Keep it safe, guys

[LCHIEN]

Must have 10 ch

[dbhost]

My high school wood shop teacher was missing ALL of the digits from his left hand, he would hold it up and wave it around when we were screwing around during lecture about safety.

During our last semester he let us in on the secret.

He host the fingers and got his forearm pretty beat up by a grenade in Vietnam....

Sick puppy he was. No wonder we liked him...

[cwsmith]

I've mentioned several times in the past that I witnessed my Father loose two fingers and seriously damage a third when I was fourteen. It was the summer before I started my freshman year of highschool. We were working late that summer night at a new home build where my father was building kitchen cabinets and I was helping out as usual. Dad was using the builder's contractor-style saw which didn't have a guard. I remember as he was feeding the stock the blade caught it and flipped it up and pulled his fingers into the blade. (No push stick!) It took his index finger just above the knuckle, ripped the middle finger, and took the ring finger at the second joint. I can still remember the sound!

He grabbed a rag and yelled, "We have to go home!" Home was about a mile away and the only thing he said was, that it was a bad cut and I'll be in the hospital, "you'll have to take care of things"! Fortunately his cousin was visiting and he drove my parents to the hospital which was almost 15 miles away. I called the builder and walked back to the house where I met him, he found my Dad's finger and drove to the hospital and I cleaned up. The next morning I cleaned up the family car. My Dad had held his hand out the window as he drove, I'm sure you can all imagine what that looked like.

I took metal shop for the next three years, avoiding wood shop until I was a senior. That year my shop teacher, Mr. Weaver noticed that I was avoiding the saws. I explained and he introduced me to the RAS which I loved. "Safety, Safety, Safety", was the mantra in all shop classes, and we were exposed to some pretty gross stories, including training films and an occasional gruesome pictures. After highschool I had several different jobs, everything from working in a restaurant (meat slicers can be scary), a QC inspector in a machine shop (watch out for those lathes, stamping machines, sheet metal breaks and heavy crimping machines) and in the data processing (those high-speed chain printers and card sorting machines); there's a lot of safety precautions you need to pay attention too. As a home owner I had a variety of tools, but I never bought a stationary saw until 1973, and that was an RAS. I didn't buy an actual table saw until 1975, when I retired, and that was the BT3100 which I purchased on clearance. Table saws still bother me, and you can believe that I take the utmost precautions with any blade, especially those that are spinning at high RPM!

I'm 77 and have used tools for most of my life. Other than a minor cut or gouge from a hand tool, I have yet to be hurt, Know your tool, know what it does and what the forces will be and then plan ahead.... Thus my byline that used to go with my past postings: "Think it through, before you do!"

CWS

[twistsol]

If you were screwing around or not paying attention, or doing anything unsafe, my high school shop teacher, Milan Matasich, was far more dangerous than any of the equipment in the shop.