Andy:
AMEN ! I agree and I wondered that same thing reading Quade's post. I've got a 25" Cincinnati Camelback drill and use it regularly without incident. If this particular drill were in close reach, I would buy it in a flash for my blacksmith shop. Can't have enough anvils or camelback drills !
I went to Brooklyn Technical High School 1964-68. We kids worked in machine shop classes with line shaft driven machine tools. Plenty of unguarded flat belts, and our teachers showed us who to "walk" a moving belt up or down a set of step cone pulleys. We ran machine tools from the 1920's and some War Production Board machine tools, 24" shapers, radial drills, camelback drills, engine lathes and more. No one- and this was in a school with a maximum attendance of 6000 boys- got seriously injured. In our freshman year in foundry classes, we poured aluminum and bronze. We poured iron in our junior year.
Plainly, it was a time when kids, let alone adults, were expected to have some common sense and take responsibility for their own actions. None of the machine tools had much in the way of guards, and there were no safety stickers, or interlocking safety devices. Gearing was guarded, but belts were often out in the open. I worked in machine shops after school and summers thru HS and college, and we worked with what was there- including open flat belts, unguarded rotating shafting and pulleys, and even grinders did not have the eye-shields. It was up to the person using the machine tools, even the pedestal grinders- to wear goggles and roll up their sleeves if there was a chance of a lathe dog or belt lacing catching it. Common sense and responsibility for one's own actions are what it was and still is about. The old saying on the safety signs in shops and mills often read: "Safety begins with YOU !". A lot of truth to it. The governmental agencies can mandate all manner of guards and safety interlocks and multi-lingual warning stickers, and the lawyers can have manufacturers building even more safeguards into products... and people will still manage to wind up getting injured using those products.
I just got done with the annual presentation of "Steam Power 101" at Hanford Mills Museum. We take a random group of people who want to learn about steam power and over a weekend, we teach them the basics of some engineering and practical subjects, with time spent firing and running the steam plant. Lineshaft driven woodworking will with plenty of unguarded flat belts, plenty of head-knockers in the form of line shaft bearing hangers in the lower elevations of the mill for a person to find the hard way, or get scalped by a moving belt. I joke that nothing is automatic in the Hanford Mills steam plant except the safety valves on the boiler and the governors on the engines. It is up to the people assigned to firing to maintain the proper water level to prevent a low water incident (potential for an explosion), and similar.
I stress safety and "situational awareness" as it now called. IOW: know where all your body parts are and make sure they are in safe places around machinery and running plant systems and equipment. A camelback drill is like anything else. Use it properly, take responsibility for your own actions, and things will be OK. Do something stupid and get wound up in the drill or caught by the "lacing" (hooks) on a moving flat belt and chances are pretty good it is a person's own fault or stupidity or carelessness. As was famously said in a popular movie: "There ain't no fixing stupid". Modern society has been progressively dumbed down, relies increasingly on artificial intelligence to tell them their every move and keep them amused and to remember stuff for them. If they can't find it on a smart phone, plenty of the current population is lost. I stress using one's mind and senses around machinery and to "read the little clues" and "use the eyes in your head to input to your brain and figure things out for yourselves". If a person thinks a flat belt is dangerous, let them go play with stuff from Home Depot with all the bells, whistles, safety stickers, interlocking controls and light-duty design for novice homeowners. This is not the place for them to pass judgement. I've know a few people wind up their hands with so-called lighter duty cordless drills and one person needed surgery. Anything- even bedding (yeah, a person could roll over in bed and smother themselves with their pillow)- could be construed as "dangerous" by people like Quade. Heck, now he might be thinking of how to make his bed safer and prevent potential self-smothering....