Got any good ones?

I do......

Well..Let me start off by saying I could have been killed.


I started off in the shop at 10 years old and by the time I was 20 I thought I knew it all. I ran everything in the shop from turret lathes, engine lathes and 96'' VTLs/VBMs. I was in my mid twenties and was running our 42'' Bullard with high jaws about 12 inches off the table and the piece was fabricated steel piece with pegs sticking out ( about 36-40 inch dia). I was running top speed (around 70rpm) since I was finish boring. I always stuck my hand in the bore to feel the finish and my left hand got caught between the boring bar and work. I'am only 5' 7'' and was able to reach the feed leaver and traverse the turret up. I ran so fast into the office screaming that you would of thought I was Carl Lewis!!! It was bad..Dad called 911 and before the ambulance got there..the chief of police took me in the cop car( no shitting )90 mph to the hospital. When it was all said and done I kept all my fingers but had about 75 stitches and loss of feeling in some of my fingers. I was also out for 3 months.

Jay

Whew, JB. Scary.

About the worst I've done was once while making repairs to the sand hoppers on our waterjet. The hoppers are pressurized to about 80 psi, to blow the sand into the fill lines and over to the cutting heads. I had left them depressurized when I left one day, and came in the next morning to continue the repair. Unbeknownst to me, the night crew guys had kicked the air line open, trying to see why they didn't work (they hadn't been told I was in the process of fixing them). Well, the plunger that closes off the fill hole had gotten stuck in the down position, and sand was billowing out of the fill hole directly underneath the closed lid. I should have known something was up when I saw the lids were on, because I had left them off. I also should have been listening for the steady HISSSSSSS...
And I also should have had my safety glasses where they would have done some good, instead of sitting on top of my damned fool head.
Anyway, I walked over to the first hopper, whipped of the lid, and was promptly sandblasted in the eyes. I must have sat at that emergency eyewash station for half an hour, no good. They finally had to drive me to the clinic, where the doctor said in 20 years of handling industrial accidents he had never seen so much crap in someones eyes. Said the insides of my bottom eylids looked like the bed of a river.
From then on, the second I set foot on the shop floor, my safety glasses are welded to my face.
Happy to report no permanent eye damage, thank God.

This was just last week. We have an electric pallet jack that moves pretty quick and a little tractor that we are working on, so we decided it would be a good idea to race the pallet jack and the tractor.

Back the tractor out, rev it up "cuz I'm goin' racin'", dump the clutch, it takes off like a rocket flipping me over backwards. And because it isn't finished yet there is a big Kant Twist holding the seat on, my shorts got caught on the clamp and I was drug about 20 feet across the gravel parking lot straight into the side of my friends BMW, the tractor then proceeded to dig itself about 10" into the gravel filling my eyes, nose, mouth, ears, pockets and shoes with dirt.

The BMW suffered one paint chip since the front tire was turned, if it wasn't I would have been paying, the tractor suffered a bent tie rod, I have gouges all over my back and 3 baseball size bruises on my butt.

Never did get to race the pallet jack.

The worst accident that I ever had was while I was working in a production shop making threaded rod back about 25 years ago. The machines were roll threaders, which applied pressure to pitch diameter rod with cylindrical dies while it was spinning and feeding at the same time. 1" bar going about 300 rpm, I reached over the machine to make an adjustment, and my shirt got caught on the spinning 1" bar. Ripped the entire shirt off of me in a micro second, and slammed my rib cage into the bar. Luckily I ended up with nothing more than a badly bruised sternum and a bad case of wounded pride.

Bob W. that story was really funny, glad that I wasn't drinking coffee when I read that one.

I was turning the OD on a bar of 1018 with a nice wire shooting off the tool all over everthing. You really got to watch that crap or it'll getcha. Went to run the carriage back without looking at the hand wheel. Grabbed the handle with a wire under my thumb without knowing it. Turned the handle a bit and realized something doesn't feel right. That wire cut deep enough into my thumb the long ways to where I needed 7 stitches on the inside and 11 on the outside. Damn that hurt! Plus it makes you feel like a dumbass.

Ray

DAMMIT Ray......got the hee-bee-gee-bee's just reading that!

Oh Baileigh - you started it - fess up!

(Seriously, I always study these threads out of a deep desire to not have to reexperience the pain. And to be honest, such warnings have spared me grief several times.)

Bob,
Glad you're ok. I laughed my a$$ off reading that. But I wouldn't have quit, pain or not. I would have grabbed a fresh beer, beat the tie rod back strait, climbed back on that bad boy and raced that damn pallet jack.

I was in 9th grade wood shop rip cutting some 1/2" by 12" cherry down to 4" wide. There was a line behind me to use the saw and consequently I was rushing (mistake one, never rush). Since I was rushing I didn't bother lowering the blade (mistake two) and it was about 2" above the top of the wood. Then for some reason I decided to feed the next piece with my left hand (mistake three) and subsequently pushed my ring finger right into the top of the blade. Once the blade hit bone it spun my hand counterclockwise and my middle and index fingers hit the blade as well. The cuts run from the bottom left to the to right of my fingers when viewed from the top.

i held my hand up and was able to see though my fingers sideways (freaky). I clamped down on then with my other hand and calmly hit the stop on the saw with my knee. Walked over to the sink and grab some paper towels before walking up to the nurses office. It actually didn't start hurting till the EMT asked me how bad it hurt, then it hurt like heck. They took me to Philly with light and sirens, only took 40 minutes in rush hour (takes that long in normal traffic). They would've flown me but it was snowing lightly and the bad weather chopper was on another call.

The x ray showed the cut ended about a 1/16" from the knuckle on my middle finger, any further and I would have lost the end of my finger. The cut on my ring finger is about half way down and my index finger just got nicked. 9 stitches in my middle finger, 5 in my ring and 1 in my index. Had a surgery a couple months latter because the finer nail on my ring finger was growing upward. Took a year or so for feeling to come back. Last time I visited the shop there were still bone chips stuck in the spay foam insulation on the ceiling.

And...........??


Rex

Before and after. My Hitachi wire EDM.

Never let an amateur (me) drive the forklift. No injuries, unless you count my bank account...

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No accidents worth mentioning in recent times.

Back in high school woodshop I cut the tip off my finger. I'll explain so you will see how things have changed.

This was back in the 1960's. We weren't allowed to use the power equipment. Our shop teacher spent about 90% of the class time in the back room working on his own projects so we used the power tools when we were sure we wouldn't get caught (I wonder why they didn't disconnect the power?).

Anyway, I cut the finger tip off in a jointer. Blood everywhere. I ran back to find the teacher, he took a look at my finger and told me not to get blood on the floor of his office.

The school nurse bandaged me and the principal drove me to the hospital where they did a skin graft from my leg over the end of my finger.

The outcome of this incident was I was banned from woodshop for the rest of high school. I got a "D" in the class. At the time this all seemed appropriate.

Now, if this would have happened these days there likely would have been a lawsuit against the school who was clearly negligent in not supervising the shop class.

I knew it was my fault. But, I did hold a grudge against the teacher for yelling at me about the blood on the floor. My friends got even with him a bit. He always used the shop lathes to turn large, thin walled bowls. They turned the reverse switch on the lathe. He turned on the lathe with the bowl on the outboard reverse thread spindle and as soon as his tool hit the work it unscrewed and went dancing across the floor, smashing on the wall. The class burst into laughter. He was so pissed he made the whole class stay after school.

Back in '98, was helping the machine technician debug a "no coolant" problem on my new Daewoo cnc lathe. We were attempting to wrestle the high pressure (i.e. big n' heavy) coolant pump out of the tank, to check for a clogged intake. Dummy me has the tip of my left middle finger under the flange of the pump, when the tech decides to "let go", and try to lift another way. The pump drops about 6 inches, smashing my left middle finger, back to the nail, between the pump flange and the tank.

Quesy-me about passes out from the pain and blood. The (then) wifey takes me to the hospital, where they pull the nail and stitch up what's left. The finger healed up pretty good, although the nail does grow a little crooked to this day.

Funny part of the whole story is the damned little Daewoo manages to get the technicians fingertip a couple days later! He was installing the chuck, and while reaching between the chuck and spindle face to find the drive-pin hole, he accidentally stepped on the chuck pedal, clamping the chuck onto the end of his finger. Freakin' ouch!!

I almost sent that damned Daewoo back that day! But, it has been a good machine since, no fingers mashed in 12 years now. (The sound of me knocking on wood.)

Greg

I was an apprentice in a very difficult EDM dept in a very difficult shop. We kept the place immaculate, eat off the floor kind of clean. I closed the tank to one of the sinkers and told it to start. It was a little Agie ZNC machine, only about 20 gallons of oil in that tank to fill. I hit cycle start and walked to the front of the bay to sit down and look at the next job with the guy that was training me. It takes about 2 minutes for the tank to fill, then the machine starts working.

We're sitting there a minute later and we hear "click" and we both stop and look at each other with that "Oh Sh@#" look on our face and push back from the desk just in time to see the door of the tank swing open and all 20 gallons of dielectric oil spill on the floor. I had gotten the latch on cock-eyed and it took all of the weight of the oil to push it open It was just like the Tom and Jerry cartoons where they fill the shower up and open the door. Or like a redneck on America's Funniest video riding a minibike into an above ground pool. .

You've never seen such a mess. No one had ever considered this happening and there wasn't more than a cupful of oildry in the whole shop. I spent hours and hour skating around there cleaning. Never heard the end of it until I quit that place. When I came in the next day, when I clocked in on the computer my picture had been changed to a picture of the Exxon Valdeze broken open and oil spilling out.

Now that is classic.

That's an appropriate pic...

In my shop on the second floor in NJ I had two EDM's which sometimes burned all night. I lived in an apartment in the shop, so I could change electrodes during the night.

I got up one morning, and one of the machines had leaked all the tank's dialectric out. The floor was wooden, and the oil seeped thru to the graphic arts supply store downstairs. Luckily it missed most of the "good stuff", and they got the job of cleaning it up before I was even aware of what happened.. They were very good about it and didn't even charge me for the cleanup. Very embarassing....

A few weeks ago, a trainee of ours was running a simple part in which he had to bandsaw out of a bigger piece. Instead of cutting the stock parallel, he thought he would just grip on the bandsawed edges and tighten the vice "real" tight. Needless to say at 15,000 rpm the aluminum block got sucked up on the endmill and helecoptered out the side of our VF8. We're very fortunate the part didn't decide to come out the front where the plexiglass and the operator was. Someone would have been seriously hurt!

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One time I was peck drilling with a 1 inch drill and it had stringy chips rolling up and these chips were like a helicopter blade. Well I had a habit of adjusting coolant lines and when these chips hit and moved the coolant line away from the cut I reflexively adjusted it. Guess what happened? It friggin cut my left index finger to the boneis what happened. I have a very nice scar to remind me. If my finger could talk it would tell me "Stupid if I didn't need you for transportation I would be getting the heck out of here"! I learned from it. I thank God it was not more serious.

Holy crap Seth, that's sucks. I hope that didn't cost you *another* spindle! I'd be pucking fist if someone did that to my machine. Definitely a good thing he didn't get it in the head, I know that has happened on lathes. I hope he isn't one of those accident prone types, or the type that checks their brain at the door when reporting for work.