When you do woodworking and carpentry for a living you live with the knowledge that you can be seriously hurt at any time if you aren't careful. Sometimes the pressure of getting work out the door or getting the house done on time can sometimes cloud your focus on safety, and when it doe's you could end up paying for that lack of focus. This is the story of my lack of focus and it resulted in the worst injury I got in my woodworking career.
It was about 4 pm and I was trying to finish up the base in the last bedroom of this 5 bedroom house I was doing the trim work on, I had already placed all the long walls with base and was filling the short pieces between the walls and the castings, I just back mitered the last piece and was coping the cut. when I lost my grip on the base and sliced into my thumb with my coping saw. It went through the skin and cut into the knuckle of my thumb very deeply,
I had to go the hospital and I ended up have surgery to repair the damage I did. the injury took a long time to heal and I still have problems with that thumb.
My point to this story is all tools are dangerous and should be used with care. I never in my life would expected getting should a bad injury from something that seems as harmless as a coping saw, but I did.
So keep your tools sharp and your eye on safety even sharper and be safe while working and enjoy the work.
Joey
2 comments:
And I could not agree with you more. As workers of wood, I believe we all have found ourselves in a rush, meeting deadlines, or in my case just excited about getting a project done. I always like reading these kind of posts because it brings the subject of safety in the forefront, where actually it should always be. These (wood working) kinds of injuries always seem to come from something you have already done a gazillion times. Maybe we all get a bit too comfortable in our own knowledge of (I have done this a million times , aint no thing mindset) and it's just that ,that gets us in trouble.
As silly as it sounds I have made a few signs on regular paper in bright colored pens that say's "Don't ever lose sight Allison that no matter how loud you scream ain't nobody coming" "SAFETY FIRST" and after awhile I even become blind to those, so I move them around and make them in different colors. I know it sounds as goofy as it comes, but it works for me. I don't think it can ever be written enough about safety when it comes to the tools we use in the shop on a daily basis. It's not like we are playing with tiddlywinks!
Thanks for the reminder.
Ah yes, I remember the last time I rushed something, got a nasty burn on my fingers.
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