The chisels, knives, and planes we sell are all hand-forged by ancient smiths. There may or may not be dwarvish ancestry in one or two cases, but without exception our blacksmiths make blades with unsurpassed crystalline structure that cut like Satan’s own scalping knife.
It’s important for those of us who use such sharp handtools to understand how they think. Allow me to put on my metallurgical psychologist’s hat for just a moment to expound. FYI this is a highly-polished brass skullcap engraved with runes of power and decorated with multiple rings of tiny silver bells suspended from stubby brass rods attached to the cap that tinkle prettily when I walk; Glitzier but more dignified than the aluminum-foil cap with projecting curly copper wires I wear daily to protect my mind from the brain-rays of alien used-car salesmen. But I digress.
High-quality blades are especially single-minded and simply live to cut wood. If you don’t believe me, just ask them. If you listen carefully you will hear the chirping and tapping sounds they make when they are happy. And the shavings and chips that fly from their misty silver edges will attest to the fun they are having. They love cutting wood best of all, but the problem is they will try their darndest to cut anything they can latch onto. It’s just their nature; something we must understand and deal with if we are to prevent the servant from becoming the bloody master in the blink of an eye.
Not only does “haste makes waste,” but when dealing with sharp tools, haste can be relied on to produce leakage of copious quantities of red sticky stuff. Not that long ago, it was common, even acceptable, for serious injury and deaths to occur on construction projects, in factories and in workshops. Indeed, hundreds of deaths on a single major construction project were common throughout most of human history; This was just accepted as the cost of getting the job done.
When I was a young man working construction projects, most such injuries and even deaths were assumed to be the price the injured/deceased workman paid for failing to “pay attention,” or “not being careful.” Fortunately, attitudes have changed.
When I was still a schoolboy, my father (RIP), was a construction superintendent in Las Vegas undertaking a pre-cast concrete parking garage project. Due to a stupid and entirely-avoidable error at the pre-cast plant in Arizona, haunches on the reinforced-concrete columns failed and 5 floors collapsed like dominoes killing three workmen and disabling several others. This was not their fault anymore than it was my father’s, but men died, families were destroyed and he was made an emotional wreck for a year afterwards. No jobsite safety rules could have prevented or even mitigated this disaster.
More recently, I was peripherally involved in a project here in Tokyo where a combination of events, including a clear violation of well-established safety rules, resulted in a basement fire killing two workmen and three fire fighters. In this case, safety rules related to “hot-work” were in-place and compliance required by law, so that careful adherence should have prevented this tragic loss of life. It appears they were not followed, however. But the number of dead and injured could have been much higher if not for other safety rules and procedures that were followed.
Nowadays everyone says “Safety First.” Your humble servant finds this slogan irritating, however, because in the real world, safety is never first priority. If it was, no one would ever undertake any potentially dangerous work; No one would swim, drive cars, ride buses, bicycles, motorcycles, snowmobiles, or even walk outside; Staircases and bathtubs would be banned, and we would all huddle in grass huts wearing helmets and full body armor. And no hot sauce!
No, in the real world we all set priorities, and except for our small children, safety is never number one. So how do we deal with safety risks? We put on our boots, stride out into the world, analyze the risks we are aware of and find ways to either avoid them entirely or to mitigate their negative impacts. But we place getting the job done, and thereby feeding, clothing and housing our families, as first priority. At least that’s how responsible fathers live. Do you disagree?
What we must never allow to happen is the rationalization of avoidable injuries against profits, schedule, hubris or stupidity. Too much of that in politics. And as much as the conflicted lawyers may disagree, we must each take some responsibility for both our safety and of those we live and work alongside. Therefore, the wise man with aspirations to become an old wise man will study safety unceasingly throughout his entire life, and share the lessons he learns with others.
Since caveman days the first reaction by the members of a tribe to an accident went something like “how did Bubba manage to get stepped on by a woolly mammoth?!”!? Perhaps the second reaction, usually from a brother-in-law, was “He’s so stupid it was bound to happen.” Whatever the reason, whenever we hear of the serious injury or death of someone we know our DNA pushes us to learn from their misfortune. This is your humble servant’s ghoulish effort to share (シ)。.
As a natural (and often irritating) extension of the observations in the previous paragraphs, everywhere we look nowadays there are layers and layers of redundant rules with busybodies busily enforcing them and lawyers greedily profiting from them. They don’t call it the “nanny state” for nuttin.
Safety rules are helpful but don’t do us any real good unless we turn them into those unconscious actions commonly called habits. Like never using an electric toaster while taking a bath, or never pointing the barrel of a rifle at anyone anytime even by accident, or always putting on the car’s brakes before the vehicle crashes through the storefront, the potential consequences are just too severe to leave them as empty rules.
I don’t want to sound like a safety nazi, but as someone who has made one, perhaps even two stupid mistakes in his lifetime (difficult to believe, I know (ツ)), I feel compelled to point out one rule and a few wise safety habits worth developing especially to those of our Beloved Customers that purchase our chisels and knives and want to continue to have more than just an emotional attachment to their fingers, hands, toes and feet.
The most important cutting-tool safety rule you need to follow is this: Don’t let them bite you! This is a common-sense, obvious rule, one ignored constantly so I am reminding you politely… for now.
Sharp wide blades can cut a lot of useful stuff inside you in the blink of an eye. Even a deep injury won’t even be painful if your blades are sharp, at least at first, but the damage may be impossible to repair fully and too often is life-changing, never in a good way. So the application of this rule is to simply never give cutting tools an opportunity to do mischief.
OK, now that the big safety rule is on the table, let’s break it down into three basic safety habits.
Safety Habit Number One:
Never Cut Towards Yourself or Anyone Else.The first habit your humble servant begs Beloved Customer to embed deep into your soul is to never ever ever never cut towards yourself or anyone else.
An example: A universal mistake everyone, without exception, makes at least once is to hold down a piece of wood in one hand while cutting it with a chisel or knife motivated by the other hand towards the hand holding down the wood. They slip, or the chisel or knife jumps out of the cut, or the chisel or knife is dull and they lose control, or they apply too much force, or don’t allow enough distance to slow the tool down after the cut should end, or pixies distract them, or Murphy starts rockin like zeppelin. Whatever the cause, in the next instant the wood quickly changes a pretty crimson color, and one hand feels strange.
So please, never ever ever never allow your hands to get in this situation. Assume I’ve now yelled this warning into your ears 50 times while showering your face in fragrant spittle and wacked you in the forehead with a wooden mallet with each cockroach-killing screech to make the lesson sink in. It’s that important.
Safety Habit Number Two:
Reject All Distractions While You Have a Cutting Tool in Your HandAnother common mistake everyone makes from time to time is to allow a distraction to affect them while holding a chisel, knife or axe. For instance, trying to juggle a can of beer and a chisel in the same hand at the same time may place one’s nose or eyeball at risk (alcohol is such an uplifting beverage). Or scrambling to answer a call on a mobile phone without setting a super-sharp carving knife down first may result in the sudden appearance of an inconveniently leaking red nick in one’s neck that doesn’t quite compliment one’s intended fashion statement in hand-embroidered woodworking robes.
Case in point: Many moons ago, when I was a poor, self-employed student lacking my current elegant white beard and with much less dignity around the waist, I was cutting mortises for a custom door with a sharp chisel at my workbench setup on an apartment balcony, using the time-honored butt clamp, of course, when a yellow-jacket wasp (of which I have an uncontrollable phobia ever since a frantic encounter as a small child with a hornet’s nest in Grandma’s attic), landed on my leg. In a blind panic I swiped the wasp off my left thigh with my left hand, which by total coincidence was also holding the chisel. 40 years later I still have that big unsightly scar that ended my promising career as a bikini model before it really got started, tragically robbing the world of great beauty (ツ)。
Professional woodcarvers all know somebody with deep, crippling injuries to nerves and tendons in hands, arms or legs from using carving tools improperly or while distracted. Not a few have lost whole hands. The wise ones wear kevlar or steel mesh gloves when they must secure work by hand while using chisels or knives. While I don’t condone it, professional woodcarvers must sometimes violate the rules just to get the job done. These safety gloves are good for preventing slicing cuts, and help to reduce the severity of injuries in all cases, but may not stop a knife or chisel from stabbing you if it is motivated, so please don’t violate the first rule just because you’re wearing fancy gloves.
The solution? Set your knives and chisels aside in a safe manner and location before you do anything other than cutting wood. In other words, have the self control and situational awareness to reject all distractions.
Oh yea, and please don’t drink and drive knives, chisels, axes or adzes.
This final safety habit is related to number two above in that distractions often cause us to violate it. In this case the hazard is a chisel or knife falling from a work surface, at which point Murphy rolls up his sleeves, licks his eyeball with his long purple tongue, and painstakingly guides the tool cutting-edge first towards ankles, feet and toes. In Japan where work has traditionally been performed while sitting on the floor, a common problem is accidentally stepping-on or kicking a chisel. Of course, the chisel doesn’t appreciate such boorish behavior and bites back.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t wear thick leather steel-toed work boots in my workshop. I prefer flip-flops or crocs without the heavy and dreadfully unfashionable iron mongery. The problem is that flip-flops are not tough enough to prevent a 200gram atsunomi falling cutting-edge-first from a height of 70cm from severing a toe, so I am careful to not give Murphy the opportunity to place his bomb sight on my “little piggies.” I encourage you to always be aware of Murphy and bench kitties and never put yourself at their mercy.
The solution? Be careful of where and how you set your tools down and make good practices a cast-iron habit.
Don’t leave them hanging over the edge of your workbench, or balanced on top of other tools where a bump from a passing bench kitty or vibration from a hammer impact might knock them off. If you have several chisels or knives on your workbench at the same time, use a chisel box. Another effective solution is to make a tool rest by cutting some notches in a stick of wood, place it in a safe location on your work surface and rest the tool’s blades in those notches to keep them organized, to protect their cutting edges from dings, and most importantly, to prevent perfidious pixies and felonious felines from pushing or rolling tools off your workbench and Murphy from dive-bombing your wiggly pigglies. This is especially important if children have access to your workplace or you have imperious felines swanning around demanding snacks, ear-rubs and freshly laundered, fluffy warm cushions as is their due as the master race.
Everything we have discussed so far is only hot air and electrons unless you manage to actually ingrain wise safety habits into your soul. I don’t know how it works for you, but the steps below work for me. Whatever it takes please embed safety habits into your work procedures.
Step 1: In the construction industry of more and more countries, wise contractors have established procedures related to safety they perform when planning the work. There are multiple steps involved, but the essence is to analyze the work BEFORE it begins, write down the plan and list every serious risk imaginable, and have both management and workers review and comment. All of us are smarter than each of us, you see.
A satisfactory solution must be developed and documented either eliminating or mitigating each risk. The risky work is not allowed to begin until everyone involved understands the safety plan and agrees to comply. Supervisors must observe and enforce them. There must be consequences to encourage workers to comply. This process is irritating and seems wasteful at first, but the importance becomes clear once an avoidable accident occurs. Your humble servant has seen it save lives and limbs multiple times.
In the case of a single person working alone you may not need to write things down, but I encourage you to analyze the risks of pushing that chisel or swinging that axe, develop safety solutions, and employ them each time you perform that operation. This will limit sticky red messes.
Step 2: When you have an accident (and you will), stop working and figure out how it happened, and what you could have done to avoid it. Hopefully it won’t be while waiting for X-ray results after an iron worker drops a bunch of jagged cutoffs of corrugated steel decking on you from 14 stories above (that lesson in gravity cost me a tendon in my hand, scars on forearm, back and shoulders, lost days at work (back when no compensation was provided for such incidents), and destroyed a perfectly good hardhat). On the plus side, I instantly discovered a hidden talent for entertaining curse words!
Step 2: Every time you find yourself in a similar situation, stop and consider if the same bloody thing could happen again, and what you should do differently. For instance, figuring out a clamping arrangement that keeps your left hand out of the path of travel of a bloodthirsty carving chisel is something worth taking a few seconds to do. Remember, prevention beats Prozac.
Step 3: Remember the pain and embarrassment of the original accident, and use the solutions you developed every time. In this way Murphy is thwarted and a good habit is born.
I can also share a personal superstition with you. Everyone nicks themselves occasionally when using sharp tools. I know I do. When this happens, I place a tiny smudge of the red stuff on the tool that bit me, and on any other cutting tools that have yet to nick me, and let it dry. This heathenish action seems to quash their curiosity about how I taste in advance. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what I hear them murmuring when I’m wearing my brightly tinkling metallurgical psychologist’s hat (ツ）。
There is one thing I can promise Gentle Reader from personal experience: you will find a severed tendon or damaged nerves in a hand or foot to be more than just inconvenient. And if, like me, fashion is your life, scars may tragically preclude your picture from ever appearing in the Swimsuit Issue of Sports Illustrated. Such a loss!
Be careful. Keep safety a high priority. Plan safety. Develop good habits and make them automatic. And don’t let your tools bite you or anyone else, even if they beg with those big puppy-dog eyes.
YMHOS
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Machine shops are inherently hazardous places. Sharp edges abound, and many machines have enough power to do serious damage to the machine, the work piece, or the person operating them. Spinning work pieces on the lathes or cutting tools can entangle anything that gets near them to slice and dice like a Cuisinart! Chuck keys left in place may be sent flying across the shop while grinding wheels can shatter into many small projectiles. Common sense and vigilance are the best defense for these types of problems. One should consistently ask, ‘What could go wrong with this set up”? Is the work piece secure and well clamped? Is the tool secure and tight in the tool holder or spindle?’ Adopting this approach before machine operation will significantly reduce the chances of injury to yourself and others around you.
The following items are the most basic and primary safety rules for the student shop, with more clarification following this list.
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