On Sun, 17 Jan 2021 11:37:53 -0800 (PST), DerbyDad03
wrote:

On Sunday, January 17, 2021 at 3:48:41 AM UTC-5, Puckdropper wrote:


Lesson #2: Safety glasses aren't the end-all of safety. A chip found its
way past the glasses and while I'm ok it's a little sore there. I should
have been wearing a full face shield but I didn't have one on site.


Not chip related, but my most dramatic "Thank God I was wearing safety
glasses" moment came when I was building my first deck.

I didn't need to wear corrective lessons back then, but I worked at a factory
so wearing safety glasses was a practice that I followed at work and at home.

I was playing around with the railing for the deck stairs, trying to figure out
what look I wanted. I attached a 2 x4 to the posts with some bar clamps and
stepped back to take a look. Since there are 9 steps from the ground to the
landing, one of the bar clamps was up pretty high. I should mention that I
had grabbed a 36" clamp and attached it so that the bar was sticking out into
the yard.

As I walked back towards the stairs, my vision was focused on the railing.
The 1/4" x 3/4" end of the steel bar didn't even register in my brain. When I
was about 30" from the stairs, my head snapped back as the end of the bar
hit the right lens of my safety glasses dead center. The bar deflected
upwards and put a nasty gouge in my forehead. By the time I realized what
had happened, blood was dripping down over my eye and I was shaking like a
leaf. It took me a few seconds to figure out that my eye was OK and that it was
just blood that was obstructing my vision. The lens was cracked, but had held
and had done it's job.

I have no doubt that the safety glasses prevented the bar from pushing my eyeball
back into my head. 30+ years later, it still makes me a little queasy just thinking
about it.

An acquaintance was hammering cut nails into his basement wall. Yep,
one shattered sending shrapnel into his eye. After a half dozen
surgeries they did save his eye but there is lesson in there.

Two big mistakes. 1) no eye protection and 2) using a hardened (claw)
hammer on hardened cut nails. He won't do that again.