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Mike Stafford

Mike Stafford

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Coastal plain of North Carolina
I was sanding inside a small Japanese inspired bowl and inadvertently allowed my thumb to touch the rim.

Now this was the rim that had not had its edge broken so it was as sharp as a meat slicer. I ended up slicing the pad of my thumb about an inch. The good news is that at whatever speed I was sanding at the spinning wood cauterized the cut and virtually no blood managed to escape which is a miracle since I take a blood thinner twice per day.

I haven't done anything that stupid in quite a while. Now I have done some stupid things but I haven't done anything that would draw blood.

By the way, I didn't feel a thing. My neuropathy doesn't allow me to feel an injury until I see the blood flying.
 
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Chuck Ellis said:
I generally tell people that if there's no blood on the work, it's probably not mine.
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I don't know if you folks ever watched Roy Underhill in his PBS TV series The Woodwright's Shop. Well, I did faithfully. He managed to nick himself in virtually every episode so I understand Chuck's sentiment quite well.

Most of the time if I am bleeding while working on the lathe it is because I didn't remove the live center and its point provided a painful and usually bloody reminder to take it out and put it away when through with it. :rolleyes:
 
Okay, I guess it is time for the story on cutting one's self on the table saw.

Many years ago when I was working for a large corporation in the Technical Services division I was as crazy about woodworking as I am now. There was another guy (let's call him Bill to protect the innocent) who worked across the hall in R&D who was as crazy as me. At that time I was building small furniture, toys (I made and sold a lot of train sets) and jewelry boxes. My friend was building cabinets for his new house and trying to get them done before he married the love of his life and carried her across the threshold.

The time for that threshold crossing was drawing nigh and Bill was using up some of his vacation and sick leave to build the face frames for his cabinets. He was using some beautiful rift saw red oak that was gorgeous.

On this particular day he was working at home by himself. I was at work attending meetings all day. One of the secretaries came into the conference room and whispered in my ear that I had an emergency call. I excused myself and went to take the call. It was Bill and he was calling from the emergency room. It seems that Bill did the unthinkable; he reached across the blade while he was ripping to control a piece that might cause the cut to bind. In the blink of an eye he dropped his thumb into that ripping blade and it pulled his hand into the blade and he lost half of his thumb and most of the first three fingers on his left hand. He wrapped a towel around his hand and drove himself to the hospital.

Bill asked me to do him a favor, "I need you to go over to the house.:

I interrupted, "You want me to find your fingers and bring them to the hospital?"

"Nah, those fingers are gone I watched them get chewed right through the slot on the table insert."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"How about cleaning off as much blood as you can from those strips I was ripping!"

When I say we were both crazy about wood and woodworking I meant what I said because I understood his concern perfectly. Man, you just don't get beautiful rift sawn red oak like that every day.

I would just like to say from that day forward I never used my hands to push a piece of wood through the table saw, jointer, band saw etc. etc. etc. I made dozens of push sticks in every size and shape to control and guide the wood. I didn't lose any fingers but Bill's accident scared the you know what out of me. To this day I don't push anything through a tool with my bare hands and that accident was over 40 years ago.
 
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As a kid growing up I worked for various farmers baling hay, sorting, moving hogs or cattle. Anyway, this "old" farmer (he is my mom and dad's age, late 80's) always talked about converting the one old hog barn into a woodworking shop. He talked about it a lot, he wanted to build birdhouses. Well he sold his line of equipment and rented out his acreage and by golly converted that hog house into a wonderful wood shop. I saw him off and on through his converting the hog house and he would show me pictures. I didn't see him often or regularly, but the next time I saw him he had his left arm in a sling, huge ace bandage around the arm to end of fingers. I asked him what happened. He said, "very first piece of plywood, very first cut in my new shop, the piece of plywood started raising up so I put my hand on it to keep it against the table saw's bed. Yep, diagonally cut off the first knuckle of finger beside pinky, most of middle finger, all of pointer finger and most of thumb". He told me he locked the door and would never go in there again. What a shame.
 
Although carving is a slow process, there is blood in all my pieces, and I never know/notice how I cut myself until I see a strike of blood on the piece. Most of the times it is just a tiny tiny cut. I guess that's the result of having sharp tools.
 
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