Safety example

mete

mete

Joined
Jun 10, 2003
Messages
15,288
The news has a sad story of a young woman at Yale U who died because she didn't follow safety procedures. I don't know her training but her long hair caught in a lathe and she died because of it.
Never wear anything that can be caught by machinery !!
 
Absolutely not. When I started working as a machininst, I quit wearing my wedding ring. I/we decided the finger the ring was on was a bit more important than the ring on the finger. Gloves, loose untucked shirts, neck ties , necklaces, all no-no's.
 
Yup. That is real stuff. My old shop teacher had a pair of safety glasses he showed to every class with a big chunk of a grinding wheel permanently stuck in the glass. The lesson stuck.
-M
 
Sometimes you gotta walk around inside equipment that is running and step over the 60 horse motors and belts. You don't need to do it often but sometimes it must be done, you can't work on everything when it's not hot. But you do always make sure you're tucked in, nothing loose. It does suck to learn your first lesson the hard way.

Reminds me, here is what WA State Law (WAC's) say about long hair, no kidding:
How do you know when your hair is too long?

WAC 296-24-084
When with hair aflame you can run into an area containing flammable liquids or a combustible atmosphere.

Unions - go figure.
 
i almost accidently drank a glass of nitric acid once. i had a glass of acid and a bottle of water on the same table. i was going to etching some steel samples, then someone called, i kept talking for like 5mins, feel thirsty...then i grabbed the glass and start to drink. well i noticed something was wrong before i swallowed the acid. 3% nitric acid do not taste too well i guess. i was lucky，it can be something more poisonous in that glass.

so, when you work at your lab or shop, always MAKE SURE WHATS IN YOUR GLASS BEFORE YOU DRINK IT.
 
i took machine trades in my last 2 years of high school and we had to go through an osha safety course. we seen some pretty nasty things that have happened to people due to not being safe. the teacher had a box with safety glasses with pieces of metal stuck in the lenses and he also had a box with pieces of scalp with long hair attached.

some of the guys had long hair and there was a rule that they had to wear a hat and keep their hair under the hat. i seen a guy about to drill a hole in a piece of steel and he forgot his hat so his hair was all over the place. this guy was not too bright and i had a feeling that he would not get his hole drilled before something happened. i stayed behind him and watched him start to drill the hole and the idiot stuck his head right down by the piece so he could see if he was still lined up.

he moved his head the wrong way and his hair caught on the spinning chuck. luckily i was right behind him and hit the off button and a second later the teacher hit the main shutoff button since he was watching too. luckily i was there or he would have had part of his scalp tore out. if i had been a few steps further behind him things would have been worse. he hair was wound up so tight he lost a big chunk of hair when we cut him loose. if i had been a second later at hitting the off button he would have had a large chunk of scalp pulled from his head.
 
hammerfall said:
i almost accidently drank a glass of nitric acid once. i had a glass of acid and a bottle of water on the same table. i was going to etching some steel samples, then someone called, i kept talking for like 5mins, feel thirsty...then i grabbed the glass and start to drink. well i noticed something was wrong before i swallowed the acid. 3% nitric acid do not taste too well i guess. i was lucky，it can be something more poisonous in that glass.

so, when you work at your lab or shop, always MAKE SURE WHATS IN YOUR GLASS BEFORE YOU DRINK IT.
Click to expand...

I drank a long swill of WATCO oil wood finish sitting next to my coffee cup once upon a time - duh :( Fortunately - in about 35 years of shop work that was a bad as I've experienced - but I do bleed for every project :). Don't drink & finish at the same time anymore though...
 
I remember the guy at work who put a pool cue tip into the drill press chuck and turned on the drill press and proceded to polish the spinning cue tip with steel wool in his bare hands. The steel wool wrapped around the spinning shaft and just about took his finger off, he got saved by the bone. There was blood everywhere, and the look on his face was shock.
 
Here are a few safety tips I've learned (some the hard way):

1) After spending time at your grinder, step outside and shake off as much of the dust and grit as you can, from you hair down to your feet, BEFORE removing your safety gear. Once I failed to do this, and as soon as I took of the safety glasses something fell from my hair into my eye, and it was lodged there for days. Probably scarred my cornea, as if I needed MORE vision problems.

2) When cleaning up the mess around your drill and grinder, always use a brush, never use bare hands. It took several times of having to use tweezers to remove a lodged tiny piece of metal from my hands to get me to stop the reflexive wiping of the detritus onto the floor before sweeping.

3) When sanding stabilized wood, always take it outside or to a VERY well ventilated area. If the wind is blowing, position the sander downwind, so the dust blows away from you. This is important even if you are wearing a respirator. Also, don't forget to shake off any dust before removing the safety gear.

4) About using a bench grinder to grind titanium.... don't. Enough said.

5) When using chemicals, the best practice is to move the work outdoors if possible, to avoid problems with fumes or possible chemical interactions. I always take my etching projects outdoors, and don't bring things back in until the job is done and the storage containers are sealed again.

6) Clean up regularly. I police my work area after each grinding session. In part to keep the wife happy, but in larger part to make sure I have a safe work area with fewer potential accidents waiting to happen.

7) Maintain your safety gear. If you have a hole in your gloves, it's time for a new pair. If your safety glasses are scarred or otherwise blocking your vision, time for a new set. Check the filters on your respirator frequently. Never reuse paper masks that have been left in a potentially dusty/dirty area.

8) Wear nitrile gloves (or equivalent) when working with any chemicals. The big concern isn't necessarily whether the chemicals can hurt your hands, it's whether your hands will subsequently come into contact with your eyes, nose or mouth before you think to wash them thoroughly.

- Greg
 
Wow, that's really sad. If you read the article, she sounded like an amazing young woman. With all the little tweekers and jerk-offs running around these days, it really sucks for the world to lose somebody with so much potential. :(

Those pics are gruesome! :eek: We had to look at those in safety classes/meetings at the paper mill. We actually had one photo on file of a "sheathed" ring finger that happened at the mill (guy climbed up to reach something on top of a metal shelf (think Costco racks) instead of using a ladder. He lost his balance, fell backward, and when he tried to catch himself he caught his wedding ring on the top shelf and boom--- right down to the bone.

I was really surprised/disconcerted when I got sent back to vocational school and in machine shop 101 they basically handed us a 20 question safety test and then sent us out into a shop with things like a 40 horsepower Lodge and Shipley lathe. It could easily do the same thing as those pictures mete linked to. They did the same thing in the welding program---- with belt grinders, 9" side grinders, shears, etc.

There was a girl in there one day cutting a narrow piece of 5/32" thick steel on the 30" vertical DoAll bandsaw with NO PUSH-STICK. She was about halfway through and I pointed out to her that if she kept pushing she was going to take her thumb off. She looked at me with shock, and said, "OMG really?!?!" "Um.... you're zipping through STEEL with the saw... You realize your thumb is much softer than that steel.... right?" :eek: :rolleyes: :foot:

There was a guy in the weld shop trying to drill a 5" thick block of aluminum with a 1-1/8" drill bit spinning at about a million mph and nothing holding the aluminum other than his hand!!! As you can imagine, it grabbed, helicoptered... then broke the drill chuck off at the tapered stem and the chuck/bit/block went flying across the room and hit one of my good buddies right in the kidney area. He had blood in his pee for a week. Had it hit him in the head, he probably wouldn't be with us anymore.

It's scary how fast things can go COMPLETELY WRONG.
 
When the little voice in your head says, "You're going to get
hurt if you continue".:eek: PAY ATTENTION!!!:thumbup:

Bill
 
Bill Hoffman said:
When the little voice in your head says, "You're going to get
hurt if you continue".:eek: PAY ATTENTION!!!:thumbup:

Bill
Click to expand...

THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TRUTH!!!! TRUST YOUR INNER VOICE. It has saved me way too many times to be denied.
 
Smoke sent for the family. It's the avoidable tragedies that really hit hard.

We had a kid in my high school welding shop who lost his thumbnail in the rollers. My teacher taped it up on the wall as a reminder to all of us of what could have happened. You can never be too careful around heavy machinery.
 
We often become to familiar with our equipment much to our regret. A lot of triage statements start with "I've done this a million times before," heard this a lot while an Army medic.

When you're tired, STOP. The little mistakes you make while fatigued are warning signs of something bad about to happen. There's nothing about a knife that's worth your health.

Is "Hellgap" still around? That Canadian guy that would always blow off our safety warnings then post injury pictures with "I shoulda listened to you guys."

When experienced makers give the new makers safety advice please don't disregard us, even if you operate similar tools in your career.
 
Saw that in the paper this morning getting on the train. It seems she also wrote a paper on safety and lab procedures.
 
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