New US Table Saw injury report & statistics....

[Bluekingfisher]

I like the one with the guy cutting fishing line, I'm shuddering now thinking about what he has left at the ends of his arms, perhaps I'll take up tiddlewinks or birdwatching as a hobby!!

 

[big soft moose]

Whilst slagging off the funny furriners lets not forget our home grow idiots.

Ask any time served A&E nurse or Doc about the cupid stunts they have to deal with.

As a H&S professional I get sick of people saying "why do we have to have that regulation - its common sense" - trouble is, most of the population do not seem to have any.

very true - even this forum isnt free from people who have... ahh.. "wizered" themselves after removing the guards, but i think we have fewer such incidents than lumberjocks - even allowing for their greater membership

my favorite tool related A&E story (and i used to date a nurse so ive heard a few) was the guy who had got into the habit of erm, shall we say "stimulating himself" with his pad sander (like you do :shock: the thought processes behind that take some grasping) then one day in the height of arrousal forget to take the 60 grit paper off first and sanded most of the skin off the end of his manly appendage

there was also the bloke who inadvertently shot himself in the bollocks with an air powered nail gun (again difficult to comprehend how that came about)

then there was the guy who was using a timberwolf woodchipper when the funnel got blocked so he climbed into it and started jumping up and down to clear it .... messy that one - his colleagues managed to hit the panic button before it ate him entirely but he lost all of one foot and most of the other.

 

[Smudger]

Whilst slagging off the funny furriners lets not forget our home grow idiots.

Ask any time served A&E nurse or Doc about the cupid stunts they have to deal with.

As a H&S professional I get sick of people saying "why do we have to have that regulation - its common sense" - trouble is, most of the population do not seem to have any.

I once spent Sunday afternoon at casualty, part of a line of men holding bandaged hands up to slow down the flow of blood...
The nurse told me that every Sunday (before the pubs chicked out) they were treating mostly:
a) Men who had cut themselves carving the Sunday roast (me)
b) Men who had stabbed, impaled, sliced, crushed or burned themselves doing DIY.

 

[ondablade]

To be the politically incorrect devil's advocate here.

(1) I wonder what (for all the Euro safety) the UK/Euro statistics would be if they are comparable?

(2) Most of the accidents quoted are cuts to fingers and thumbs. Is it actually possible to set a saw up in a way that avoids the possibility of contacting the blade? I've not seen a safety device that can eliminate this possibility.

If this is the case is it possible that much of the Euro safety stuff actually contributes very little to safety? i.e. that despite the relative absence of safety devices on US saws that the accidents that happen are ones that would not be prevented by Euro safety devices and rules?

In the broadest sense. I wonder how much equipment and rules add to safety once equipment is such that it's not actively dangerous? As in liable to unpredictable failure and the like that can injure a person, or especially likely to cause serious injury?

I ask because one thing that's abundantly clear is that the relationship between accident rates and safety devices is not clear. People drop their level of care and vigilance, and may actively rely on safety kit to allow them to do things if it's there.

My sense is that it's mostly down to (a) the personal equation of how viligant we remain relative to the level of risk we perceive, and (b) some unknown factor that makes certain individuals highly accident prone no matter how careful they are.

My memory on this is always of being transferred from Ireland to work in California in the early 80s as a young engineer. Miles of largely empty and perfectly straight and beautifully laid out roads - compared to the twisty and badly surfaced almost signless country lanes i was used to.

Yet brainless accidents all over the place. In places that you damn well could not figure out why they should have happened...

Speed cameras and excessive road marking/traffic management are another case in point. The powers that be have struggled mightily to show any clear correlation of cameras with safety. In Holland they are experimenting with removing street paraphenalia like traffic lights, crossings, excess road markings and so on. In the village that was the subject i seem to recall they saw a 40% or so reduction in accident rates....

The Hawthorne experiment (on motivation) very famously demonstrated a very similar effect back in the early 1900s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Safety equipment and rules appeal very much to those of a bureaucratic mentality and vested self interest (how did we manage to build such a lobby?), but i wonder in the end if it's not the case that safety is much more to do with 'soft' human factors rather than the 'hard'???

ian

 

[Smudger]

And to be honest the number of accidents tells you very little. What you want to know are the percentages of operators injured and the frequency of accidents as a percentage of operations. Seen in those terms it probably is no different from Europe.

From the Youtube videos I've seen it may be different from the Far East, though, but again that is generalising from a small number of cases.

 

[Steve Maskery]

OK, it's time to tell my injury story. Those of you who have heard it before can move along now, nothing to see here, move along please....

My workshop has a concrete floor. I have a very nice Clifton 311 plane. One day I was changing the nose from long to short when I dropped the plane mid-change. It had no nose at all. Not wishing to damage the plane I reached out to grab it, mid fall, and trapped it between my bench and my hand.

It was blade-end first.

The world (or at least that part of it that is occupied by my person / bench / floor) turned red. I could see the inside of my hand.

I single-handedly phoned my next-door neighbour, Brian, who took one look and said "Hospital", so off we went to A&E.

5 hr waiting time.

Now my wife (I'm going to have to get used to calling her my ex-wife - seems weird), is a GP and works a kickback distance from A&E. I phoned her to tell her what I had done. "Plonker" was her professional diagnosis. Could she do anything? NO.

However, she also trains new GPs, and her current Registrar had had a previous career which involved surgery, and he very kindly offered to stitch me up. So an hour later she turns up to take me away. Mr New GP sews me up very neatly and today there is only the faintest of scars.
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I never expected to be grateful for the services of a gynaecologist.
S

 

[big soft moose]

My workshop has a concrete floor. I have a very nice Clifton 311 plane. One day I was changing the nose from long to short when I dropped the plane mid-change. It had no nose at all. Not wishing to damage the plane I reached out to grab it, mid fall, and trapped it between my bench and my hand.

It was blade-end first.

next time use your foot - plane blades dont cut safety boots

 

[Smudger]

I once grabbed a chisel by the wrong end to stop it rolling off the bench...

But then I also closed a vice with my finger in it.

 

[jimi43]

Only this afternoon I was tarting up an ancient Flather and Sons brace I chanced upon...complete with them there vintage centre bits....

when the bit decided to leave the brace and decend in a vertical fashion to the wooden floor!

There was a noise like you get when a knife thrower is practicing and it imbedded itself up to the end of the (very sharp recently fettled) point in the flooring!

I was wearing my steel toecaps but I hate to think what would have happened had I been wearing trainers and was more on target!!!

So....it is the simplest accident that is the most frightening and Steve's tale exemplifies this!

Steve...I love your sleds...with the guards...I am going to build a few of them and keep the maxim...hands away from saw...from now on!

Jim

 

[big soft moose]

well if its confession time heres my "i'm an *****" stories

a) i was countersinking screw holes in oak and had just done 10 in succesion with the countersink in my 18v dewalt drill driver- i then needed to change the countersink for a driver bit so knowing that the countersink would be a tad warm I carefully undid the keyless chuck and tipped the countersink out on to the bench

It rolled round in a little circle and fell off , and without thinking i shot my hand out and grabbed it - I still have the burn marks to prove it

b) I was turning a load of vases and it was getting towards the end of the day, and i had the last blank mounted between centres but couldnt find the roughing gouge (it later transpired that it was under a pile of shavings), for some reason i decided to rough out with a 3/8 spindle gouge which the forces promptly snapped and jammed the jagged end into my left palm.

blood went all over the place, and i compounded my error by grabbing a handful of shavings (oak) and squeezing them tightly to stop the bleeding - which worked but the tannin burned like a *****

 

[promhandicam]

. . .
Actually, there is a lovely piece of film of an orangutan doing carpentry, holding a piece of wood with his feet and hammering a nail in (with a hammer, natch) with his hands. It's in one of the Attenborough programmes. It looks so natural you forget he's an orangutan.
And an endangered species...

No wonder they are endangered using old fashioned techniques like nails and hammers. If they learnt to use cordless screwdrivers and screws perhaps they wouldn't be endangered :lol:

 

[Smudger]

Ah yes. I hadn't considered that...

The clip is here

 

[jimi43]

. . .
Actually, there is a lovely piece of film of an orangutan doing carpentry, holding a piece of wood with his feet and hammering a nail in (with a hammer, natch) with his hands. It's in one of the Attenborough programmes. It looks so natural you forget he's an orangutan.
And an endangered species...

No wonder they are endangered using old fashioned techniques like nails and hammers. If they learnt to use cordless screwdrivers and screws perhaps they wouldn't be endangered :lol:

If they ever learn how to use table saws they will be extinct!!!

:wink:

Jim

 

[promhandicam]

If they ever learn how to use table saws they will be extinct!!!

:wink:

Jim

No - they'd be contributing to FWW

 

[Chems]

I liked to read SawMill creek the US equivlent of our home here. Someone started a topic do you use a blade guard. Read this for stupid stupid stupid. If he was an animal he'd quickly be instinct.

40 years of woodworking and I have never used a blade guard, owned a pushstick (though I've made a few) and never hit my fingers with a sawblade EVER, until about a month ago. Thinking about a calculation on a jig I was making... instead of paying attention to the cut. Had my right hand over the fence, ripping a narrow board, using the exact same procedure I've used 10,000 times. This time, however, I decided to hang my thumb out from the fence and stuck the end of it right into blade. Cut right down through the nail and out of the fingerprint. Split in half almost to the knuckle. The surgeon told me I was "lucky" in that the angle of the blade was, as he put it, "in exactly the right position to do the least nerve and circulation damage." Uhhhh... Okay....

1 ambulance ride, 18 stitches, 1 missing bone (x-ray shows that it is GONE) and a month later, I am finally going back to the shop. You would not believe what you can't do without a right thumb to help. You can't button/buckle your pants, you can't pick up any number of things. Then, there's the skin peeling which reveals the nerve endings in the dermis below. Hanging out at home AFTER the stitches were taken out, I tried to help out by doing some things like washing dishes. Washed a few glasses, with warm water not hot, and raised a number of serious blisters which just slowed down the recovery. It's been five weeks, and I still can't handle a piece of hard material with an edge.

Long story short is that I still won't use a blade guard... BUT... a reassessment of using safety procedures and PAYING ATTENTION is definitely in order.

Full topic here.

I consider myself to be fairly down with the table saw, why do people need to watch the blade? Its the fence you need to watch. I just dont get it, inless your using the TS like a scroll saw why do you need a table saw?

 

[Jeff Gorman]

Ian wrote:

Wonder what the comparable UK/European numbers might be?

Although they were compiled many years ago and don't give numbers, the list on my web site at:http://tinyurl.com/yjbmj8t might help to indicate the causes of sawbench accidents.

Jeff