On 5/26/2012 8:00 PM, Mike Marlow wrote:
Steve Turner wrote:
A woodworking buddy of mine just told me about an accident that
another acquaintance of ours had about a week ago. Not a fun story.

This fellow (I'll call him John) has a contractor's saw (not sure of
the brand) for which he was preparing to install a new zero-clearance
insert. I don't know whether the insert was home-made or
commercially available, what material it was made of, or whether it
had a roll pin protruding out the back to prevent it from lifting,
etc. All I know is that he needed to raise the blade through the
insert to cut the opening.
So John installs the insert and proceeds to hold it down from above
with a block of wood (don't know how big, what kind, or what shape)
to keep it from lifting while raising the blade. The block was
sacrificial, and for some reason he thought it was OK to let the
blade cut into the block as he was raising it while also holding the
block in place with a push stick (one of those long things with a
notch at the end; I HATE those things!). Does this raise any red
flags with you yet?
So while John is turning the crank with his right hand to raise the
blade, he is holding the block in place with his left hand (I think
he had his left index finger extended; I'm not sure), and as you
might expect the block shifted around a little bit, and WHAM! The
blade grabs the block and virtually *disintegrates* it, which in turn
disintegrates the push stick, which in turn disintegrates the index
finger on John's left hand. Ten different breaks and fractures in
his finger, torn tendons, and meat hanging off the bone. The doctors
told him they might be able to return it to some semblance of a
finger after a half-dozen or more surgeries, but he just told them to
take it off. I probably would have said the same thing.

I know you had to leave out a lot of details that you didn't have, but for
the life of me I cannot just see this happening. Not to say that I question
it - to say that done at least one way, this should have worked just fine.
I would be very curious about the missing details, because this just does
not seem that dangerous (under one set of circumstances).

Really? You don't see anything dangerous about the blade coming up through the
center of a block of wood that has no real protection from side-to-side or
front-to-back movement?

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