11-20-2016, 12:20 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-20-2016, 12:21 PM by Lumber Yard®.)
Met a man a couple weeks ago who responded to my CL ad for a bandsaw I had for sale. Via email he had told me that he wanted the saw and that he would purchase it of I could hold it for him. I told him, "no problem" and we set-up a time to make the transaction. In that part of the discussion he indicated that he recently had surgery and he would need quite a bit of help getting it loaded into his truck. Again, my response was, "no problem' but I hadn't really thought about it being an injury caused by woodworking that led him to go under the knife.
The older man showed up as scheduled with his wife to purchase the saw. He had a nice clean white bandage over his hand and at that point I started to put it together... dood got bit by something in the shop. We ended up discussing it and I could tell he was not really well versed on things... he sounded like he was probably a pretty experienced woodworker but he certainly didn't have all the safety jargon down. The short version of the story is that he was attempting to resaw a piece of walnut on the tablesaw when he experienced a kickback. The kickback was violent enough that it severed one of his fingers and destroyed the ligaments/tendons in one of his knuckles... surgery repaired things by fusing the bones at the knuckle joint. After it was all said and done it was $15,000 expense at the hospital.
The set-up on the tablesaw was that he had already made the first cut halfway through the lumber and had flipped it over to complete the resaw cut. He didn't really know what a "splitter" was but told me he couldn't use the guard because of the "non-through" cut. He also didn't really know what to call what had happened so, he described it and I explained that he experienced a "kickback". He chuckled and nodded his head like he understood why it would be called that. He made it sound like he had made similar cuts in the past on the tablesaw as he had never owned a bandsaw or any other tool that could make a similar style resaw cut. In the end, he had convinced his wife, that based on his research, resawing on a bandsaw would be much safer and cheaper than another trip to the hospital.
The older man showed up as scheduled with his wife to purchase the saw. He had a nice clean white bandage over his hand and at that point I started to put it together... dood got bit by something in the shop. We ended up discussing it and I could tell he was not really well versed on things... he sounded like he was probably a pretty experienced woodworker but he certainly didn't have all the safety jargon down. The short version of the story is that he was attempting to resaw a piece of walnut on the tablesaw when he experienced a kickback. The kickback was violent enough that it severed one of his fingers and destroyed the ligaments/tendons in one of his knuckles... surgery repaired things by fusing the bones at the knuckle joint. After it was all said and done it was $15,000 expense at the hospital.
The set-up on the tablesaw was that he had already made the first cut halfway through the lumber and had flipped it over to complete the resaw cut. He didn't really know what a "splitter" was but told me he couldn't use the guard because of the "non-through" cut. He also didn't really know what to call what had happened so, he described it and I explained that he experienced a "kickback". He chuckled and nodded his head like he understood why it would be called that. He made it sound like he had made similar cuts in the past on the tablesaw as he had never owned a bandsaw or any other tool that could make a similar style resaw cut. In the end, he had convinced his wife, that based on his research, resawing on a bandsaw would be much safer and cheaper than another trip to the hospital.
