Freakin' punctured myself...

Hope you heal up fast!

One of things that I try to do as I work, is ask my self "If the tool, work piece, or my hand slips, where is it going?" If the answer is one of my body parts, then it's time to rethink what I am doing.

And Rick, thanks for being a safety nut as well as a knife nut.

Ric (without a K)
 
I've had a few not so fun ones, split thumb- (bandsaw), thumb knuckle- new 24 grit belt, drill press-
slinging out about a 4# block of walnut and peeling my nail back. The one that actually scared me the
most was hitting a stump with the trolling motor going wide open while carp shooting with a bow.
I fell out of the boat while having an arrow nocked and somehow drove the arrow into my thigh, not
straight in but deep under the skin- looked like a 2" deep horizontal bloodblister.
Ken.
 
I did have one bad drill press scare, that was boring some mild steel plate on my 20" JET drill press. Snapped a 5/8" bit and flung the work. I think I had it clamped, but insufficiently. Now I use t-slot furniture to always clamp down TIGHT.

I've actually been pricing job site and OSHA first aid kit for the wall, they are not too expensive. I'd like to have one out there.
 
You may be able to just pack what you actually need into an old tackle box or something and get more stuff for less money. I get most of my first-aid stuff from the dollar store :o
 
I can do this all day ;0)

A buddy of mine called me up and said he was getting a little behind schedule on a house he was building and asked if I would be interested in helping him out on Saturday and Sunday, and I said yes, so around 5pm Saturday, I called out and said I was packin it up, and I would see him at 7am the next morning, he said he was going to stay and work a couple more hours and said goodbye.

The next day I show up and my buddy had two of his fingers bandaged up, I asked what happened? he said he was holding a small piece of exterior sheathing with his left hand out a window opening, and reached around through a slider door opening to nail the piece and shot a nail through two of his fingers, effectively making him one with the house, so he tells me how after the shot he had stood there for a few minutes weighing the gravity of the situation, and realized calling for help would do no good, the house is way out in the middle of the sticks, no one would hear his painful cries for help.

So he sits down in the window sill, with his hand stuck to the wall and tries to figure out his next move, then he remembers the often told story about different guys using their hammers to pull the nails so they could get to the hospital and get the nails extracted from their digits, lt was at that point he realized his hammer was laying next to the saw horses about 15 ft away, and so he sat there probably in shock, for almost 2 hours hoping someone would show up and help him out, no one did.

Now by this time the light is fading and so was the shock I suspect, no other reason I can think of for the sudden clarity of thought that happened next, he looked down at the nail gun and hose and decided to start tossing the nail gun and hose over on top of his hammer in hopes of dragging it back with the hose, after about 15 tries the hammer was in reach, he picked it up and after a few failed 3 2 1 countdowns he managed to pull the nail and made the 30 mile trip to the emergency room

I often wonder if he works alone on saterdays anymore ;0)
 
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That's a good one. A shipyard story I heard, some guys are working on wooden hulled boats one day. One of them is off by himself. At the end of the day, he doesn't show. Then the guys realize he was not there at lunch. They go and look for him, and find him nailed to a boat hull. He's standing stretched out at the top of his ladder, having been reaching high to tack a board in with the gun or somesuch. Been up there for probably 6 hours.

Nail guns seem to account for a lot of stories. They are our equivalent of buffers and drill presses.
 
funny nail story

guy number 1 bent over nailing bottom plate, ass facing guy number 2, guy number 2 nailing top plate skips nail off top plate hitting guy number 1 one half inch from danglers

To this day I have never seen a guy hop around hooten and hollerin that much, fortunately for guy number 1 the nail spun as it grazed the top plate and hit him flat leaving a 3 inch long 1/4 high welt, we joked around saying he had better hope the swelling went down before he got home, otherwise his wife wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the welt and the original equipment
 
I have a big grey bag in the van that goes with me everywhere. It could probably be used to do an emergency appendectomy if needed. I can anesthetize a wound, clean and sterilize it, suture it up, bandage it, and immobilize the appendage.
I have a smaller duplicate surgical kit in the office at work.
There is a basic emergency kit in the workshop that has the items to bandage small woulds and to stop serious bleeding.

One thing I do whenever working outside, be it in the shop or working inn the yard, is take the extension phone with me. If something happens and Judy is home, I can hit the PAGE button. If I am alone, I can call 911, if needed. Being only 30-50 feet from a house and help won't do squat if you are holding an artery closed or have a hand stick in a machine. Having a phone ten feet away won't help either, so I use the belt clip to keep the extension with me.

Thinking about the worst won't cause it to happen, but it can make it less worse if it does happen.


Last story from me on this thread:
In my 20's I did tree work. A friend and I would remove trees from difficult spots, like overhanging the roof and/or between houses. The big companies would bring a crane to do that, and charge several thousand bucks. We did it 3-4 feet of tree at a time using climbing gear ,pulleys and ropes. We charged about half what the crane guys did. $1000 was a months pay on a good job back then. We could drop a tree in a weeks worth of afternoons plus a weekend.
We had been working on a 50 foot oak tree that had grown up between two houses that were only 10 feet apart. The base was over 36" across. It wasn't too hard to remove all the branches with the main rope gear at the trunk top, but once the tree was a pole with just 6" branch stubs, we had to cut about 3' at a time and lower it down. We would attach the pulley strap below the section to be cut. If we cut the hinge right and didn't make much of a jerk when it came free.
We both got off on our regular jobs at 2PM, and would go and work on the tree for two or three hours each day. There was no one home then to complain about the saw noise.
On the day the trunk was down to about 20 feet, we figured we could finish it all in that afternoon......and get paid! My friend got there ahead of me, and decided to rig everything up and get ready to drop one piece before I got there. The trunk was about 18" wide at this stage, and each piece was hundreds of pounds. We were low enough to use a ladder and didn't have to spike up, which would make things go a lot faster. He got the pulley strap set and tied the drop line to the section ready to cut , put his safety line around the tree firmly, and made the cut. He made the hinge cut perfect, and when it was ready to push over, shut off the saw and let it hang on its safety line. He was holding the trunk with one arm for leverage and balance, because the ladder didn't offer him as solid a purchase as the spikes do. As he toppled the section, it folded over, making the hinge.... and pinning his arm to the tree. He then realized he was pinned to a tree about two stories up, without two hands to start the saw, and no one around. He called for a couple minutes, but no one came. I got there about ten minutes later, and he played cool and macho. I went up and cut the hinge free, dropping the log and freeing his arm. He said his hand was so numb and sore he didn't think he could climb down the ladder, so I put the drop rope on his belt to lower him down. He massaged the arm for a while and it felt better, but he couldn't move his fingers well. We finished dropping the tree with me doing the cutting work and him handling the rope with one and a half hands. When we were done, he went to the clinic and got his arm checked. The docs said he had crushed the nerve long enough to mess it up, and that it would take a good while to recover. It took three months before he had full use and feeling in his hand.
If I hadn't got there when I did, he might have lost his arm. (This was all long before cell phones existed).
 
Pay attention is great advice. And pay attention not only to your own work, but also what is happening around you in the shop (hint: there probably shouldn't be anything else happening around you when you are doing certain tasks).

This isn't knife related, but one of the many strange stories I've come across working in the clinic that begs you to pay attention to what is happening. A number of years ago, I was evaluating a fella for new sockets for his prostheses. He was a double amputee (one above knee, one below knee). While taking his history, I asked how he had lost his legs, and his reply was that he was "run over".

My immediate response was, "you were in a car accident?"

His reply was, "no. It was a 707."

Me: "A 707? Like a jet airplane 707?"

Turns out he was working on the ground crew doing maintenance on a visiting celebrity's jet. He told his super that he was going down to check the main gear, and while he was there, facing briefly away from the landing gear, someone started moving the jet with the pushback tractor/tug. Before he realized what was happening, the gear had rolled up on the ankle of one of his legs, preventing him from escaping. He was able to throw himself to the side, saving his life, but the landing gear proceeded to run over both of his legs.

He told me how he watched as his legs "exploded and flattened like you see on a cartoon" as the jet ran over them. His screams brought people immediately, but they were all freaking out by what they were seeing, and he was the only lucid one. He starts yelling instructions to people to take their belts off and tourniquet his legs, call EMS, "stop taxying the **@^ing jet", etc.

Anyway, he got a nice fat settlement for the incident; however, it will never replace his legs. It only takes a second or less, and your life can be completely changed.

Salem, I've done similar things back when I used to hand sand without any supporting structure under the blade. I stabbed myself twice in nearly the same spot within 15 minutes when sanding back and forth (rough sanding work) and going off the tip unable to stop the return stroke before jamming myself into the pointy end of the blade. I definitely clamp things down now and use sanding sticks instead of paper in my fingers and knife in hand. :D

--nathan
 
bladsmth said:
I have a big grey bag in the van that goes with me everywhere.

Thinking about the worst won't cause it to happen, but it can make it less worse if it does happen.
Click to expand...

james terrio said:
You may be able to just pack what you actually need into an old tackle box or something and get more stuff for less money. I get most of my first-aid stuff from the dollar store :o
Click to expand...

Really good points.

Stacy what do you have for aesthetic?

I have a hard line phone in the shop area because I have problems with reliability of a cordless especially in the cold.


OSHA or the equivilant rules I read here don't seem like a good kit to me.

In the first aid I learned there was a huge emphasis on triangle bandages
stop bleeding, immobilize, splint, it all depends on lots of triangle bandages

You can make them up with cheap quilting cotton fabric from the liquidation outlets.

Hydrogen peroxide is handy to have too

Plus an eyewash bottle

- also not in the OSHA kit ?
 
Y'all remember that real pointy dagger I made last year? A magazine said they wanted to put it in a book they publish and asked me to send it to them for photography. Cool huh? So I wrapped it in a cloth and stuck it in a PVC tube and corked the ends with paper and stuck it in a box. Then I thought to myself, "someone is going to poke themselves getting this out of this tube" so a I wrote a little warning note to include in the package. And all went well. A few weeks later it returned. And I uncorked it and (like in a dumb Saturday morning cartoon) turn it over and shook on it a little bit, then a little more and then gave it one good shake and it popped out and buried itself into the ring finger knuckle of the palm of my hand. That hurt for a couple months.
 
Heal quickly and well, kind sir!
And for folks that like cyano for closing wounds - please buy the stuff made specifically for it. Industrial versions use carriers and solvents that cause necrosis to the open cells. And, DO NOT GLUE PUNCTURE WOUNDS CLOSED. Thank you.
Best
Steve
 
I has friends with connections :)

I have topical sprays, and injectables like xylocaine. Most of the time I just sew myself up ( or someone else does) without it. It always seemed silly to inject a would five times with anesthetic only to put in two or three sutures.

Glenfiddich is for sterilizing the wound, Balvenie is for post surgical application to the nerves. ( just kidding, Glenfiddich 18 and 21 is good stuff).
 
bladsmth said:
Glenfiddich is for sterilizing the wound, Balvenie is for post surgical application to the nerves. ( just kidding, Glenfiddich 18 and 21 is good stuff).
Click to expand...
I have both GF's ... and the Balvenie DW 12. I also have a Laphroaig 31 that only comes out twice a year.

Back on topic... well, safety anyway...

I went to the local safety equipment supply and got refills for my eye wash bottle. My first aid station is mounted at the shop exit right next to the light switch and power kill. It consists of a FAK, eyewash bottle, fire extinguisher and phone. I currently don't have a clotting agent in my kit. What do you recommend? I do have a few large military field dressings.

How do you guys address smoke and CO2 detectors?
 
I use G10 and ballistol soaked paper towels! (don't do that!)

My wife and are always together but last year she had to leave for a week because of a family emergency. She told me "don't get hurt" as we live in a remote area and I was alone. Sure enough I stuck a tanto so deep in my hand it stayed that way until I pulled it out. I wrapped up tight and actually started to pass out from the pain, next time I'm going to have a backup plan! I try not to use the buffer either.

Anyone else think Ballistol is just Pastis re-labled? I think it might make for a tasty beverage. :p
 
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