A bad day

I like Ernie's explanation:

(paraphrased, of course)

"I f*$)#&ed up."

How eloquent.

How terse.

How descriptive.

How all encompassing.

How honest.

I'm impressed.

Steve

Maybe for you it's "playing". For some people (and this used to be me) it was a question of how I built big dangerous machines and put them in a factory where stupid people on piecework would come back from the pub at lunchtime with some great idea about how to work faster by jamming the guards open.

My problem wasn't the smart people - they could by and large look after themselves. I once dangled a co-worker by his ankles _inside_ a double eccentric press whilst I barred it over on the slow motor, so that he could count the teeth on the dog clutch. This was an act guaranteed to give any safety inspector conniptions, but it was _relatively_ safe because we both had a pretty good idea of what we were doing and were concentrating on doing it.

Sometimes I got to work on machines in toolrooms, where they'd be used by the most skilled machinists you could hope to meet. Most of the time though, they were for low-skilled grunts to earn minimum wage with at McJobs and yet I _still_ had a legal responsibility to keep these people safe from any deviousness they could invent (and they sure were inventive, when it came to defeating guards).

I got out of the control gear business when a software bug in my code very nearly took an operator's arm off. I looked very carefully at how this problem arose, and my conclusion was that it was a systems error more than a coding problem. Given the stack of sub-contracting going on, and the poor communication and rushed timescales between the people building the ironwork and my software team, I couldn't guarantee anything I could really stand behind as a competently safe system. It was my responsibility to sign these things off as "built to best industry practices", even if I couldn't guarantee them to be entirely safe, and under those cost-squeezing measures there just wasn't a way I could do this.

Any guard can be defeated, be it gate plugs, palm buttons, light curtains, even a harness hooked to the ram on a press. I think I've seen it all, as I'm sure you have. We've found the best way to deal with this crap is to hit 'em where it hurts when caught. A few days sitting home with no pay works pretty good. Another thing that works well is to get rid of piece work pay and go to an hourly rate with a production standard.

"Jim" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@news.chartermi.net...

I work at a large dairy plant with lots of semi dangerous machinery.. Local safety regulations specify that machinery with moving parts has to be enclosed in such a way that noone can get their limbs caught in the moving parts ( conveyorbelts not included )..

This is mostly achieved by putting a fence around the machine with switches that "kill" the machine when the door opens.. The switches are typically something like this one:

Most of my coworkers have found way to defeat this system ( Some even have the key part of the switch above in their keyring ), so if the machine is having a bad day they will operate it with the doors open.. So far only one person has been injured from this ( new trainee got her arm caught in a large sled like thing moved by a huge pneumatic actuator)..

Most of the time you will just need to "cheat" a sensor inside the machine.... I usually do this with a broomstick, but some people stick their arm inside without stopping the machine..

The policy from the management side is that you can and will be fired if caught messing with the safety devices on the machinery.. Unfortunately this is not being enforced

If its enforced, yes.. Problem here is that the local laws say that its the employers responsibility if someone gets hurt.. Even if they are acting like idiots..

/peter

Many a farmer versus manufacturer lawsuit has been the result of a farmer opening a panel, disabling a safety and promptly loosing a body part to a still running machine.

Joel. phx

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:29:32 +0200, "Q" calmly ranted:

Ooh, got yer "self" stuck in a milker once, didja?

-------------------------------------------------- I survived the D.C. Blizzard of 2003 (from Oregon) ----------------------------

Comprehensive Website Development

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no company can afford to operate unsafely...

from lawsuits, insurance claims, absenteeisms, retraining costs, even public image...there are all sorts of direct and indirect costs associated with accidents. if for no other reason, a clean conscious is enough for me to make sure everything i do for my company is constructed 1st...with safety in mind, and then all other objectives.

it is a misconception to believe "intelligent" people are less likely to be injured. given enough time around enough dangers...anyone can become a statistic of workplace injury.

big industry has big dangers...trainig, ppe, safety devices, safety programs, awareness...these are some of the tools that have to be utilized by any company who wants to be succesful. anything less is unacceptable.

if you disagree, then you have not seen the things i have.

chuck

Andy D> >

Strong agree on that one. The really 'smart' folks think they know what they're doing. That's when things *really* take a turn for the worse!

Jim

"Larry Jaques" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Naah :-)... This place is a few steps further "down the road"...

But I have gotten my right index finger partially crushed in the date-stamping mechanism ( basically like an old fashioned typewriter ) on an old Tetra Pack "Brick" filling machine ( the machines use to make and fill these cartons with milk or juice:

)..

The usual practice is to change the roll of colored film for the date stamper while the machine is running... I have done this thousands of times, but a moment of diverted attention and I got my index finger under that stamp... the stamp presses with about 1.5 tons of pressure, so you can almost guess how my finger looked afterwards..

/peter

"Q" wrote > > Ooh, got yer "self" stuck in a milker once, didja?

At a Las Vegas hotel I once worked at, a chef got his finger stuck in a salad maker.

They fired both of them.

Steve ........... groan ...........

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:36:07 +0200, "Q" calmly ranted:

Kinkier?

Yeouch!

It's all about ATTENTION, isn't it? Smart or dumb, if you're not paying full attention to what you're doing, you can suffer.

-------------------------------------------------- I survived the D.C. Blizzard of 2003 (from Oregon) ----------------------------

Comprehensive Website Development

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BTW, I've worked in the Army handling Pershing guided missiles, in the engine rooms of cargo ships, and about

25 years of various industry.

Nothing I saw in all that time scared me as much as working a day with my brother in his orchard.

The father of a friend of mine was touring woodworking factories in Mexico several years ago to see about having furniture made there. In one factory there were many men working at large wood lathes and making tons of chips. The solution to removing the chips was a propeller mounted at the headstock. The men would carve this prop and mount it so that when the part was turning so was the prop. I don't know if the props blew the chips away or sucked them toward the headstock. But these were run without any sort of gaurd. So the operator could have easily stuck his hand into one of the props. The factory did not get the work. The guys looking at the setup were so horrified the furniture spindles were made in the USA. ERS

Speaking of Mexico, I was at a geothermal installation up in the Sierra Madres a few years back. They had a man chipping off the aspestos lagging from a pressure vessel and chucking it into the back of a pickup truck with a garden spade.

No breathing equipment, no protective clothing, not even a water spray to keep the dust down.

At least you should remember when that happened without having to look at the finger, right? Gerry :-)} London, Canada

But to refresh himself as to *when* it happened, he would have to read it from his finger. :-)

Actually -- *Ouch!*, DoN.

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:06:22 -0700, Jim Stewart calmly ranted:

Considering that 95% of the asbestos out there is NOT the type of fiber that causes the problem or is not in a small enough format to cause troubles, that's not surprising at all. The asbestos scare, global warming, freon damaging the ozone layer, gun deaths, and good old honest politicians all deserve pages of their own on the Snopes Urban Legend website. I invite you to do more research on these subjects if you're interested in the truth.

-------------------------------------------------- I survived the D.C. Blizzard of 2003 (from Oregon) ----------------------------

Comprehensive Website Development

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"DoN. Nichols" skrev i en meddelelse news:civkue$s16$ snipped-for-privacy@fuego.d-and-d.com...

Well... it took several weeks before the partial stamp on the nail was gone.. had half of "April 27 2002" written in arabian letters on the nail.... ( we did a lot of export products to Saudi Arabia at that place )

The stamp actually punched a hole in the nail and left some of that colored plastic strip ( same thing used in old fashioned typewriters and dot matrix printers ) under the nail... On the other side of the finger the "meat" had a 15 mm long crack, showing bare bone at the deepest point....

I got my finger caught between the thingie that holds the letters and the backing plate.. this is where the packaging material should be....

The machines are an impressive piece of engineering and automation tho..

If you have a look at this PDF showing how the material is folded, filled and turned into the brick shaped cartons you already know..

While considering how to build such a device keep in mind that some of these machines can make 10.000 + cartons per hour.. The older ones that I operated could do about 1800 cartons per hour and were controlled with a couple hundred relays and timers... no PLC controllers were used ( the machines were built before the PLC was an affordable option ).. These things were an impressive pile of motors, gears, pneumatics and heaters

I can actually feel some scar tissue inside the meat part of the finger... it is also very visible on my fingerprint.....

Cant possibly be worse than what Ernie did :-(

Ernie: If you read this: Loosing parts of fingers SUCK.. I wish you a speedy recovery!

/peter

Hopefully you stayed downwind, eh?