What's the most stupid thing you've done in woodworking?

[TRITON]

How about the double ended miters. pic frames and the like. Check its going to cut the right direction, lay on saw, look to check again its going the right way and make the cut. OOPS, cut the miter the wrong way
Find new piece of wood.

 

[NickM]

How about the double ended miters. pic frames and the like. Check its going to cut the right direction, lay on saw, look to check again its going the right way and make the cut. OOPS, cut the miter the wrong way
Find new piece of wood.

I did that so many times when I was making corner braces for a fruit cage I built in the garden. Madness...

 

[Cabinetman]

Learnt the hard way to always just scribble a line that shows the direction. Funnily enough I was doing exactly those this afternoon.

 

[francovendee]

Not exactly woodwork but at one time when I worked for a living I was asked to cut some 3" thick slabs of UMWPE ( those that don't know this material it's a form of plastic widely used in the medical industry and very heavy) using a circular saw.
The whole set up looked lethal to me.
A metre square of this plastic. G clamped down to an iron stand. The sole of the saw had a piece of angle iron screwed on to act as a cutting guide. If you managed to keep the saw upright as you reached the end it did work okay but after cutting these up for 2 hours your arms get tired and you tilt the saw. Resulting in the piece that's being cut off getting caught in the spinning blade.
I spoke to the boss and he told me it was fine and we only had to do it one day a week.
I carried on until one time the saw must have caught the plastic really well as the saw broke through. The plastic took off like a missile and went clean through the partition wall into the bosses office! He came out very shaken as it had put a huge dent in a metal waste bin under his desk.
I managed to persuade him to buy a radial arm saw the following week.

 

[mikej460]

When I bought my planer I couldn't tell whether the blades were fitted, so I poked it with my finger. It turned out the blades were indeed fitted.

I bet there's some classic stories waiting to be told.

I bet you can count the number of times you've done that on one hand...

 

[TRITON]

Not woodworking but in industrial butchery.

Given the job of cleaning a sausage press, which is a vessel you put sausage meat into and a hydraulic ram forces it up and out a nozzle, on which you place the gut. Its a 415v bit of kit, about 5' high about 18" in circumference and made of thick stainless steel, with a thick(about 5 inches) lid. Basically a big pressure vessel.

To stop the water coming out the hole the nozzle screws into I hammer in a round nylon wedge.
I fill with boiling water, slide over the big lid which hydraulically seals itself, then operate the knee switch(which allows both hands free to tension the gut to fill the sausage casing)

It starts to make a whirring sound. Unfamiliar as i am with such a machine of this size i bump the knee switch a few more time, still get a whirring sound very odd, so i press the knee switch fully on and BANG, the fking nylon wedge flys out the hole like a fking missile and goes right through a chiller wall which was about 20' away, missing my head by inches.
Lesson, dont fill a pressure vessel full of water, seal it than ramp up the pressure. Lesson truly learned

Finish cleaning it and wander off, not saying a word about the 8" hold in the wall. Nowt to do with me guv

 

[Keith 66]

I popped round a mates house years ago & him and another bloke were building some rustic exercise equipment, basically a tree trunk with wooden bars stuck out of it, idea was for it to be stood upright in the ground with sandbags hung off them.
They had managed to drill & mangle some large mortices into it but were now at the stage of cutting the tenons on some round logs about 4" in diameter & 3ft long. One was holding the log upright with both hands & the other was cutting the tenon sides vertically downwards towards his wrists with a chainsaw. I voiced my thoughts & left. Down the pub later the bloke still had both hands attached!

 

[joshvegas]

Has anyone ever noticed how alike water bottles and white spirit bottles are? Thats where the similarity ends.

 

[KingAether]

I have a small propane forge in the shop to make my own hardware and occasional tools; Recently a turned it on without checked the hose connections and one of them had come loose due to the pressure change.. The fire spread down the hose and onto the tank. Luckily i got it all turned off before anything more happened but burned my hand nicely

 

[thetyreman]

Has anyone ever noticed how alike water bottles and white spirit bottles are? Thats where the similarity ends.

have you ever noticed how similar cups of tea and cups of dirty water are? water that's had steel dipped into it after grinding, fun times.

 

[Terrytpot]

have you ever noticed how similar cups of tea and cups of dirty water are? water that's had steel dipped into it after grinding, fun times.

As a whipper snapper at a barbeque in Holland in the summer many moons ago , having acquired a raging thirst, I discovered how dissimilar cooking oil and a refreshing drink are even though they do have a remarkable similarity when left on tables in a glass..

 

[francovendee]

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!
This wasn't me but a colleague in a light engineering company we worked at. We had a large piston type compressor that had a starting mechanism (star delta?) that meant it started slowly and built up speed. I think it started on one phase at a time.
This day it wouldn't get past the slow speed due to a fault in the electrical switch mechanism.
We were on a bonus system so everyone was keen to see it run. My colleague said he knew all about them so took the cover off and started poking around with a screwdriver. There was blinding flash and a bang. He was left hold just part of the screwdriver.
The morale is don't mess with 415 volts if you don't know what you're doing.

 

[TRITON]

I used to use a coke bottle to put all the slops from fixing bike brakes and forks. Hydraulic fluid, oil etc.
Took a swig one day, though it was a bottle of coke.

Won't be doing that again. I was lucky though and only got a mouthful which I spat back out instantly, then the run to the kitchen tap and spend 5 minuted filling/spitting out

 

[joshvegas]

Won't be doing that again. I was lucky though and only got a mouthful which I spat back out instantly, then the run to the kitchen tap and spend 5 minuted filling/spitting out

Same i took a huge mouthful and instantly thought "this isn't right" and sprayed it everywhere. It was such a hot day though i could easily have swallowed a significant amount!

I went for vodka for the initial swill out.

 

[Sachakins]

The most stupid thing, well there's many I guess, BUT
The DUMBEST thing has to be taking up wood turning, as that looked like a cheap hobby, you know the idea, a wood spinny tool, and a couple of chisels, Ha Effing Ha, does the costs ever end. And are the decent gouge makers just taking the pizz,

 

[jcassidy]

OOPS, cut the miter the wrong way
Find new piece of wood.

I just ruined two lovely lengths of oak doing just this.

Measured up dovetails, checked, double checked, cut ever so carefully with my newly refurbed dovetail saw, mightily pleased with myself, until I tried to fit... Wrong way around. Find, plane and square a new piece of wood... Carefully measure, carefullt cut...

And did it again!

Called it a night at that stage... Next day cut them down and changed the dimensions of my project to suit!

 

[Jonzjob]

When we lived in France we wanted a couple of pines by the swimming pool taking down. So we got a couple of pro arborists in to do the job. One was quite careful, the other

He's about 10' up a ladder holding on to a stub of a branch and using a top handle chainsaw about a foot away from his throat! I took the photo and went round the back of our house and into my workshop. I didn't want to watch!

I just hoped that he didn't get a lot of blood in our pool

 

[TRITON]

I didn't want to watch!

The picture alone is pretty horrifying. Personally I'd have said something, and held my arm at throat level while doing so exclaiming 'Are you mad ???'

 

[Jonzjob]

What you really mean is "Vous êtes fou???"

He didn't speak any English and nor did our neighbours. Plus, he wouldn't have thought anything wrong.

That along with no ear defenders, goggles or even glasses, what else would you expect. He earns his living trying to kill himself!

 

[Cabinetman]

I don’t know anything about using a chainsaw nor do I want to but isn’t the weight of that tree going to trap his blade any second?
The French do seem to have a different attitude sometimes, I remember seeing the gas bottle delivery man quite happily smoking as he Unloaded his large lorry full of the stuff.