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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> You aren't making a lathe for someone with no experience.

Probably the #1 image I wish I could purge from my mind is that of a lathe accident. I saw the picture maybe 15 years ago, and I still remember it in horrifying detail.

Some tools really shouldn't be used until a person has had thorough safety training. The two that immediately come to mind are lathes and table saws.

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I said it elsewhere, but one of the first things I learned about power tools, from my father, is that if you don't know how to use a tool or tool setting, you don't use it.

Granted, power drills are moderately benign as these things go, but you can do a lot of damage to a work piece really fast if you select a tool or setting you're unfamiliar with. Which is why there manuals, books, videos, and classes to teach you.

Blogging about discoverability in the context of power tool interfaces is just peak software engineer naval gazing.

Power drills are pretty benign to the operator as long as they know not to try to use the drill bit as a router or sander. I've seen plenty of people try to knock off an edge with the side of a bit. Sure it can be done, but its also a great way to have it jump and catch the side of your hand.

You can also easily break your wrist with some of the stronger ones that are available. I've also had one wind-up part of my work glove on accident. And the big plug-in drills are just terrifying in general, with how much rotational inertia they have. I won't touch those.

Never wear gloves with tools that rotate.

Easy to say, but working on a house framing/electric/plumbing project for 8+ hours I would rather have the gloves on. With a lathe or mill, of course I'm not gonna wear gloves.

Anti-kickback is a great feature on hammer drills, angle grinders etc.

Pretty benign until an idiot holds a small piece of sheet metal in one hand and drills it with the other. Guess how I know :)

To my defense, I put a bit of wood between the metal and my hand to prevent drilling my hand but little did I know how the drill catches the steel on the very last part of the cut.

Even "standard" tools have dangers. I was wearing gloves to protect my hands and was using an impact driver to loosen a nut... and I tapped the trigger, tool ran, my glove wound around the socket and pulled my finger in. Hurt my finger, luckily didn't break/permanently damage it. Took a second. I wouldn't have predicted.

Yeah it's weird to me how many tools are less safe with work gloves.

Almost like work safety rules ban using gloves with those tools.

I said this elsewhere: never wear gloves with roots that rotate.

Drill, table saw, router, belt sander are all big no-nos.

Orbital sander is about the only power tool I'd be comfortable wearing gloves with.

How does this uncommon knowledge become common sense?

Took me long enough to LEARN to wear gloves, now I have to unlearn it in specific cases :)

How do you prevent your bare hand from getting abraded when it accidentally brushes up against the sanding belt, drill bit, or other fast moving parts of the tool? Yes, I know, exercising caution is always a great idea, but accidents do happen, right?

I have a bench grinder that I use to clean rust off various pieces of metal, and you'd better believe I wear gloves when using it. My reasoning is that the chance of accidentally touching the grinding wheel is high, and a glove will prevent most injuries, while the chance of the glove getting wound around the grinding wheel is near zero because it doesn't take much pressure to stop the wheel. Am I wrong?

Power tool woodworking injuries are no joke. Table saws, lathes, routers, and planers all want to absolutely destroy the operator.

Planers aren't so bad once you get into power feeders, which can be gotten as cheap as $500 with a DW735. (Yeah you can get a power feeder for a table saw too; it's $500 and more like $1500 just for the feeder!)

The others: very, very yes. Very yes. Jointers too. Jointers exist to show malice.

Ah I mistyped there, jointers are actually what I meant rather than planers! I use hand planes when jointing boards and forget that power planers aren't that fancy.

I don't remember hearing about any serious planer injuries (though I'm sure it happens), jointers on the other hand are more ornery than an alligator with all them teeth and no toothbrush.

I've had knots thrown back at me by my planer before. That was before I upgraded to the DW735 with those power feeders and a much deeper body to keep the cutters further away from the human, though.

I have a reasonably safe checklist and set practice for my jointer and I still don't trust the thing.

I learned to use a lathe in highschool for shop class in the mid 2000s, was this abnormal?

Not in a vocational program, but by that time “shop” or “industrial arts” class for the typical student was no longer common.

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