Thread: Personal Turning Safety Kit

I also peaked at McBride in Google earth.

Having done some time between Medicine Hat, Calgary & Banff all I can say is that pic was taken on a 'Good day!'

Thanks for the safety information. Between me and the lathe owner, I think I have everything I need.

I did the Bio Prof thing in Prince George for 31 years. pop maybe 85,000
McBride is half way from PG to Jasper, about 2.5 hrs each way on a good road.
pop 700. Google Earth can't show the size of the mosquitoes in mid summer.
Bought my home in 2000 and have not regretted it for 1 second.
This is the top destination in North America for snowmobile riding.
Our little airport is so busy, that's where children learn to ride new bicycles in the spring.
Winter now, at least one Heliski company flies their clients from there.

You can't get off the beaten track. Highway #16 is the only track. Empty highway, just a grand hallway in the forest. Nobody lives there. 220km from PG to McBride. I can name the 7 people who live within 5km of the highway. No cell phone coverage in between.
While the logging roads may seem to go forever, all dead ends. GPS is useless, the valleys are narrow and steep-sided.

As to footwear, I have had my 2 pound scraper and 1 1/2 inch skew jiggle off the bench under the lathe and fall at my feet. I now have a rack and magnet, but still wear shoes.

I put on glasses to find the floor in the morning, so I have prescription safety glasses. One experience of having a chunk of wood removed from an eye has me use a face shield or goggles over the glasses if the timber is splintery or throwing chunks.

If you have "turners cough" and / or stuffed up head the next day, better dust extraction or face mask is in order.

Most lathes are not so noisy as to need to use hearing protection.

Originally Posted by

I used to wear fingerless gloves and probably for the average turner they would be OK. In our case we have flesh eating shards coming off the timber that wears out gloves in about 3 weeks.

I tried the fingerless style, but prefer a full glove. My workshop up here in the Adelaide Hills hovers around 8-11 deg C during the winter and that tool steel sure is cold first thing of a morning.

To get maximum feel through the leather I like my new rigger gloves to be as tight as I can get them. They then wear into a comfortable fit, but still take an effort to get on and off. That creates a problem for feeling for sharpness with the skin on my thumb, which I do very frequently. To get around this I put a slit in the back of my right hand glove thumb so I can slip my thumb in and out without removing the gloves. Found the right slit size and position for me by trial and error on worn out gloves before attacking a new pair of gloves.

Attachment 190128

Originally Posted by NeilS

I tried the fingerless style, but prefer a full glove. My workshop up here in the Adelaide Hills hovers around 8-11 deg C during the winter and that tool steel sure is cold first thing of a morning.

To get maximum feel through the leather I like my new rigger gloves to be as tight as I can get them. They then wear into a comfortable fit, but still take an effort to get on and off. That creates a problem for feeling for sharpness with the skin on my thumb, which I do very frequently. To get around this I put a slit in the back of my right hand glove thumb so I can slip my thumb in and out without removing the gloves. Found the right slit size and position for me by trial and error on worn out gloves before attacking a new pair of gloves.

Attachment 190128

You been raiding our bin Neil?

Originally Posted by powderpost

Very broad statement. If this were true, I should have died many years ago. Maybe some species are carcinogenic or maybe the chemicals introduced to protect the timber???. I would be very interested in seeing the evidence of this. Even so, breathing protection is certainly a good idea.
Jim

Jim,

The American Industrial Hygiene Association made this statement and it was published in an issue of Fine Woodworking in 1996. In fact, they described wood dust as on par with asbestos fibres.

'Carginogenic' doesn't mean everyone will get cancer; it means a cancer-inducing agent.

When you trawl through the research literature, nose and pharynx cancer among timber millers/workers shows up at a clearly higher rate than among the general population, and yes, some timbers are worse than others.

To add, MDF is a toxic material for this reason as well as for the binding agent (which may include urea-formaldehyde) - I read somewhere on the web (so it must be true ) that California has banned its use.

And breathing in wood dust has other negative health effects as well.

The biggest risk is in breathing in small particles from sanding, invisible to the eye and that float around the workshop for hours after generation, that lodge in the lungs or airways.

Originally Posted by

You been raiding our bin Neil?

Definitely a better source of used gloves than my bin, especially since I found a better lasting glove at my local nursery which are holding out for anything up to three months, and they don't stain my hands orange....

[

The American Industrial Hygiene Association made this statement and it was published in an issue of Fine Woodworking in 1996. In fact, they described wood dust as on par with asbestos fibres.

I find it interesting as you wander around the net, many American turners are not aware of the danger, for many its only a general vague awareness.

Yes, a google on 'bad wood' or 'wood toxicity' will yield some interesting reading. Inhalation is not the only risk.

...

Recently a turner was killed at the lathe in the US so within the AAW at least there's a renewed focus on safety.

Originally Posted by rsser

Recently a turner was killed at the lathe in the US so within the AAW at least there's a renewed focus on safety.

More recently than the student that was found dead at the lathe with her hair wound up on the spindle?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/ny...-accident.html

What a tragedy.

...

BTW if you're out to buy a visor, try to get one with a chin piece.

Debris can come up between the visor and the face. DAMHIKT.

Dust, any dust, is nasty. I got a page from a local tropical woods supplier which indicated some species' dust is better than other dust = toxic biochemicals in it. Doesn't surprise me one bit.

Still, I needed to know what gear I should be wearing for lathe work. Scary thought about tools rattling off the bench! Good tip right there. The Sorbey tools that I'll be using are in a big rack, like a chemistry test tube rack. The spot lights are good, the dust extraction is very good (lathe owner makes log furniture from diamond willow with production runs of 100 hiking sticks and 100 canes. Weeks of power sanding.)

NeilS: testing for sharpness with your thumb. What are you carving? Thumbs?
I NEVER do that. If and when I want to test a wood-carving tool, I have a "try-piece" on the bench, the kind of wood that I'll be carving. That's the real test. When I cleaned up the set of Sorbeys, I still poked them into a stick. I can tell, now, what's sharp and what's carving sharp.

This is a woodturning forum, no?

Never had a prob. running the thumb off a bevel with tools at 30 or 45 degrees etc off the grinder. A honed skew gets more care and the thumbnail test is used.

Originally Posted by Robson Valley

NeilS: testing for sharpness with your thumb. What are you carving? Thumbs?

Thumbs are still all there....

A thumb is always 'to hand' ( ) and for me a predictable gauge of whether the edge will cut. When using aluminium oxide or silicon carbide wheels to sharpen your turning tools an indication of the sharpest edge you will get off that wheel are the sparks that start to come over the edge, but this doesn't apply to wet grinders or diamond/CBN wheels or hand honing.

But, like Ern, I do use the thumb nail test on my Japanese knives (which have subtle degrees of extreme sharpness) to judge whether they need to be resharpened. Although the best guide on when to resharpen any blade is when it has stopped cutting without extra effort.