I have been cutting some slabs and found that by rotating the guard on my 230mm grinder, I could use it 2 ways:
In this method, the the dust fires AWAY from you, BUT if/when the grinder kicks, it will come towards you.
Now you get the dust firing in to your leg, but grinder would now 'kick' away from you!.
I am guessing that the 2nd of these is the safest, but which is correct?
I've always used mine this way. Seems the safest to me - though shortly after getting my first grinder, when cutting some metal pipe, I nearly set myself alight (a slight exageration I melted a hole in my fleece but it could have been a lot worse) So now I'm always careful as to where the waste flies.
Matt
I've only a little Bosch grinder but have used that both ways. I don't think I'd like to try stopping a big one if it kicked back towards me though.
Got enough holes in my t-shirts already from grinding metal. :-)
Mark S.
Leather welders apron is what you need
Sparks away from you, kicks towards you.
When a grinder kicks (unlike a chainsaw) it will tend to kick in a fairly straight and predictable manner. It doesn't tend to twist and buck. You can resist this quite easily. Besides which, grinders don;t kick in anything like the way that saws do.
One hazard you do find with 9" grinders is the gyroscopic effect of the disk. I don't much like mine because of this, and tend to use a 7" flap wheel for much of the time. A 9" grinder is also slower than a 4
1/2", so the wheel linear speed is about the same. Unless you really need the motor power, there's not really much extra capacity to a 9" and they're much more awkward.
Sparks from metal grinding are very dangerous - my father set his workshop on fire and died in it. We reckon that he was grinding metal.
Rob
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