Burned by complacency. PSA

[sdshirtman]

I thought I'd post this little warning here since it's the most visited section of the forum..

First a short back story. I've been pretty vacant from this forum lately due the the fact that Ive been working two new jobs. On top of running my core business and doing my own builds I've been doing repairs with a well known guy down here in So Cal . The other gig has been consulting, designing, and sudo-ghost building instuments for a new line of guitars for the same guy  

Right now the new guitar start up has sold 20 new builds on pre orders and committed to delivering them by Dec 21st. It's a tall order seeing that we were given six weeks to do them and it's me and one other guy doing all of the work and they are all due by Dec 21st.   I've been putting in 12-14 hr days trying to meet this deadline. Anyways, fast forward to 10 PM last night   

  I was routing a bunch of control cavities with the hand held plunge router. I was working at a fast pace and between guitars and was putting the router upside down on the table just to my left side between each piece. (I was in a sitting position while routing on a workmate in front of me),  I got to a pace where I would put the router on the table to my left while it was still spinning down. One of those times it started to fall off the table while still spinning down and in that split second I instinctively reached my left hand out to catch it and we'll, you can imagine what happened next.  I got finished with stitches at the ER this morning around 5 AM.  

I got extreamly lucky and my "bite" was isolated to the fleshy part of my palm and missed all my fingers.  The thought of how much worse it could have gone makes me cringe every time I run it back in my head.  Needless to say my injury could have been easily avoided and I learned a valuable lesson the hard way.

Be careful out there, slow down and don't get complacent with you power tools. It's not fun when they bite back. 

JW

[Skyjerk]

A good message!

I had a similar recent experience lately with my angle grinder and holey galahad disk while carving the top on a previous build.. Likewise no permanent damage but a lesson well learned

They dont stop being dangerous as soon as you take your finger off the trigger.

Be patient and wait for them to stop before relaxing your vigilance

[curtisa]

Good to hear you're OK given what could've been much worse.

And a timely reminder to all of us playing with high speed cutting tools - safety first, people. Complacency and fatigue are not good bedfellows when it comes to power tools such as these.

[ScottR]

Dayamn John.

You didn't get any tendons or anything else important for making your fingers work, I hope.

Take care of yourself and thanks for the warning. There's not a one of us that couldn't use a reminder every so often.

SR

 

[steve1556]

I'm glad to hear the mistake wasn't any worse! I got complacent when I was putting down my router once and never repeated it. I got into a habit of routing a part of the body or neck (can't remember which), and while the router was spinning down I would take it off the work piece and place the cutter part into a hole on the work bench so the router base would sit flat on it. I changed the bit to a bigger one, tried putting the router bit down the hole and it caught the wood, ripped upwards and damaged the work bench, but if it came up a few centimeters higher then it would have caught my hand. Always been a lot more careful since!

[2.5itim]

Yep routers are crazy dangerous and we should never become comfortable with them. 

Some of you may remember I was thicknessing a top a while back with mine and caught the middle of my 2 middle fingers just as you did. Grabbed my oversized router base and my hand slipped and ended up losing 2 good chunks of meat. It could have been so much worse but my fingers are gonna look funny the rest of my life but at least I still have them. 

[sdshirtman]

 I remember reading that thread on MLP when you did that Chris.  Cringy wound you had there. 

 

Scott, no tendons or major parts. Just the meat part of my palm.  But it hurt like hell and I was scared to look down it right after it happened in fear of what I would see.  I've seen too many grizzly pictures in the past. 

[Woden]

Thanks for sharing your story. It's always good to be reminded about safety by seasoned builders. It's always tricky to maintain maximum concentration when you are working under stressful deadlines.

I've only just got a table saw and made my first ever rip cuts with it the other day. I will always approach that tool with extra caution, knowing how dangerous they can be. Thankfully, I took on a lot of info before firing it up and make sure I use all the essential safety stuff like push sticks and keeping out of the kickback line of fire (though my saw does have a good riving knife which gives me peace of mind).

Being a newbie round here, I look forward to doing a couple of build threads next year now I've got some nice wood for them. I'm sure I'll need a lot of help from you guys on here!