My close call

I know you guys think I’ve vanished but to your dismay I am still here. It happens that a couple of french friends have come over to visit the country and they are staying over at our home for two weeks so I am quite busy showing them the area.

Although after reading Hawg's post I couldn’t help but remember my close call with a spinning blade. Too close for my taste.

It was a few years ago and I was building a new porch for a friend of mine. Her house is an ancient (170 years old) log house and the front porch was badly rotten so I teared it down and proceeded to build a new one. Mind you, this was a completely “on-site” job and my choice of tools was very limited (and there goes my entry for the Understatement Of The Year Awards…).

I was ripping very long 4×4s (not SUVs!) with a portable circular saw. Sure enough, the saw was too small for the job and I had to do it in two passes from opposite sides as the blade only went about 60% of the required deep.

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They were about 10 ft long if I recall correctly so, at the end of the last cut, the thin but long slice of wood closed down on the back of the saw and Mr. Kickback showed it’s ugly face. The saw jumped back out of my hand -literally- and landed on the floor on my side. Not to brag about it but I’m a pretty strong guy and I could never have imagined that such a small tool could exert that kind of force.

In the heat of the moment I didn’t felt anything, I guess it was the adrenaline rush, but immediately I started inspecting my hands trying to convince myself that I was still in one piece.

Then I saw it.

And I was afraid.

Very scared I should say.

Of course when you are building fine furniture you have to compromise in some security items because, after all, you can’t expect great results if you are wearing boxing gloves. But I was just rough cutting posts and boards in a makeshift workbench and I confess that I’ve never trusted portable circular saws. I think it’s pretty easy to get confident with them and the retractile guard is not enough to keep you safe. So I am glad on that day I was wearing thick leather contractor gloves. I am glad because it’s the only thing that saved my right thumb. And not that I want to, but if I have to choose, I can’t think of a worse finger to loose.

Here’s the picture of my right glove after the accident:

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It was when I looked down and I saw this image that I was scared. I was afraid of taking the glove off and see what was inside. Even if it’s not easy to appreciate in the picture, the upper and lower holes are connected by a cut all the way through the leather and fabric.

Lucky me, once I saw the extent of the lesion I was very, very relieved. Still shaking but relieved nonetheless. This is a picture of my “two thumbs up” three weeks after the accident:

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The part of the lion is not facing the camera, just behind the left bump. That was the entry point and the saw ran across the top of my thumb, following the scar and exiting in the small dark patch on the right side.

Worse comes to worst, and to add insult to the injury (pun intended), after a couple of hours and some painkillers, once the throbing thumb was a little bit better I was stupid enough to go back to work… Obviously, I was somewhat stressed out and I managed to cleanly cut… the power cord of the saw! Yep, after that I called it a day and take the rest of the day and the following one off.

Lessons learned that day:

1. Stabilize well your blanks, AKA you can never have enough clamps.
2. If cutting such long pieces, insert a scrap halfway through the cut and fix it with a clamp. This would prevent the gap from closing down on the blade.
3. Don’t do such kind of cuts alone. A helping hand on the other end would have prevented this.
4. As for your enemies, never trust or misjudge any machine, no matter how small and innocent it would look like.
5. Be paranoid about safety. I am and always been and yet…
6. If you have suffered a stressful situation, stop, think about what and why happened and, if you don’t feel totally confident, call it a day. The hardest thing to learn in aviation, and the one that causes the highest number of casualties is learning to recognize when to say NO and where to stop before errors pile up.

And last but not least:

1. If a friend of yours ever asks you to build her a porch, do like I did and be sure beforehand that she’s a certified nurse. Otherwise change your friends! :o)

Take care folks, I have to go now because tomorrow the frenchies will come back from Hiroshima and I will be busy again (By the way, and in a complete non sequitur, visiting the Peace museum in Hiroshima changed my life, that is scary!)

-- Jojo, shopless in Kyoto · http://twitter.com/kagushokunin