Thread: Cold hands and wood. Still gives me the willies decades later

I'm 59 and when I was about 25 I had a near miss on a big old jointer. When it's really cold the hands get very dry and slippery and it's hard to grip the wood. The pic below is where my hand landed on the infeed bed when it slipped off a large 3" thick pine board while trying to feed it into a big ol jointer... And I hit the bed with a fair bit of force I slipped off that quick. A couple inches more and I wouldn't have a hand, simple as that... When it happened I was so freaked out I had to go for a long walk, and I think I ended up going home for the rest of the day. The opening on my 6" here is about half the gap on this old square head 4 blade jointer. It could have been used as a chipper the gap was that big. Every once in a while it crosses my mind and I still get the willies in the guts over it and think: that was just too damn close. The push stick is what I use religiously and have since soon after that. My hands never get close to the gap ever, and I refuse to use a machine without guards.

Another time and cold hands again I was ripping ply on a 12" tablesaw... As I did one rip I tried to pull the partial sheet back to do another rip... About halfway to pulling it back I realised I wasn't going to keep my grip and would drop the ply, onto the blade. 20/20 hind sight, I should have pushed it forward and flung it off the end of the saw table... This is also in Canada, so riving knives don't exist. No, instead I dropped it and tried to get out of the way. Well, it shot back and hit me just below the belly button. My dad, bless his heart, taught us kids well how to take a punch, but even he never hit me that hard. I went down instantly. Took about 15mins to drag myself back up I was in that much pain. Needless to say, my day was over and went home. Next day I had a look at the damage and realised I had two very large bruises from a double impact. A 12" blade spinning at 3000rpm is traveling pretty effin fast, and so is the wood when it gets launched from it... It hit me so hard and so fast I never knew that the ply bounced back and hit the blade again and then hit me in the guts a second time. I was already on the way down so it hit higher, luckily not in the sternum.

Fun times!!

Needless to say, not long after that I went on a quest looking for some very sticky gloves to wear on cold dry days.