DIY near misses

[fred]

As a follow up to Geoff's post regarding his uncle I hope he doesn't mind me starting a thread encouraging contributors to recount near misses they have experienced that could have had serious consequences, a sort of tribute and reminder.

Here's mine:

As a teenage lad I was helping my dad re-roof a stone walled barn when he put his weight on a tile batten and promptly went straight through it, falling through the sarking felt and rafters to the floor below.

The family rushed to his rescue to find him sitting on the floor of the barn unharmed apart from a concussion and a gash on his forehead. On looking up we noticed that he had bounced off a dividing wall used to store a row of scythes hung on rusty iron spikes driven into the wall.

I have no idea how he avoided the bagatelle on the way down.

Over to you . . .

The story of my own (multiple) adolescent electrocutions can wait until later.

[brass monkey]

I was working late, (only two of us in the factory) testing a boiler control panel. The system was waiting to detect a flame (normally from an oil injector). We used to hold the flame detector (metal casing) near to a candle, which I did. I was bending down, started to overbalance and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a 440v test switch, I couldn't loose it. Things started to go black and I must have fallen backwards dragging the switch out of my hand. I came round with the other guy prodding me with his coat covering his hands ;)

[Tony Bryer]

The worst thing that happened to me - which could have been very nasty - was working up a short ladder, one of those folding ones unfolded so about 2.5m. A friend and I were building an extension, corner house, flank wall at the back of the pavement, and the ladder was resting against some ply sheathing on timber frame. I must have overreached: the ladder and I went sideways and I hit the pavement hard. After a moment or two my first thought was whether I could move my feet or not, fortunately yes.

My friend called the ambulance and after a quick check they said they'd better take me to hospital to be checked over, was I OK to walk to the ambulance, by then yes. When we got to the hospital they insisted on stretchering me in as the boss might be watching.

The funny side: what probably saved me from serious injury was that it was a bitterly cold February day and I had multiple layers of clothing on. When the nurse asked me to remove my outer clothes it was like pass-the-parcel: jacket jumper, body warmer, another jumper shirt, tee shirt, ....

Since then I have always treated ladders with a bit more respect - I only fell a short distance, but if it had been summer and I'd just been wearing a tee-shirt or my head had hit the ground first I might be typing this from a wheelchair ... or not at all.

[Lobster]

Never had one myself ;-) David

[lister]

Our first house, and the sofa had been delivered. I was hacking the thick plastic off with a stanley knife. At the bottom it was really thick as folded over several times.

For some insane reason that escapes me now I ended up lying on the floor pulling the knife towards me with some gusto. As you can imagine to plastic gave and I ended up with a knife about 5mm from my eyeball.

I remember lying there in a sweat wondering how I could have been so bloody stupid.

[geraldthehamster]

I wore building gloves to protect my hands from the stone I was hefting about, and cutting with a 9 inch angle grinder. When the grinder skipped out of the stone, the disc caught the glove and dragged my hand in. I found myself kneeling on the ground, firmly attached to the grinder, with the disc in the back of my hand, and the contents of my hand congealing over the garden. This counts as a near miss because another inch would have cut half the hand off, rather than merely severing tendons.

I'm all right now ;-)

Cheers Richard

[Peter]

A mate rewired a new 2 pin rubber connector to his extension and to his hedge clippers. You know the connectors where u stand on the cable lift the trimmer and disconnect. Needless to say he fixed the plug and socket on the wrong way round. Stepped on the cable lifted the trimmer and disconnected. Picked up the extension the shock clamped his hand around and the electricity did not cut off. Poss 5 seconds later he had the wherewithall to pull the plug free. It fried a tendon in his shoulder and alyways gives me the shivers thinking about it. Peter

[Andrew Gabriel]

That reminded me of an X ray image I've seen, so I went looking for it again, and found it...

this isn't where I saw it originally, because there was no explanation of how it happened and I was wondering, whereas there is here.

[John Rumm]

On 11/08/2010 01:35, fred wrote:

Helping a mate add a waterproofing layer of torch on felt to his multiple flat roofs, I was working around the edge of one doing a neat "drip" that would be visible from down below. I had two blow torches with me, a small ish one on a 4.5 kg propane tank, and a big f'off long reach jobbie on a 47kg tank. At this point I was using the big torch for a bit, while working from a platform ladder (the sort of thing with a 5' wide platform and couple of ladder type ends). The height of which was set so that my head was about level with the (single storey) roof level. The torches have two controls - one that sets the current gas rate, and a flare lever that lets you whack it up to full power instantly. Hence I usually set the burn rate to just enough to keep it alight in the wind, and then flare it when actually torching. As I worked my way along, I found I needed to put the big torch down for a moment while I sorted the next strip of felt, and so put it on the roof in front of me. There is a bend in the end of the pipe that means you can do this without the end touching what you put it down on, so its quite safe with the flame burning on low level a few inches above the surface its sat on. That is until you pop your head over the roof line and notice that you have put it down such that for the last 30 secs or so, it has been flaming the rubber pipe connecting the other torch to its regulator on the propane tank you left sitting on the roof some hours earlier! The prospect of a flaming pipe whipping about with 4 bar of propane pressure behind it did not really merit thinking about!

[TheScullster]

Working with a Stanley type knife, it slipped off the work and made sickeningly solid contact with my left thumb. When I plucked up the courage to look, there was a neat cut straight across the base of my thumb nail - very little bleeding. A while later, the cut grew out and the end of the nail fell off leaving a perfect straight edge. Not quite life-threatening, but remarkable none the less.

Phil

[ARWadsworth]

Not really a near miss nor DIY. An electrician I knew was killed in some council offices when working with a heating unit behind a false ceiling. There were exposed live wires behind the false ceiling. The management were aware of the live wires and the local council were fined £400,000.

[Jules Richardson]

Done that before with an angle grinder, with similar results - it went right through the nail, but amazingly didn't cut the flesh beneath.

I remember cutting a fuel line on a car once, thinking it was depressurised - it wasn't, and I got a not-so-healthy blast of petrol in my face. Luckily it split when I was far enough back that I closed my eyes in time, although I was still tasting petrol for the next few hours.

I've had quite a few "crap, that could have been so much worse!" moments, but so far have been lucky and not caused myself any long-term damage.

cheers

Jules

[ARWadsworth]

My ladder scare was not from a fall but nearly been hit by a falling ladder. The guy fitting the alarm on a three storey house asked me to foot the 3 stage ladders whilst he was up there. After he had come down from the ladders we started to lower them. However he had not locked the top section and it came straight down towards my face. I let go of the ladder and rolled . The section missed my head by about 12 inches.

[ARWadsworth]

Sometime things are not dangerous but can be embarrassing.

The first one was my Dad some years ago. He went to inspect a village police station that was closed due to mining subsidence and to decide if it was to be knocked down and rebuilt or repaired. As he went into one of the cells to check how much the cracks had widened his workmate slammed the cell door shut and shouted "gotcha". About 30 seconds later they found out that the cell door was a self locking one and my Dad was locked in.

Of course it took six hours to get a key to open the door and only one hour for everyone that worked in his office to get to the police station and take the piss.

The second one is an un-named electrician from the Barnsley area. He wanted to run some cables under a suspended floor in an old terraced house. It was a 6 or 7 foot drop and so he thought it would not be a problem to drop down, lay the cables and then pull himself back up through the floorboards he had removed.

When he dropped down into the under floor space he found out there was an additional two feed of mud and he was stuck and unable to reach the floorboards and pull himself out.

He had to call a friend on his mobile to come and drop some ladders down the hole to rescue him, but his friend also brought along other friends so they could take the piss out of him.

[Lobster]

I lied, as reminded by the angle grinder story posted by someone else.

Years ago, I was working with mine (can't remember what) when it suddenly stopped working. Rats. Fiddled about with it a bit, put it down on the ground and scratched my head. Spotted the plug lokked like it might not be fully home in its socket and gave it a push.

Yes, you've guessed it: angle grinder behind me burst into life as I'd left the trigger lock on, and took off across the floor like a banshee, the blade missing my leg by a few centimetres. Duh.

David

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah. Mine was a biy like this. Router, switched it off, and moved to put it down, thing wound my jeans round the bit within an inch of...well..before it stopped.

Ruined the jeans. NEVER put a power tool down till its STOPPED.

[Tabby]

Reminds me of the famous x-ray of someone's head with several nails in it.

NT

[ARWadsworth]

And this one

[dom]

Not diy, but years ago - a near-miss that made me feel sick to see my friend having such a close call.

A new electron microscope in it's huge and heavy delivery crate (around a 1.5m cube) being unloaded from the truck, via the tail-lift.

3 blokes - one operating a hand-cranked forklift - the other 2 helping manouvre the crate out of the back of the truck and onto the tail- lift.

As the front wheels of the forklift rolled onto the tail-lift, and the tail-lift started taking the weight of the crate - the tail-lift sunk a couple of inches under the load.

The forklift started to run away as the rear wheels were still in the truck body, whilst the front wheels were now a couple of inches lower on the tail-lift.

The operator instinctively dropped the forks to the ground to stop it running away - instantly transferring the forward momentum of the crate into it tipping over and off the tail-lift - with my mate stood on the edge of the tail-lift and the crate tipping onto to him.

It looked like the crate had tipped over too far and too quickly and would tip off the tail-lift with my mate between it and the ground about 1.5m lower. I doubt such a heavy object falling that far and onto a person would be survivable.

It didn't. It seemed to stop at the very point of going over, and crash back. But in my mind's eye I saw my mate being killed.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember fred saying something like:

I was about fifteen and replacing a socket in the understairs cupboard, having switched off the mains, of course. Unfortunately, I hadn't pulled the fuse. My younger brother was pissed off at losing power in his bedroom, stormed down the stairs and flicked the fusebox switch back on, just as I was touching a red wire.

The utter wanker.