I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to make one of these posts, but I guess it was inevitable. However, it could have been much, much worse.

So I went to the ER the other night. In retrospect, I probably could have just gone to the clinic or something. But one tends to assume the worst when there is so much blood coming out of you.

I don’t really want to focus on what happened, but more on what I could have done to prevent the accident.

You see, in woodworking, there is a lot of force and energy applied to your workpiece. Most of the time it is you who is applying the force and energy. Whether it is carving out a piece of wood with a chisel, feeding some wood through the bandsaw, or simply cutting a sliver of veneer with a utility blade. You apply force in all of these. There are multiple things to consider when you create that kind of tension between you and your workpiece, especially when you have a very very sharp tool in the middle of it all.

-Where is my point A and point B?
A lot of what you do in wood working has a start and finish location. It is pretty much second nature to figure out where you will start, but have you figured out where you will finish? Have you visualized your process from start to finish? When you finish cutting a piece of wood on your bandsaw, the next thing that your bandsaw is cutting could be your finger. Working with tools is a lot like handling a gun, you want to be very aware of  the business end of your tool and where it can end up.

-What if something unpredictable happens?
I can’t count how many times that my workpiece slips and I end up taking a huge gouge out of my beloved workpiece, or worse yet, my hand. Wood is inherently inconsistent. Let’s use the bandsaw as an example again.

Imagine you are ripping a piece of wood at, say, 1 inch per second. It’s not a very big piece, so it is easy to manage. In an instant, the saw blade hits a patch of softer wood and eats in 3 inches before you can even blink.  I think you can guess what CAN happen at that point. Hopefully, you just take a deep sigh of relief because nothing horrible happened. However, it is possible that you could be picking up your thumb off the floor as well.

Moral of the story is: Always prepare for the worst.

-What am I reacting into?
This lesson comes from my buddy Greg.

Lets say that when you are working on a piece and you are exercising safe procedures and ready to react in a split second. Have you thought about what happens when you DO react? When you jerk your fingers out of the way of potential danger, are you just going to react into another danger?

My shop gets pretty messy, I try to clean it occasionally, but sometimes I end up working with crap laying around. This poses a potential hazard because some of the mess might be a sharp chisel that I forgot to put back on the rack. Having your work area clear of other hazards is important.

Keep these rules in mind when working with dangerous equipment. There are plenty of other rules to consider, but those are the big ones that I have learned in the 10 months of wood working.
Stay safe.
-M