Could have been worse.

[woodfab]

My wife thinks that since I'm getting up there in age that I should get a Saw Stop.

I haven had a crazy shop accident in quite. a while and thought that "don't put your hand near the blade and you won't get cut".

I won't tell her what happened this morning. Not that a Saw Stop would help in a router accident.

I made two mistakes,

1.  I only put the router bit in about 1/2" into the collet.

2. I didn't pay enough attention to the hold down bolts on my jig.

Well, Bang, I hit the bolt with the router bit, the router bit pulled out of the router and hit me pretty hard below the belt.

Lucky it  was cold outside and I had enough layers on which saved me from getting cut.

 

 

[Bizman62]

Those short shafted large diameter bits somehow seem scarier than narrower ones. The ones where only the blades protrude from the shaft look much safer to me. Something like a 10 mm bit with an 8 mm shaft.

[henrim]

Good to hear that nothing more severe happened!

2 hours ago, Bizman62 said:

Those short shafted large diameter bits somehow seem scarier than narrower ones.

They are more dangerous and thus scarier. There’s more surface speed on a larger diameter bit. And if the bit grabs it has more leverage than a shank sized bit. And they are more prone to balancing issues.

Edited March 20 by henrim

[woodfab]

Years ago I read an article about a piece of carbide going into someones neck.

And now sometimes if I have a free hand while using certain cutters  like a fly cutter I'll put one hand over my neck. 

[ADFinlayson]

ooh yeah I bet that required some new under pants. I had a similar horror show with my trim router the other day - it was in the cheap katsu router base as my makeshift workmate router table and the retention clip failed while I was routing a binding channel, router fell through the bottom on to the floor missing my toes by a few inches and danced around on the floor while I jumped out of the way and hit the emergency stop on the wall, first time I've used the big red button when it wasn't a drill. 

[Professor Woozle]

A friend of mine ( who did the caricature of me I use as an avatar, BTW) once dropped a circular saw while it was locked on, and had to dance out of the way until he could pull the plug.
I tend to use a footswitch with power tools now as a safety measure, although I had to rewire it first as it was most definitely not safe in  its as-bought-off-ebay condition - no prizes for guessing where it was made...