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Metalworking (rec.crafts.metalworking) Discuss various aspects of working with metal, such as machining, welding, metal joining, screwing, casting, hardening/tempering, blacksmithing/forging, spinning and hammer work, sheet metal work. |
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I hate it when that happens
On Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:45:24 -0700, "Charlie Gary"
wrote: BottleBob wrote: Snip Charlie: YIKES! That sounds really serious. Here's wishing you a fast and complete recovery. I was wondering where you've been lately. If you are able, could you give some greater detail? A few years ago I bought this program called "Via Voice", it lets you talk into one of those microphones you wear and the program types what you say on your monitor. I played with it for a couple of weeks, but lost interest in enunciating my words properly. It did seem to have the potential to somewhat work as advertised. BB, thanks for the well-wishes. More detail, eh? Well, the plastic was ABS 12" x 12" x 2". The cutter was spinning 5000 rpm, and the plastic was out of the vise whipping around when the pull stud broke. This spinning square of plastic came through the 24" wide opening between the doors and hit my arm just below the elbow. It seems to have ridden up my arm a little, because it also smashed a few fingers. I had a big bruise on my hip where my elbow hit it, and my head still has a numb spot where it bounced off the table leg, but my forearm really took a beating. When I thought about getting up off the floor I took one look at my arm and knew better than to try standing. It sort of looked like there was an explosion inside my arm. A big piece of muscle was laying inside out, and there was more than one visible bone. Nobody ever tried counting all the bone fragments. The surgery reports (seven, so far) use terms like "degloving" and "near-amputation". So far repairs have involved 3 metal plates with lots of screws, cadaver bone to bridge the two forearm bones, making them one solid unit, grafting muscle from my leg to my arm to replace all the muscles that used to extend my fingers and thumb, about 62 square inches of skin for two separate skin grafts from the same leg, and four surgeries where all they did was clean up some of the mess. The fingers were fixed with .045" wires sticking out of my knuckles, and those have already been removed. There's still a hole in my elbow, but the doc wants to wait a while to see if it closes up by itself. It might be, because my daughter says she can no longer see the end of one of the plates at the bottom. Here's hoping it keeps going. I'm really lucky I work so close to the hospital I went to. The doctor in charge of fixing me is known around the world for doing this kind of thing, so I have a lot of confidence in him. I'm not doing too bad typing with only one hand. I'm a master hunter-pecker, so one hand out of action doesn't slow me down too much. I was talking to my boss, who is a saint for continuing to send paychecks during my seven-1/2 week absence, and we both concluded I would be better of with some kind of mouse or ball with programmable buttons than some voice-regognition software. I currently stand a 1/2 endmill on my shift, alt and control keys when I need a second hand, and that slows me down some when using Pro/E. There's the detailed report. Hope it wasn't too much. Time to go back on my head. Lets all be careful out there. Gunner |