is absolutely rational to be pedantic about OHS. Not as a matter of modern sensitivity - but maintaining warfighting capability with the budget to hand.
    That was a similar situation at uni. Problem was we started getting inexperienced OHS officers with basic health and safety degrees telling us what to in out expert areas which they really didn't understand. But I won't go into it too far because it just opens old wounds and is one of the reasons I retired early.

    I do recognise that some of the most difficult things for old pros to guard against is over familiarity and complacency. They've gone 20-30-40 years doing things a certain way and think - "It's worked so far I'll keep doing the same" and they don't recognise that there may indeed be a better way. If indeed the old pros had all the answers they would never get injured.

    But getting back to your story that reminds me of a case at uni when a lecturer fell backwards off a 4 wheeled office chair while leaning back to get something out of a filing cabinet. He smashed the side of his face on the cabinet drawer and injured his back. The pay out was huge as 4 wheeled office chairs had already been deemed by uni OHS as unsafe. The uni already had a program running for a couple of years to replace these chairs with 5 wheelers, but only at a rate of a few hundred per year. But the sums were a no brainer - if just one more person got injured the payout would pay for all the remaining 4 wheeled chairs to be replaced, so we all got new chairs. Sometimes you just have to cough up to save $$.

  10. #24
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    I "rescued quite a few of those from the skip and they live in my workshop. I've never fallen off a 4 wheeler, but then I don't lean backwards trying to extract things from drawers when getting my fat a.. airborne is trivial..
    I'm just a startled bunny in the headlights of life. L.J. Young.
    We live in a free country. We have freedom of choice. You can choose to agree with me, or you can choose to be wrong.
    Wait! No one told you your government was a sitcom?

  11. #25
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    Quote Originally Posted by damian View Post
    I "rescued quite a few of those from the skip and they live in my workshop. I've never fallen off a 4 wheeler, but then I don't lean backwards trying to extract things from drawers when getting my fat a.. airborne is trivial..
    The other way people were falling off those chairs is when skating from one spot to another (kick off with feet/foot and scoot across a room/lab) etc. Doesn't work all that well on carpet but works a treat on har lino. Problems comes if wheel strikes a low object, even a pencil or a cable is enough and WHOOPS over you go. We had 4 wheelers in one of our labs that had two large analytical instruments and I was zooming about 3m between the two instruments about every 5 minutes. I came off a few times but no injuries fortunately. Students in computer labs were sometimes running multiple computers and scooting between machines on 4 wheelers but that was only for about a year.

  12. #26
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    Sounds disturbingly like my lab, except I never skated around on a chair. I had about 15 XT's running at one point cleaning them up to repurpose for repeat calculations and other trivial things when they were headed for the rubbish.

    I actually SOLD a heap of old computer stuff a couple of years back. Seems young people are keen to play with old 286's xt's etc. I've got an apple 2 some old suns and an osboourne 1 I must get around to advertising....
    I'm just a startled bunny in the headlights of life. L.J. Young.
    We live in a free country. We have freedom of choice. You can choose to agree with me, or you can choose to be wrong.
    Wait! No one told you your government was a sitcom?

  13. #27
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    Go to sit and only catch the edge of the seat it won't matter a pile of beans how many wheels its got, you are down for the count and the chair has departed the vacinity.

  14. #28
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    I do get the some people dislike saw stops because it can make you laxed in regards to proper tool usage, but many of the stories in this thread if the technology was in the saw they had their injuries may have been nearly fully negated. Things like bits of wood getting caught dragging hands into saws may have saved some peoples careers. Also sawstops are also a pretty decent saw in their own right, high quality and accurate. I do wish they would relinquish the patent so it can be implemented in other equipment.


    but if you want the most bizarre OHS accident, A colleague at his old work place was reading the monthly safety reports etc at his place of work where it was reported that an employee received a cut to his eye.... because he was leaning too close to the piece of paper he was reading when he turned it and got a paper cut on his eye.

  15. #29
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    Quote Originally Posted by rustynail View Post
    Go to sit and only catch the edge of the seat it won't matter a pile of beans how many wheels its got, you are down for the count and the chair has departed the vacinity.
    It depends on how far from the edge you "catch". if you catch enough of an edge, a 5 wheeler will tend to tip less often than a 4 wheeler.

    Another factor I did not include was that the new 5 wheelers also had the wheels further from the centre line of the chair than the old 4 wheels which also helps.

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