| For those of you reading this to see gory pictures, I am sorry to disappoint you. There is something about having a disagreement with one's tablesaw that interferes with one’s memory, thus making him forget about picking up the camera. I probably would have covered the lens with blood anyway so the pictures wouldn’t have turned out.
I am relating this story not because I want to sound stupid, or because I have a masochistic desire to have people ask me “what I did that for?”, which I had quite enough of at the time, but because it has a very valuable moral to it.
One evening after work I was engaged in cutting out pieces of mahogany for a project I was working on, an entertainment unit. It had been a long evening and it was nearing 11 PM. Most of the evening had been taken up by gluing up small router made boxes for a craft show I was entering. I was tired, and my mind was no longer on what I was doing.
The mahogany pieces were glued up panels to be used as the sides of the unit. I was in a rush because I was fairly fed up with creating projects for the craft show and I wanted to make some headway on a project for myself. In the process, I forgot to scrape off the squished out glue bead from one side of one of the two panels. After having ripped one to width I started on the other, having the glue bead facing down on the saw table. A very big mistake.
At this point let me point out that the tablesaw blade guard and splitter were stuck behind a woodpile somewhere. They were the stock items that came with my Unisaw and I could never get them to fit properly, no matter how hard I tried. So, I tossed them against a wall.
After having placed the panel an the saw, I powered it up and waited for the usual happy hum, and proceeded to feed my stock through. As I shifted my hand position, the panel rocked along the glue bead. This caused the panel to ride up on the blade at which time it began to rotate very quickly. After doing a 90 degree turn the blade lifted it up and tried to throw it in my face. To counteract this, I pushed the panel down with my left hand. Unfortunately, by the time the panel was flat to the table again, it had rotated out of the way of the blade and my hand was fed into the spinning carbide at the base of my thumb near the wrist. The blade dug deeply into the meat of my palm and kicked my hand back, nearly breaking my wrist, the carbide teeth contacting my hand in a continuous line from near the wrist, across the side of my palm and up the inside of my thumb nearly to its tip.
I was very lucky to keep it. At the time though, I wasn’t sure so I grabbed a Canadian Armed Forces surplus compression bandage form my medical kit and placed direct pressure on a 4 inch long gaping hole that looked like where the rest of my thumb was going to fall off. I then used the 4 or 5 feet of bandage wrapping to securely tie on my thumb. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it wasn’t going to come off.
With blood soaking the entire front of my dark blue shop coat, as well as pooling on my table saw, I used the intercom to call my wife who was in the house. In shock, I screamed for her to get the @$#% out to the shop but I guess my mouth was too close to the mike because her sweet voice, somewhat agitated, called back that she was busy and did not understand what my problem was. I very slowly said, “I think I cut my $%@*& thumb off in the tablesaw and I think I should go to the hospital NOW!”
Well she grabbed her keys and came running out without a coat. It might be pertinent to note that it was November in Alberta, and the snow had been falling all evening so we had nearly a foot and a half of fresh snow on the car and in the driveway since I came home from work. As she rushed to the shop, I met her just outside the door and I could tell her face went completely white even in the dull glow of the yard light when she saw the bandage and the blood all over me.
Nearly in hysterics, she yelled at me to get in the car. All the way to the hospital I just sat there and chanted, “I hope I don’t lose it, I hope I don’t lose it!” Of course she yelled at me to stop that talk the whole time. Funny enough they didn’t even x-ray it. Years later I feel that they made a big mistake not taking an x-ray because you can feel irregularities in the bone under the skin. Well they cleaned it up and put in 30 or 40 stitches and I was back on the road.
Oh, not quite. For weeks it was wrapped tight enough to immobilize it. The saw blade had traveled sideways through the meat in my palm as my hand pivoted. The doctor said that if I used my hand at all, he didn’t know how they would ever make the stitches stay due to the amount of meat that was removed.
To this day, my left hand doesn’t work properly. It hurts like hell when the weather changes, and sometimes even when it doesn’t. It took 6 or 7 months to get it to the point where I could woodwork again, and several months after that before I was brave enough to use the table saw again. Over a year later I still had no sensation. Between the pain, the recuperation and the nightmares, it wasn’t worth it.
So, the moral of the story? First, NEVER work wood when you are too tired. Machinery doesn’t forgive stupidity and you must be thinking at the top of your form to keep those flesh hungry machines at bay. Second, always use a saw guard and a splitter. The tablesaw isn’t your friend, it is an emotionless beast who couldn’t give a rat’s patoot about you and your fingers. Remember that.
In the end, my accident was entirely preventable. If I had quit when I felt fatigued it would never have happened. Coming back fresh I would have noticed the glue bead I had failed to scrape off. Even if I hadn’t quit, the appropriate blade guard would have saved me from injury.
So, in the end, I hope the story of my thumb inspires you to think about the safety practices you use in your shop. Please learn from my mistakes: quit when you are tired, and USE the guards that come with your tools! |
