Steve Turner wrote:
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?

Really - read what I wrote. The description seemed to be lacking in detail
to me. So no... I did not get anything from the original explanation which
explained how the accident happened.

Watch as this thread unfolds and I will assure you that more than just I do
not really understand exactly what happened.

To draw any conclusions based on a lack of understanding is just
meaningless.


--

-Mike-