Bad experience at work today--

HAH! You don't know how LUCKY you are. We had an accident at our shop moving a LeBlond Toolroom Precision lathe in a narrow corridor with a sloping floor. (A prescription for disaster!) The lathe tipped over on one of our machinists, and the carriage handle went through his lower leg. After a day at the hospital, they told him that they didn't think there was any chance to save the bones in the leg, and the only plan that had much chance of him walking again was amputation below the knee. So, he now has an artificial foot, and can't stand for long periods because the stump gets sore. But, at least, he walks well with it.

Believe me, if somebody had gotten seriously hurt, it would have been MUCH worse for all involved.

Jon

Where I used to work, we had kind of a running joke where one person who was about to start on a sketchy task would say to someone across the room, "Hey Dave, come on over here and share the blame on this one, okay?

There was also an old story, I believe from IBM, where a manager who just screwed up to the tune of

I'm sure you will get lots of sympathy from those of us who have also "been there". I've destroyed a 100 KW wind machine due to momentary brain lapse. I was also involved in dumping a large induction power supply that was being dismantled. Wouldn't have been so bad except it landed up against a support post for our drafting department working in a mezzinine (sp). To say that they noticed it would be an understatement.

Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH

any company that is worth working for is more interested in the safety of the employee than the damage of any machine.... if you or the co-worker got hurt then it could have cost them hundreds of thousands in the workers compensation damages... so if they are worried about how much its gonna cost them the machine can be repaired and is cheaper than having to replace a person or two... and there is also the liability of not telling the employees to not move the material in an unsafe manner which might over rule the workers comp. limit of liability???? what is there to worry about....

Way back in the 19?0s, my first job after graduating from high school was as an adding machine mechanic for the Burroughs Corporation. My first week on the job, they did not really know what to do with this untrained kid, so they put me back in the stock room. Somehow, I managed to drop a

Vaughn

Ha ha ha.

That never happens.

Jim

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NOW I know where it came from! Gerry :-)} London, Canada

Losing your foot would seem to qualify as "seriously hurt". This seems to be a good argument to hire riggers or millwrights. The LeBlond isn't a big lathe, I have no idea what went wrong, but evidently no one was prepared for what *can* happen. Hindsight is 20-20. :)

Jim Kovar Vulcan, Mi

One of the guys at work used to work for Grumman, moving very large lathes and milling machines. He saw some guys trying to pull a large machine with a steel cable that was way too small. It snapped and cut one of the guys in half at the waist level.

Has anyone ever seen the "You F*&^ed UP" flow chart?

First box is "Does anyone else know?" No pionts to "No Problem". Yes goes to next box.

Second box is "Can you blame someone else?" Yes points to "No Problem"

This goes on and on down the page. The last box points to "You poor Bastard"

Karl

I did a stupid, but fascinating thing today. I had just turned off the motor on my mill (3 HP) and was admiring it as it coasted down with a #10 counterbore in the chuck. As I recalled the pilot of the counterbore was a little tight as it went in, so I thought it would be a good idea to wipe it with a rag to see if it had galled. No rag being handy I used the bottom end of my T shirt - knowing full well it might catch in the tool. It did. This was amusing for a moment; I was fortunate to be studying an accident in a safe fashion but the "coast down" was not as far along as I had imagined it to be. The pull of that flimsy T shirt was tremendous. The T shirt did not tear as I figured it would. Of course, I pulled back as hard as I could and the T shirt stretched quite a bit as the spindle finally came to a stop. I won't repeat that particular experiment any time soon, esp. with a rag I'm wearing.

Bob S.

Problem"

Holy Smoke@! How in the world could you do that? Congrats for surviving!

Only thing comes to mind is working 15 feet up on a forklift, and didn't close the chain across the cage.Inexperienced lift operator knocked me out, but I caught the cage with one hand.Then he dropped it and stopped it fast enough to break my grip. Face first onto concrete littered with 1" nuts,bolts and shelf parts. Now I have a vacuous smile.

wws

Sorta reminds me of the time I was working over welded parts with a 7" angle grinder. It was winter, shop was cold, and I knew the heavy quilted flannel shirt I was wearing was something of a hazard that close to the spinning disk. Yep, caught my shirt. Wrapped up the flannel and my T-shirt right into my gut, stopping the disk cold, in a fraction of a second. Ever get a sucker punch in the gut? This was my first and it had me dazed enough I thought the trigger lock was still on so I tapped it with my finger to release it. No, it wasn't locked and I got punched again. For some reason my co-worker found this so amusing he almost fell over laughing...

Jon

No, no, I agree, he DID get seriously hurt. That was 2 years ago. The original poster and a co-worker from today apparently had no injuries from this oops.

High center of gravity and not enough support. I roped my lathe to the forklift, even though I was lifting it from the bed. The only injury was to my back yard, from the 21,000 Lb rough-terrain forklift. The trenches are slowly evening out, but I still get that "bronco riding" sensation when I mow it with my tractor.

Jon

Actually..it does.

Dont ask.

Gunner

" >> ......The world has gone crazy. Guess I'm showing my age... I think it dates from when we started looking at virtues as funny. It's embarrassing to speak of honor, integrity, bravery, patriotism, 'doing the right thing', charity, fairness. You have Seinfeld making cowardice an acceptable choice; our politicians changing positions of honor with every poll; we laugh at servicemen and patriotic fervor; we accept corruption in our police and bias in our judges; we kill our children, and wonder why they have no respect for Life. We deny children their childhood and innocence- and then we denigrate being a Man, as opposed to a 'person'. We *assume* that anyone with a weapon will use it against his fellowman- if only he has the chance. Nah; in our agitation to keep the State out of the church business, we've destroyed our value system and replaced it with *nothing*. Turns my stomach- " Chas , rec.knives

You misunderstood the snicker.

I don't need to...

Jim

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I have it as the "Problem Solving Flow Chart" which is a bit more convoluted.

With the advent of the internet, there is an entire subset of office communication that has fallen by the wayside.

Here I am speaking of the tattered pieces of photocopy paper, of a diagram or cartoon, that has been replicated about a thousand times, and passed on - hand to hand, like a holy relic - between multiple generations of engineers and workes.

I have the famous 'Flow Chart' on the wall in my office, a memorial to the torch brazer at work, who handed it to me nearly on my first day at work. I will try to scan it and post it to the dropbox.

Jim

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...

Is it like the ones at

...did I just hear a duck???

Tippy little bastards, aren't they. In hindsight, of course it should have been bolted to a concrete slab twice its mounting width the whole time. Plywood just wouldn't do.

Yeah, the old one-of-four problem. The idea is, though, that these should be bolted to the machine mounts, not simply placed under. They must be part of the machine during transit.

At Aerophysics they "installed" the Clausing 15 inch lathe by dragging it in with a ratchet winch off the end wall. They probably put an eye bolt in the wall near the floor near the desired position of the corner, and pulled on that corner.

I know what that feels like. At least you jumped away instead of trying to catch it and getting perforated by the cross feed handle.

You are about to recondition a lathe after a fall. You'll learn how to straighten that shaft on the arbor press to about a mil of runout, and how to scrape surfaces straight. This will make you an even better machinist.

I lost 17 when I went from the little white tablets to the little blue capsules. Was that ever a productive month! Now, it's like three is not enough and I get a bit silly, and four is too damn many. The pharmacist says seven of the half-strength capsules should be juuuuuust riiiiiiight.

S*it happens. Just don't ever quit.

That's one of the best uses of an open forum. Not too much about nuts and bolts, please, let's keep a sense of adventure and drama if we can.

Likewise, when you delete the final version of the annual report, the bezel on the monitor does not suddenly change color. Nobody knows anything unless you tell them. Spin doctor to the machine lab, stat!

Yours,

Doug Goncz (at aol dot com) Replikon Research

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