Lathe Accidents

Anybody know any stories or have a personal experience with a lathe accident. The reason I'm asking is that I'm thinking about moving up to a gear driven lathe. I had a bad experience with my Jet 920 years ago. My stupidity. I needed to remove the rust off a 1.5" ID Pipe so I just cranked it up, got a piece of 30 grit sandpaper, put on a welders glove and just grabbed it tight as it was turning. Worked pretty good. But eventually one day I wasn't paying to much attention and the glove got snagged under the paper and wrapped my arm clean around the machine. The only thing that saved me was that the belt on the machine slipped. Didn't break anything but it scared the hell out of me. I don't go near that thing with anything other than tooling anymore. But I figure somewhere out there someone has had an arm ripped off. Every old time carpenter I know has at least the tip of one finger missing.

There's a local shop here in Savannah that has a large antique lathe parked in the corner. Evidently the current owner's grandfather was working on the machine one day wearing bib overalls, got a little too familiar with the machine, the good stout overalls let the machine wind him around the workpiece. He lived for a few days.

Similar thing happened at the old RR shop here in town, only this time it was some lineshaft and the guy wasn't hurt badly.

Another fellow here in town I know got his hand in some long strandy cuttings when the workpiece grabbed them. Luckily they were able to re-attach the fingers.

I USED TO wear overalls when working on the lathe, I'm now much in favor of jeans and a pretty worn out T shirt. And call me slow or crazy, I stop the machine to clear chips, stick or no.

The list of "thou shalt nots" in industrial settings is almost endless. Hazard avoidance, self knowledge, thinking ahead to consequences, experience, and familiarity with the equipment are the practical roots of safety.

The sandpaper/glove trick is one of those classic accidents waiting to happen. It was dumb luck you didn't get hurt in your accident and you're wiser now in consequence. That said, I wouldn't let the gear Vs belt drive lathe non-controversy inhibit me from moving up a size or three in lathes.

good morning.

good subject for discussion here. thank you for starting it, Paul.

i have long hair. i wear it in a ponytail and it reaches down to about the middle of my back. i realize that this is 'different'. don't need any commentary there. i have it because i don't like hair places.

ok. to the point. a couple of years ago i was changing the oil in my truck. i managed to get the hair wrapped around a creeper wheel. you have no idea how heavy a cheap wal mart creeper is until you lift it wiht your hair. my kid cut me loose.

you would think i would have learned something there, huh?

about six months ago i was screwing some tin to the side of my house. got too close to the drill motor and got some hair wrapped around the shaft of it. where the armature is, not the chuck. it stopped the drill motor and i had to get my kid to cut me loose again.

i learned then. the point of this is to tell you that it happens in a heartbeat. had this happened with more of a machine, it could have been pretty serious.

i have been around machinery all my life. i learned early on not to wear anything loose or floppy around it. gloves are a serious hazard around stuff that rotates.

my kids are interested in machines. the first thing i taught them is that a machine is hungry and it doesn't care whether it eats steel or fingers. ALWAYS look at what you are doing and try to consider all the ways that it can hurt you. maybe that makes me slow, but i am not in a race and i have gotten to where i like all my fingers. i have seen a lot of guys get hurt, and almost all of those injuries could have been prevented by thinking a little more before acting.

good luck. work safely.

peace.
bill

Bill,
You might not like hair places but it sounds like your kid is getting quite good at it <g>

John S.

I had a minor shop accident yesterday. It didn't involve the lathe or any other tool for that matter. I was moving parts for my latest project from the garage to my downstairs shop. As is the custom in this part of the woods we always remove footwear when entering the house, which I did. I was carrying four pieces of aluminum box section tubing, each one 2"x3"x1/4" thick and 31 inches long. Each weighs around ten pounds. I carried them down stairs and placed them on a work bench. As I set them down one piece slipped off the stack and managed to fall in a perfectly vertical orientation straight onto the second knuckle of my left big toe which was protected only by a sock. The good news is that it didn't break the toe. The bad news is that the toe was already broken in an unrelated mishap a year ago and was still sore. Good thing I don't mind the sight of my own blood. The tubing had already been machined on the ends to a perfect flat with nice sharp edges. Cut my toe very nicely as well as crushing it. I made some comments that my mother would not be proud of and limped upstairs to tend it. I need to find some steel toed slippers.

Evan:

So, you work in your shop barefooted? Do you ever step on sharp things on the floor?

Just wondering.

No gloves with powered machinery. That's
a hard and fast rule. You'll get into
trouble with almost any kind of lathe
that way, short of a unimat.

Jim

Never..............NEVER grab a stringy chip,even loose ones under or near a rotating chuck, workpiece or tool. Also, only grab stringy chips: while wearing gloves, with machines off. I really filleted my finger once while trying to pull a stringy stainless chip free from a shop towel. It was real deep. That was, however the first time I tried "super glue surgery", because I was too selfish with my time to waste going to the ER and have some intern do a lousey and expensive job sewing it up, while losing 3 hours of my life. So, I scrubbed the heck out of it, kept pressure on it till I could open the finger up a bit without re-opening the gash, then I applied super glue on the wound, bandaged up with antibiotic and went back into the shop.
I experienced No pain, infection at all, and could use it pretty quick. Was making chips again and only lost an hour. Guess I am an addicted chipmaker.

Brett (Size 10 shirt, size 2 hat)

I can think of a couple. One a women in the shop was polishing a shaft with floves on and using lapping paper that comes in rolls for lapping crankshafts. She wound up losing part of two fingers and a third all the way to the palm. No way to reattch as the tendon snapped too far in. The other is kind of funy. We have one guy who has the habit of getting too close to his work. He ws cutting threads one day and had a nice culring chip coming off the tool. When he stuck his nose in to see what was going on the chip went right up one of his nostrils. Cured him for about six months

I will never grab a stringy chip in the lathe with my hands, gloves or not. I use a curved hook for the tougher ones or pliers. Hands NEVER ! A friend of mine was borrowing a few hours on my lathe one day. I was in the shop working too on the mill. I heard this #$@#$%^&* and looked around to see him bleeding like a stuck hog. (and he did not have the lathe running)... he had tried to pull loose a stringy stainless chip and it nearly sliced his entire finger off... oooooooooooooo.. do I hate the sight of a flood of blood.

TMD

mflywheel,

No I do not work barefooted. I have some slippers that I wear with heavy wool socks. They stay in the shop at all times as it is the only way to minimize the swarf tracking problem to acceptable levels. I need something easy to put on and off as I frequently need to go upstairs to the garage shop for various tasks like grinding or to use the big drill press and/or sander etc. I just looked into the price of some steel toed slip on shoes this morning. $189.00 cdn. Yikes. I'm going to have to look around some more.

Billr, for many years (about 15), I had a similar ponytail which ended about my belt! Now I sport a flat top, just got sick of dealing with it about 10yrs ago. You should have seen the old barber's face when I walked into his shop after nearly 20 yrs without a haircut and announced I wanted a flat top.

Anyhow, before the flat top, I was doing some boring on my Jet 9x20 one day and suddenly realized the chuck was getting REALLY BIG! Leaning over to see inside the cut had resulted in my hair being wound around the leadscrew and it was just reeling me in...fast! I grabbed the ponytail with both hands and snatched myself loose, losing a couple of inches of hair in the process. From then on I wore that ponytail up under a HAT around the machine tools. Just glad it wasn't that Pacemaker at work, I might have lost my head instead (not that it would have affected any vital organs).

A friend of a friend works in BIG machine shop here in town. Was running a huge 20 or 30 ft vertical boring mill one day. Leaned over to adjust or check something and it grabbed his hooded sweatshirt. He remembers seeing a blur of the shop go by a few times before it skinned him ut of the sweatshirt. He has no idea exactly how many times he went around, but distinctly remembers the first four. He was bruised over his entire trunk where the machine wrung him out of the shirt.

No rings, no watches, no gloves (except when handling hot pieces and stringy chips with the machine shut off), no beer when running a machine (lots after!). Gotta have safety glasses (my prescription glasses are large plastic lens saftey glasses) and I have a set of rung binders with the Army machine shop web info printed out. You want to run the machines, you sit down and read the book, questions to follow. That's the rules in my shop.

One day a buddy called me over to look at the piece in the CNC ID grinder. i had just come from the production floor and was still wearing the mandotory hairnet. Being a grinder the spindle is left on, as soon as I looked in the wheel grabbed the hairnet and slammed my head into the spindle housing. No blood, no foul, just my hard head.

It's real easy to get cavalier about machine tools.

The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up just reading this thread. Nothing personal to report here, but I've seen a mess of them. My dad taught me at a very early age to think forward, constant vigilance, situational awareness.

I was an auto mechanic for 12 years and learned "where those knuckles will go if that wrench lets go" very early on, too. When I started in this trade, my boss would come around at the end of the night and count my fingers (jokingly) but I did wonder those first few weeks if I hadn't made a mistake. Here we were spinning razor sharp tools at very high speeds.

The first bonehead move I made in this trade was when I went looking for a resharpened endmill. You know that protective plastic they dip them in? ( I know a bunch of you are cringing now) I had the endmill in one hand and tugged on the plastic with the other. It wouldn't come off, so what'd I do? yep, tugged harder. 'Till it gave and I felt a tug in my finger and thumb. Looked down, blood everywhere. Stupid, but I learned.

We just got a bunch of new gloves in the shop for handling chips (no pulling, just handling. Like the others, we use steel hook and pliers for pulling). They are reinforced with kevlar (don't remember the manufacturer) We work with a lot of stainless and it would slice through leather gloves as easily as skin.

Kind of a funny one: We used to wear lab coats at IBM if it was a particularly messy job. There's a guy working beside me on a BP and I hear him yelling "SHUT IT OFF! SHUT IT OFF!" I look over to see he had set the power cross feed on and the handle on the left side of the machine was wrapping him up in his lab coat. Lifted his feet right off the ground and he couldn't reach the shut off switch. We got him untangled and back on the ground.

Had another guy setting up a fly cutter in a BP. The kind that's just a 3/4" bar vertically, and a horizontal 3/4" bar running through it at the bottom. He chucks it up and doesn't check the set screws on the cross bar. Fires up the mill and BANG ZIP BANG POW, bar slips out and ricochetes through the 15 BP's all in a small area with people ducking for cover. We started leaving a hard hat hanging on the machine next to him for anyone who had to work near him

There are more, but this getting long winded (sorry)

Excellent topic to get the word out about safety and awareness. Diligence, always.

Mark

I am glad someone mentioned the dangers of hooded sweatshirts. I have one that is my favorite I wear a lot. I'll have to got an unhooded one for when I have the machinery running.

I have been lucky, nothing but minor cuts in all my machining years. probably the worse one was the angle grinder across the thumb. Operating an angle grinder, let go of the switch, while checking my work managed to press the still spinning disc onto my thumbnail. Didn't feel a thing then all of a sudden I sense it. Looked at my thumb, cut the nail in half at a 45* diagonal line then about 1/4" deep into my thumb. The cut was a perfect white color, then little red spots, then the red gusher.

It is good these threads start up now and again. It is easy to get careless, complacent, or rushed into making a mistake.

My closest accident was a CNC mill. It was stupid, but I wont do it again.

The shop I worked in had shitty lighting and was loud...average. Endmill was spinning at about 3000 RPM, I couldn't hear the machine running. It looked identical to my edge finder (there was just a shiny glare on the OD). I was getting ready to swap out a tool, so I reached in to grab the toolholder, somehow felt the moving air around the endmill and thought for a second.

I dont like to think about what would have happened. It's my guess I would have at least cut all of my fingers off.

Worse lathe accident was using emory cloth. I had it wrapped around the part in a U shape, holding it with one hand. I looked away for a second, gave it a little slack and it sucked right around the piece, ripped the emory out of my hand and swung back around to give me a nice cut on my index finger.

-Jacob

Mike,

You bring up a strange point about the beer. All of the local shops I used to take stuff to. If you didn't smell alcohol on their breath, you really didn't want to leave parts with them. For some reason, they did their best work drunk.

Every year one of the guys had his new years resolution...quit drinking. So, for the first three or four weeks of every year, we stopped sending stuff to him, everything he would do for us would be out of spec...often by inches.

-Jacob

I have seen pliars shoved through the palm of a hand (my brother pulling chips off a boring bar), 1,000lb parts smash fingers, big parts fly out and smash a knee, smashed feet, files hit the chuck and stab the operator in the breast bone, big bunches if chips grab the chuck and slap the operator bloody,,,,

I could write a book on lathe accidents.

having run lathes up to 45 hp. I know damn well it will kill you no problem, chew you up and spit you out and never care.

a 5hp drill press kicked my ass big time, it was a friday right before quiting time, I was drilling a small 11 lb manhole cover on the edge with a 5/16" drill @ 700 rpm i pulled the drill up after drilling and it picked up the cover spun it at 700 rpm till the drill snaped and nailed my legs right below the crotch, I was walking with two canes for a few days.

I have personal knowledge of a case where some guy is a vegetable because a workpiece flew out of a CNC lathe. It was a 54-lb piece of four- or five-inch round stock held by soft jaws in a too-small chuck with no tailstock support. The operator had programmed the lathe to face the end under constant surface speed control. As the tool ran towards the center, the lathe headed towards 3600 RPM and the workpiece flew out. It hit some poor bystander in the temple.