Thread: Safety frustration at the mens shed

Originally Posted by rustynail

Any organisation that takes on pretty much all comers is going to have its problems. How management deals with this will determine the level of success enjoyed by all.
A friend of mine died recently and left a shed full (read over full) of top line tools and machinery to his local Mens Shed. I hate to think how abused this equipment is going to be as it falls into inexperienced hands and hope the organizers have the sense to limit the onslaught. But I doubt it.

interesting
I've recently rejigged my will and the thought crossed my mind to leave all my tools to the mens shed (my sons don't seem that interested)
I made up my mind when I saw a fellow sheddie using a chisel (probably a Titan) and thought to myself - That could be one of your Harold & Saxons - he was removing nail plates from some timber we were recycling
Somebody wept
I'm bequeathing my tools to my uninterested son.

Originally Posted by rustynail

Any organisation that takes on pretty much all comers is going to have its problems. How management deals with this will determine the level of success enjoyed by all.
A friend of mine died recently and left a shed full (read over full) of top line tools and machinery to his local Mens Shed. I hate to think how abused this equipment is going to be as it falls into inexperienced hands and hope the organizers have the sense to limit the onslaught. But I doubt it.

Is it a selfish notion to deny these sheds quality tools when you know that in the main the tools will not have the respect in usage that you had for them.Many years back when one of our sheds was in the process of setting up ,I offered a lot of tools that I could well manage without,I was subsequently told that they would only sell them as their offerings were a plenty,that they had enough to go on with & that they would only on sell any extra that they had.

Originally Posted by John Saxton

Is it a selfish notion to deny these sheds quality tools when you know that in the main the tools will not have the respect in usage that you had for them.Many years back when one of our sheds was in the process of setting up ,I offered a lot of tools that I could well manage without,I was subsequently told that they would only sell them as their offerings were a plenty,that they had enough to go on with & that they would only on sell any extra that they had.

Yep that's a pretty common situation. I am in fact the main valuer/advertiser/seller of our Shed's surplus gear on gum tree and usually have 5/6 items for sale at any one time. Our shed has a protocol for selling - firstly its offered at bargain basement prices to members. I don't have a problem with this but I do have a problem when a member is really buying it for a relative or friend or perhaps to onset (and they expect me to repair it before it's sold!) but this is near impossible to police. If it doesn't sell it is offered to other mens sheds at a medium-low price. We have in fact given away truck loads of gear to other mens sheds. Then the gear is offered for sale to the public on gum tree. If that fails the gear is scrapped. Most hand tools are near worthless in this situation - we have given some away to a women's prison and other institutions.

Most of the gear is old and well past its use by date but some is still serviceable. The older blokes have unrealistic expectations of prices especially on Welders and most of these have ended up as scrap. At one stage we had a 4 drawer filing cabinet full of old spanners, many were rusty pressed steel jobbies for specific machines - someone got serious and cleaned most of these out, and I recently managed to extract a near full set of real Whitworth spanners from the stash.

Originally Posted by Sawdust Maker

........ I saw a fellow sheddie using a chisel (probably a Titan) and thought to myself - That could be one of your Harold & Saxons - he was removing nail plates from some timber we were recycling
.........

But Harold & Saxon are great paint tin openners!



Cheers

Graeme

Originally Posted by BobL

On Fridays I am supposed to supervise/coordinate the mens shed and we generally get about 15-20 attendees.

We have a full safety induction, safety notices and signs, safety features in the newsletter, reminders etc.

Here is a list of potentially unsafe activities I noted today.
- using a wire wheel on a bench grinder with just regular eyeglasses
- using a jointer on small stock with no push sticks.
- using a screw driver as a push stick on a table saw
- fiddling around with stock under an RAS with the arm fully extended and the blade running
- not an activity but a donation from a member - a half dozen files with the the ends ground for wood turning.

I'm quite a bit younger than most members, and I was not a tradie so don't have that credibility, so it's not that easy for me to convince the culprits to do the right thing.
Does anyone have any ideas about how to get their attention about this?

Do yourself a favour leave I did this as a job for 18 years in a community centre and after having to hold a guys severed hand on until ambos arrived the board decided to send =me to trade school to get my papers If you are lucky like I was you will have willing retired tradies willing to sign on your indentures. i was required to sit an exam to see what i already knew and then they based my training around my shortfalls I was 40 at the time. And maybe its time for your board of management to do what our centre did and fork out the cash for Tafe lecturers to come in and do basic machine training look after your own backside if something goes pear shaped badly they will be looking for a scape goat. And the severed hand was on a radial arm saw he passed the wood through then held it with his left hand and crosscut with the right. thankfully he defended me and explained he had a temporary black out, I got a letter from him thanking me for the first aid they had to save his hand as the other side was partially crippled from a stroke. Do youself another favour get first aid training, And good luck

Originally Posted by pete101

Do yourself a favour leave

I stopped supervising about 16 months ago so no longer have that responsibility. I'm still a member and mainly undertake special projects for the shed which I do mainly in my shed at home. I go in about once a week for an hour or so to pick stuff up and drop things off and have a coffee with some of the members, and try not to look too hard.

Originally Posted by BobL

I stopped supervising about 16 months ago so no longer have that responsibility. I'm still a member and mainly undertake special projects for the shed which I do mainly in my shed at home. I go in about once a week to pick stuff up and drop things off and try not to look too hard.

I got out totally.

It is very unfortunate that the situation in the "shed" gets to this sort of decision point as members in supervisory roles feel vulnerable to potential litigation / prosecution. In my experience those members are also the types who like to "pay it forward" , to contribute and have generally prepared well for their retirement so may have reasonable assets worth "going after."

Wether that is a real or perceived risk does not really matter! What matters is capable, skilled, proactive members who are making significant contributions are left to feel vulnerable, at risk, unsupported and often ostracised by a significant portion of the membership and are often lost for good never to come back in any circumstance. Not good for the club or the mental wellbeing of the individual members.

Whilst collaborating with others from wood turning clubs across QLD on how to address these issues and provide workable solutions for introducing, monitoring, and training members on "working safely" it became apparent to me that there are many and widely diverging expectations from the executive, committee & supervisors on what that means and how to do it.

Some clubs went the path of having one member "accredit" each member on each machine before they get their "permit to use it" - personally I believe that practice places that member at quite some personal risk should events go pear shaped as the incident (severed hand) above illustrates. Raises all sorts of issues re competence to assess, train etc.

I promoted the notion of collaborative support and peer group "pressure", divorcing membership from access to the workshop facilities, and placing responsibility on the member.

BEFORE and then to gain access to the workshop facilities, tools and machinery, a member had to

• participate in a safety awareness session,
• read the clubs policies and "safe operating procedures" (SOP's)
• undertake separate SOP inductions on the 14" & 24" bandsaws, lathes, grinders, etc which could be conducted by a range of members in any workshop session
• approach and seek support from a range of members who were prepared to mentor and supervise inexperienced members,
• comply with instructions / directions from the workshop session supervisor,
• sign a declaration witnessed by any two current members that they agreed to comply with the clubs policies, to use the clubs assets per the "SOP's", and understood that their access to the workshop facilities may be revoked if they chose not to comply.

There was not going to be a system of accreditation of their competence to use a machine by other club members, but there would be ongoing assessment of their abilities and compliance with the clubs policies by their mentors and supervisors who would initiate "on the job" training at the time they noticed issues.

Through the two years or so that we collaborated each system had its successes and failures, and I believe each could work well with a suitable range of member/s skills and committee support.

The "collaborative support" approach that I favoured was well regarded by the few current and retired legal practitioners that I spoke with as it spreads "legal risk" and promotes and demonstrates a proactive approach by the executive and attitude in all members plus clearly defines expectations, responsibilities and the consequences of not complying with what are essentially commonly accepted basic hand tool, power tool and workshop machinery inductions.

The single failing - "committee support" ; well a second, standardizing / normalizing the supervisory and mentoring practices across sessions. Both issues that can be addressed.

In the local club a small clique decided that they would not comply and the committee folded when it came time to address those issues and withdraw their workshop access.

Generally the collaborative support initiative was well accepted by the majority of members using the workshop facilities as they realized that it had long term benefits in training them how to gain maximum return from their workshop access.

Interestingly only about 20% of members used the clubs workshop facilities, most preferred to use their own assets and attend club meetings etc. The most resistance came from members who did not actively or regularly use the workshop facilities.

When it came to the crunch for me it was also committee operations. The committee themselves was one of friendliest and helpful bunch of guys I have met. All they wanted was a peaceful and friendly atmosphere and to be able to do some collaborative community projects, and some of their own projects. Unfortunately safety was dealt with at committee meetings after everything else had been discussed, which meant sometimes it was never discussed, whereas my viewpoint is it should be the first thing discussed at any meeting. I am no longer on the committee so have no idea what they do now, but I know a couple of the new committee members are very safety conscious and have revived safety issues.

Something I forgot to mention was when I went in last week, one of those new committee member was finally going around attaching laminated safety notices on the machinery. I proposed doing that 2 years ago and wrote up most of the notices, adapting the notices provided by AMSA to suit our machines. I didn't do the attaching because of my not wanting to be seen as the only person doing OHS stuff. Anyway, as I said above, now when I visit I try not to look, I'm getting a bit more time in my own shed and as a result my own mental health has improved.

I fail to see how someone who is not trained to teach safety can himself teach safety...if you get my drift and that is the biggest problem of the whole thing. I have yet to find anyone in the MS movement who is qualified to teach safety, end of story. I doubt anyone here is, we all have our own ideas and think we are capable but a set level of proficiency is the only way to arrive at a standard of training. My standard and methods might be considered totally inadequate by every contributer to here but I would consider the safety skills I have and would teach to be perfect in every respect...yeah, right and I am aware that is not the case. Fred Blogs decides he is going to open a MS in his area and he will do the safety training, he thinks he is a careful man who can teach others but in reality he has no training or the knowledge to do that. The whole system is screwed up despite the best intentions of everyone involved and it would be interesting to see mandatory reporting of injuries and the stats that would come out of that.

Not being a member of a MS, is there a requirement for a white card for either members or those in an a management/overseer role?
The other point that has been mentioned is the DNA of MS, that is, looking out for the welfare of our fellow men. This is both a mental/psychological thing as well as a physical thing. The mental part is passive, the physical part is does and dont's which is affected to some extent by the first part. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink, the same with a lot of people. If they won't listen and learn, there's no hope, and if they band together in cliques then your pushing the proverbial up hill with a fork. The minimum that those with safety skills/knowledge/experience can do is raise the issues, try to have them implemented and monitored and if that fails at least you know you have done your bit to do the right thing. Your can choose to stay and be prepared to look after yourself and pick up the pieces of those who don't or won't or you can move on. Unless those in charge are prepared to stick to their guns then there isn't much can be done to improve the situation. If it means that a MS looses members or folds then at least a possible disaster has been avoided.

One thing I have learnt is safety is a mindset. Perhaps I benefited from my role as a rescue instructor in a past life but safety is all about hazard analysis, action and consequence, look before leaping.

Originally Posted by Chris Parks

I fail to see how someone who is not trained to teach safety can himself teach safety...if you get my drift and that is the biggest problem of the whole thing.

I agree - there are too many persons wth no training in any sort of technical area whatsoever with their fingers in the Mens shed pie. Some of these people are fantastic allrounders and craftspersons and there are some very helpful and natural teachers but unfortunately few have ever done ANY training let alone any safety training, let alone instructional training. Even those who you might think should know better are often no better than the rest Perhaps the worst offender in this regard I have run across is a former "old school" manual arts teacher who does member inductions. The good bit is he is 'covers most things" , but the inductions themselves consist of him talking to new members for ~90 minutes without a break. The whole thing is too long, there is too much talking and not enough member engagement, there is no checking to see if the new members understands what they are being told, and the new members walks away with nothing concrete, or even on paper.

Engineers are generally good on paper but not always so in a practical sense and we have several that claim to have never used even a hammer before they arrived at the shed. Generally they are smart enough to put 2 and 2 together to make 4. Most of the younger engineers are well and truly up to speed on safety, but unfortunately they tend to be the quieter members who are less likely to speak up about safety issues.

Tradies vary as well. My experience is that tradies and possibly farmers are the hardest to convince that there are safer ways of doing things than they did 50 years ago. When I tell then that tradies actually have the same accident rate as DIY'ers (albeit with much higher exposure) they don't believe me. Some tradies are outstanding, the two tradies that taught me most of what I know about welding have been careful about explaining safety issues but even there they both missed out on telling me about the high rate of CO generation by TIG welders. In a large volume workspace environment this is non-issue but in a small DIY shed it turns out to be potentially harmful.

The ability to teach anything is a real issue for the teaching profession in general. Most people I run across think that because they have been to school, they can teach others better than they were themselves tough but my experience is that there are few natural teachers amongst us. Even amongst so called trained teachers there are problems ie the manual arts teach above.

The majority of people who have supposedly been trained to teach safety would be persons with OHS qualifications. However, my experience is that all they really know are a few basics and principles and the relevant legislation, but they can be somewhat ignorant of specific situations. I have in mind the OHS staff who would come down from Senior Admin to the coal face to tell us what we should be doing. Truth was they had no idea what we even did. They could look up legislation but applying it in various labs etc was way out of their league. In the end they would wave the relevant legislation at us and would ask what we did and how we could do it safely. They seemed more interested in paperwork and legal covering that setting up a safe and efficient work place.

So it comes down to the experienced professional who not only can perform the tasks required but also practices safe procedures and has read widely and informed themselves to take into account the wider picture outside their own experience zone. If you stick to only your own experience you will be narrowing your window and increasing your risks.

By the time I left uni we instituted simple student safety risk assessments for all experiments in first year. Most of these were trivial but at least it got students used to thinking about safety. Not long after we instituted this I note that professional society like Engineers Australia required that some of the be included in Engineering courses. i wonder how many of us stop and think for 30s of the relevant risks involved before starting a new project.

Originally Posted by BobL

there are too many persons wth no training in any sort of technical area whatsoever with their fingers in the Mens shed pie.

And others just leave their fingers in the Men's Shed.

Originally Posted by rwbuild

is there a requirement for a white card for either members or those in an a management/overseer role?

I have a White Card (as I guess you do too Ray). They are ridiculously easy to get, but I think making it a requirement to be a member of a MS might be a pretty good start. The could get an instructor in to do groups of people pretty easily.

However, the point about a White Card is that it is not specific to any particular machine - really it is only about general safety issues - which is why they are so easy to get. Anyone with a modicum of sense should be able to pass, particularly with the coaching that our class got (he said he never has failures - we soon worked out why).

Originally Posted by BobL

my experience is that there are few natural teachers amongst us. Even amongst so called trained teachers there are problems ie the manual arts teach above.

Absolutely agreed on both points. Teaching is like being an artist or a musician (e.g.) - you can learn the finer points, but if you don't have the basics in your DNA then it ain't going to happen.

Look at the extraordinary teaching skills of Eddie Woo as an example. That guy was born to teach! The fact that he teaches maths is probably a side issue.

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

However, the point about a White Card is that it is not specific to any particular machine - really it is only about general safety issues - which is why they are so easy to get. Anyone with a modicum of sense should be able to pass, particularly with the coaching that our class got (he said he never has failures - we soon worked out why).

Our shed has a 4 card system see previous posts. The top level card (gold) are for members who are considered expert in at least one area (metal work) or set of machine (eg Table Saw/Band saw) AND have the common sense to realize what they don't know and go get some help with gear they are not familiar with. IMHO the criteria to get one is a bit loose and based on what the member says about their experience rather than demonstrable skill.

One thing I have learnt is safety is a mindset. Perhaps I benefited from my role as a rescue instructor in a past life but safety is all about hazard analysis, action and consequence, look before leaping.

Yep - nailed it.