Last year I cut the tip of my left index finger off on the TS. I was
cutting some thin strips from a 2x4 on a friends crappy contractor
saw. Dull blade, underpowered saw, and light saw frame, so I was
holding down the saw with my left foot while feeding with both hands.
I was down to the last strip from a 2x4 and was pushing with my right
hand using a pushstick. Since the wood was so hard to feed into the
crap blade, my left hand ended up doing some pushing instead of just
guiding the wood against the fence. The saw also had a gaping wide
throat plate, and the sliver of an offcut ended up getting sucked into
the throatplate, which sucked the workpiece into the blade really
fast. I tried to pull my left hand back, but it was too late and I
watched it go in. Felt like someone hit my fingers with a big stick or
something, and I pulled my hand back and saw hanging parts of meat
from my fingers with a bunch of blood. At that point I didn't feel I
could look at it any more and just said "Oh ****. I think you'd better
drive me to the hospital." So I ended up in the emergency room with a
bloody rag wrapped around my hand. Kind of the "walk of shame" for a
woodworker, eh? I was blacking out by thinking about my fingers
getting cut off, since at that point I wasn't really sure what the
extent of the damage was.

Luckily the hunk that got cut off was hanging off by a little piece of
skin, so we didn't have to go looking for it in the saw. The blade
chewed off the end of the bone, but they were able to kind of file it
off and cover it up with the chunk of flesh. I had a good orthopedic
surgeon, and the repair seems to have taken, and even regrown some
nerves in the chunk that was cut off. The nail sort of grew out from
the piece of cuticle that was left and out over the repaired piece. So
now its a little shorter, is shaped funny, has a wierd nail, and
doesn't have good feeling in it. But my surgeon said thats about as
good as you can hope for when you put your hand in the table saw. He
also said that the most popular injury for him was fingers in the
table saw and toes in the lawnmower. So I feel relatively lucky.

Well, thats probably more detail than you wanted to hear. Kind of
gross, really!

Now I'm scared to cut my fingers off every single time I use the table
saw, and have started imagining how I could be hurt by nearly every
other tool I use too. I guess that is for the better, and it could
have been a more costly lesson.

Lessons learned:

- use a zero clearance throat plate

- use a sharp blade

- use good tools

- don't get into a situation where if something goes wrong your hands
will end up in the cutter. I of course knew this, and actually right
before the incident happened I was starting to get little alarm bells
in my head that this might not be the best situation.

So even before my finger was out from under dressings, I went out and
bought a 1973 Powermatic 66 and have been restoring it for the last
year. Now its up and running with a WWII and a zero clearance insert,
good fence, etc. It cuts well and I don't need to jam wood through it,
and isn't tipping over when I feed boards. Much harder for things to
be sucked into the throat plate now as well.

After reading about TS injuries though, I am probably even more scared
about kickback, so I now have a little screw in splitter in my throat
plate too. Probably will get a blade guard at some point but I haven't
decided which option will be the least annoying.

-Holly

Prometheus wrote in message . ..
On Sat, 09 Oct 2004 07:13:04 -0400, wrote:

Yesterday, my uncle lost most of the first joint of left ring finger
in a jointer. Last year I almost lost my left ring finger while
adjusting lower guides on a band saw that was running with lower cover
open.

For those that track these kind of things, which fingers seem to get
bit most often? I'm thinking that thumb, fore finger, and index
finger don't get hit as often as ring finger since we tend to work
with those three vs all five.

I think we fixate on the key three and loose track of the other two
per hand.

The whole point of this message is to remind people to think about all
your fingers and not just the ones that are guiding your stock.

Wes