Okay, maybe not but this nail gun guy is getting a lot of airplay. I have seen numerous medical professionals on TV with the x-ray in the background describing how 'easy' this can happen etc. I listen to several talk shows nightly, all of which have dedicated segments to this guy. I can't wait to see what Saturday Night Live does with it.
Anybody have personal "you're not gonna believe this" stories?
-Brian
My dad told one about his pre-OSHA factory days...
A co-worker operated a foot-pedal pneumatic riveting machine, which would punch a hole in sheet metal and install and crimp a rivet. In a moment of inattention, he placed his thumb in the unit, and punched a hole clear through flesh, bone, and thumbnail, placing a rivet in his thumb and crimping it over. You could see right through it.
He returned several days later, after having the rivet drilled out of his thumb. When asked how he managed to do what he did, he proceeded to demonstrate - on his other thumb...
A friend of mine was demonstrating a peice of machinery. He told those watching to "never do this" and he proceded to shorten his finger by about an inch. He got his point across. (no pun intended)
Remove the 'remove' in my address to e:mail me.
Not the most damage I've seen done, but the most painful looking happened when I was a helper about 32 years ago. Hanging drywall on metal studs in a mall and the guy I was helping screwed his thumb to the wall with a drywall screw.
He would not allow me to use the screw gun to get him off the wall. I had to use a screw driver to ease the screw back out far enough to release him from the wall. He climbed down off the scaffold and went off to the hospital. Back at work that afternoon.
I am vary wary of screwguns since that incident.
I have shot myself numerous times with nail guns. 4 times with a framing nailer, which is by far the worst. Trim gun wounds too numberous to mention, but never a screw gun and I aim (pun intended) to keep it that way.
With a little tape and some drywall compound you can fix almost anything!
-Brian
He had it drilled out? Some people pay big money to put holes in their body!!
In 1981, I subbed out the drywall on the tri-level house I built. There were two guys that did the job. One was about 5'6" and 140 lbs. The other was a strapping young guy who was just back after recovering from his "accident". Seems he had fallen from a scaffold on a job and landed on a fireplace footing pad that had rebar sticking up. One bar went up giving him dual anuses and just missing his heart. They had to use bolt cutters to snip off the rebar and haul him to the hospital with it still implanted. Makes me shiver every time I think about it.
Those two guys hung and taped the drywall including the 4' x 12' 5/8" stuff on the vaulted ceilings and in the garage of a 3000 sq' house starting on a Friday afternoon and finishing on Sunday afternoon. As I recall, it cost me all of three grand!
- Doug
I find this one hard to believe - still.
When I got my first router (Hitachi TR-12) mounted in a table I was doing everything wrong - it can't happen to me - right? As I fed in stock, I somehow had my finger caught by the bit and flung out at high speed (21000rpm, whatever that equates to in linear motion).
I *knew* I'd lost my finger, and my shoulder hurt like heck. As it turned out, I hadn't even cut the skin, though it was badly bruised and throbbing from being squashed into the void between the flutes.
My shoulder hurt due to a muscle bing pulled from the force of my hand being ejected so fast.
SWMBO said I was as white as a ghost. On the bright side though, I am now *very* safety conscious and still have all ten attached.
i have a flat roof house, and there are different height ceilings so there are different levels to the roof itself, with small walls between them. when they were putting the plywood on the higher portion of the roof, a guy had to go to the other side. rather than walk the truss, he hopped over the small wall to the lower deck. turns out the rest of the crew hadn't gotten to that portion of the lower deck, and he didn't look first. he hopped over the wall, straddling a truss about 6' down, then swiveled off that and fell to the cement slab 16' down.
held up work for an hour or so. i heard he found a different bus>
Some years ago (1984?) I visited the Mayo Clinic Museum in Rochester MN, USA. They had a wax model of a farm worker who (IIRC) fell some 10 feet onto a pitchfork handle and experienced a similar injury. Parts of the wax torso were cut away so museum visitors could see in detail the organs that were damaged by the accident.
If you're ever in Rochester MN and you have some time to kill I recommend you count the number of red cars versus white cars parked on the street rather than visit the Mayo Clinic Museum. ;-)
-- Mark
About a year ago, I was in HD looking at a brad nailer, and this guy walks up looking for a couple boxes of brads and he points (with a bandaged finger) to the one I'm holding and says "that's a good nailer".
I say, "you got this one"? He says, while pealing back the bandage, "yeah, but keep your fingers away from the tip, sometimes the wood will force a brad out of the board sideways". Under the bandage was a perfect little hole going in one side and out the other of his finger. He said it had happened earlier that day.
I bought the brad nailer, and I have a vivid image of his bloody finger every time I fire a brad.
Kevin in Bakersfield
Not an injury but could have been. The boss of 20+ years I referred to was a general contractor, specializing in underground utilities and earthmoving, translated: lots of iron (heavy equipment). On the job one day, he stopped Greg (super and boss' son-in-law), had him climb down off the Michigan 210 scraper, then he parked in front of the scraper, about five feet in front. Do you have the picture imbedded in your mind?
Boss was good at ranting and raving and storming off. He did his ranting, then turned around to climb in his truck and leave. He changed his mind and went elsewhere, on foot. Greg, already on the equipment, started the scraper. Now those of you who have ever been on one of those know that visibility from the top does not include close to the front. We are on a construction site, after all, nothing around but dirt *and* the boss' Ford Ranger which he had headed for to leave the job site. Scraper moving, slowly at first luckily, loud crunch and bump. Scraper stopped, "What the h*ll?" Boss turned around to see the front quarter and front of his truck smashed, hood was toast. Greg said, as boss started screaming at him, "What kind of person parks a truck in front of a scraper anyway?" 'Nuff said.
Salt in the wound. A few days later, I stopped at the key shop to have keys made. While waiting, I thumbed through the collection of cards at the register, you know, the ones with various sayings on them. I laughed and bought one, took it back to the office and left it on the boss' desk. It said, no joke, "Have you driven over a Ford lately?"
I might add, this is the same Ranger truck that a few years before, another employee ran into it with a backhoe, and drove across a 30-acre job site to do it. It was the second time for the same emloyee. That truck had enough body work done to it over the years that ten trucks could have been built. That same employee walked into a raised backhoe bucket one day; makes one wonder.
Glenna
I don't think "body art" was in high fashion in the 50's, when this particular incident happened. He might have gotten away with a tattoo, but piercings??
Not an equipment story but close.
I was about 14 at the time. We lived here in Tucson but I spent a lot of time on a ranch owned by family friends about 60 miles away. As is often the case in rural America when a vehicle died it went up on blocks to await repair "someday."
I was getting interested in cars and there was a 30's vintage Ford pickup truck up on blocks with a twisted rear axle. I asked our rancher friend about it and he said that if I could get it running, I could have it.
In a pre-fifties Fords the axles had integral differential gears on the inner ends, thus they were captured in the differential housing and the whole assembly had to come apart to change an axle. I removed all of the bolts and tried to separate the pieces. Nothing doing. So I turned the assembly to a vertical position and banged the end of an axle on the something handy on the ground. I had one hand wrapped around the axle above the differential and another below. After a few increasingly sharp blows, the ring gear came loose and shot down the axle and trapped the meat of the palm of my hand at the base of my index finger between the gear and the axle. Trust me, there is very little clearance between these two pieces at that point. (Fifty years later I still have the scar)
Somehow I get disengaged and run to the house with my bloodied and greasy hand. We packed up and my parents drove me the sixty miles to our family doctor.
The doc was kind of a gruff guy and as he was cleaning and sewing up the injury he asks, "How the hell did you manage this?"
Me: "Aw, I was fooling around with a pickup's rear end."
Doc: "That'll get you in trouble every time."
Low fashion though.
Take a read of "Modern Primitives". America had a big tattoo and piercing culture back in the '50s and even '30s, but it was centred on the carnivals, not the suburbs.
Red hot stainless lockwire (or paper clip), IMHE. Smelly, but you don't have to apply pressure.
I dropped a heavy pipe cutter on my big toe. Big blood blister.!
Went to my buddy who is a dental mechanic and borrowed one of his smallest burrs, chucked in my Dremel, touched the toenail and ZIP it was done. Those burrs are so sharp I felt no pressure. It chewed thru the nail as if it wasn't there. No Pain.
Ten months later the nail grew out.
Ted
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