Table Saw Accidents
sawaccidents.com
sawaccidents.com
It frankly terrifies me somewhat. I have always been very respectful of it, and had had no incidents in a couple of years of use.
However one day he watched me using it and said I needed to use a pusher stick to push the piece in, rather than the tips of my fingers as I was doing.
I switched to the pusher stick, and things felt...safer! I felt more casual I guess. And then, some months later, I contacted the blade with the pusher stick which disintegrated, with a piece flying past my face.
My learning was that sometimes having safety equipment can make one less careful, with a commensurate increase in the likelihood of an accident.
(A secondary learning was that table saws are just plain dangerous, and I wouldn't want a job that involved using one all day long - statistics would catch up with me one day).
As a side note, wasn't Johnny Cash's brother killed in a saw mill accident? Seems like a saw mill is basically a very large table saw from what I've seen of them.
Luckily I was wearing super thick work gloves in the cold of winter, but it still wrenched my thumb so hard as it threw my hand back it was swollen and blue for weeks. (And ripper the glove all the way through).
Lesson learned: Be super careful whenever that blade is spinning, not just while making the actual cut.
In my opinion it's just way safer, especially if you keep the safety guard in tact.
The other culture difference I've noticed with American furniture makers is that they use the table saw for many more operations than we europeans do. For making rabbets, we generally use a shaper. Shapers can be daunting machines, but used with the safety equipment they come with they can be a blessing to work with. Things like kickback if you try to create a rabbet are prevented.
It just feels strange to see that difference between these two continents, maybe OSHA is just way more lenient, or the idea of the importance of employee safety is something totally different..
Also, these tools last a long time, so even if something better comes along, it's going to take quite a few years to make inroads into existing shops.
Someone said: Wow, that must have been quite an accident to lose three fingers!
Carpenter replies: Well I lost this one 3 years ago, this one a year ago, and this one 6 months ago...
Some people never learn.
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When I was a kid I met an old man with half a pinky finger. I asked him how he lost it. He said he was picking his nose one day and zoop, it was gone.