I have just finished a bowl turning course; my first lathe work. The instructor is very casual about safety; he says that is reasonable, since no one ever get hurt on a lathe. I wonder how true that is.
I read through the website on woodworking injuries, and there aren't many lathe injuries reported. The main problem seems to be the work breaking apart at high speeds. Does that happen much? A number of people recommended full face shields. I have one, but it is pretty thin flexible plastic; I don't expect it would help much against a high speed chunk of wood. I looked up a few websites (amazon, hartsville, woodcraft) and they just sell ones like mine, except mine has a metal frame. Is there something better, or is it strong enough?
I am the only person wearing a dust mask, and it gets pretty dirty after a few hours.
He's got to be a complete moron to make such an irresponsible and inaccurate statement.
Probably because lathes are not as widely used as table saws, bandsaws, jointers, etc.
Yes, especially with inexperienced turners. Sufficiently heavy catches can also break tool rests and steel turning tools. Other dangers include loose clothing, jewelry, and long hair getting caught on the workpiece or spindle.
Even though it's fairly thin, the shield has a radius to it, so a flying object is more likely to be deflected away than result in a full-force impact as a flat surface would.
I personally find dust masks annoying and don't use them much, but I often pay for it with a couple hours of coughing and sneezing afterwards. Other turners take dust more seriously and wear breathing apparatus resembling full hazmat suits.
Wed, Nov 29, 2006, 4:46am (EST+5) snipped-for-privacy@Yahoo.com (Toller) doth tentatively state: I have just finished a bowl turning course;
Sounds like your instructor is an idiot.
You should be asking woodturning questions at news:rec.crafts.woodturning instead of here.
I wear a face shield. It's better than nothing if a piece lets loose, and it keeps the small bits off your face and out of your eyes. I wear a dust mask too, because it's dusty.
"Toller" wrote in news:kg8bh.6406$ snipped-for-privacy@news01.roc.ny:
I've been working with wood for my whole life, and seriously, as in furniture making, for the last six or seven years, as a hobby. I bought a lathe 18 months ago, and have turned some interesting pieces, bowls, etc. up to 14" in size.
I had a nasty catch a couple of days after Labor Day, and the scraper managed to catch me in the left hand, at the base of the second finger. I wore a major bandage for 6 weeks, and only in the last couple of weeks have I been comfortable wearing my wedding ring again. The scar doesn't show too badly.
Nobody ever gets hurt, but I did. And I was very lucky that's all that happened. I nearly passed out from the shock.
BTW, the bowl is still mounted on the lathe. It's finished now, but it's still out there.
Toller, head on over to rec.crafts.woodturning and check out the group. More than you could imagine about woodturning over there, and some really stellar turners. Many are very generous with their time and ideas and some have gotten to be friends (the kind that drink coffee!) over the years. Lots of talk about injuries from time to time; some serious, and some just scare the crap out of you.
I turn a lot on Jet minis, and when I get going on a turning jag, I might turn for a few hours a day, 5 days a week. This nonsense has been going on for several years. Two years ago I was deep hollowing (yup.. entire possible on a Jet mini) when my bowl gouge caught on a twisty piece of grain I had uncovered by peeling away the insides of the vessel. It rolled the gouge over and smashed my finger so hard I thought it was broken. It turned kinda black and hurt like hell, but that was it. My wrist was sore for about a week.
Flying wood has shot off the lathe (for different reasons) at such great velocity that it has left the lathe and embedded in the garage wall. I have had smaller pieces leap to their freedom (only to find themselves in the burn pile) and not hit the deck for about 15 feet. According the the spinners on that group, you can achieve aboutg 70 mph of velocity under the right conditions, and the have the math to prove it. I believe them.
So how would your instructor react to being hit in his unprotected face with a piece of rough, spinning wood weighing a few POUNDS going 70 mph? If you persue this, you should join local club. They will help you keep straight.
Always wear a dust mask, even a paper N95 is better than nothing. You will be standing right over your work all the time breathing wood dust. Always wear a full face mask. The ONLY time I wear goggles is when it is my turn to demo, or if I am teaching. No other time.
And as far as no one getting hurt... click the link in the message below and see what you think. Many thanks to Owen Lowe, who tracked this down for us.
Northwest Woodturners Pacific Northwest Woodturning Guild ___ Tips fer Turnin': Place a sign, easily seen as you switch on your lathe, warning you to remove any and all rings from your fingers. Called degloving, extended hardware can grab your ring and rip it off your finger. A pic for the strong of stomach:
Just a follow up. The pic didn't happen while a guy was turning, but stories abound in the spinning community of things like that. No watches, rings or hair should be hovering around an object spinning at
5000 rpms.
I can be breathtaking to just freehand a tool into something like that... imagine getting caught...
- unless the instructor is dangerous. Sounds like yours was.
You're holding a sharp tool, applying it to a spinning piece of wood of uncertain soundness, turned by a quarter horse to a horse and a half and you've probably got chips of wood or ribbons of wood flying around. That's if the piece of wood starts out balanced and you've got the rpms below where things start to vibrate or rock around. Does this sound like a place to be careless and assume you're completely safe, no matter what you do?
Check to obituaries. Look for man killed from blunt trauma - may include unexplained discovery of large chunk of wood on the dented hood of the car in the driveway and the mysterious hole in the garage roof.
Haven't turned above 1200 rpms so I have no personal experience
Probably lexan or other polycarbonate - pretty unbreakable unlike regular plastic. Protects your eyes from flying wood chips and could distribute the force or a larger flying piece of wood.
I don't use a face shield often but that's because I've got a mini/ midi lathe (JET) and my glasses are polycarb. A face shield if you don't want to wear safety glasses would be a good idea. Getting a chip out of your eye ain't always easy.
Certainly people can and do get hurt on a lathe, especially if they wear loose-fitting clothing. Now a lathe itself isn't going to cut your arm off, but it can certainly cause serious bruising, fractures and even breaks if your sleeve gets caught when it's spinning and pulls you into the work.
That's probably more of a concern than bodily damage, having a piece come apart at high revolutions and hit you. A face shield is manditory when using a lathe and I'd recommend a dust mask, at least when working with materials that might be toxic or hazardous (I do it all the time, but that's just me.)
Most of the shields out there are strong enough to withstand small pieces of wood hitting them at high speed. I've seen some really extreme shields, made of thick Lexan and the like, but I think that's probably overkill for most people's needs.
And as far as dust masks go, I wear these a lot, from many different manufacturers, but all made for people leaning over an ugly cesspool of germs and ground, powdered bone and amalgam.
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7 cents each, there really isn't much of an excuse for not wearing them.
Sometimes I wear 3 or 4 a day, so I buy them 200 at a time. Almost all of those guys on Ebay have lot of those masks so just contact them and ask for more at the same price.
If you like those, get the ones that have ear loops, and make sure they have a wire nose clip. I have found that they are not nearly as hot as my 3m dustmasks that I buy for the guys.
Others have expressed themselves quite succinctly regarding the sagacity of your instructor and I fully concur with them.
But let me add a short note on lung protection.
I have a shop-built air cleaner that I calculate (back of the lunch bag numbers) filters my shop air roughly 3 times a minute. Yeah ... that's a pretty noticeable breeze! I have a stack of three filters. The first is a normal 79 cent furnace filter that grabs stuff that would have settled out of the air if I weren't stirring it up so much. The second, a 5 micron filter, gets the air clean-looking ... that is, if it was the final filter, I'd be fooled into thinking that my air was clean. The third filter is rated to pass nothing bigger then 0.3 microns. Thats smaller than dust. Smaller than bacteria. Smaller, even, than some viruses.
With that much air filtration, you'd think that dirty air would be the least of my concerns, eh?
But I still wear a 1/2 mask respirator (~$26 at Harbor Freight) because I am closer to where the dust is generated than the filter is ... so my lungs get first dibs on it.
There is an older carpenter that I know. He provided well for his family and retired with a workshop bigger than my house and yard combined. But he never wore so much as a dust mask.
He's doing well to get 2 or 3 words out between coughs.
Lathe work generates a lot of dust to go with the shavings. You do the math.
There are occasional injuries. I would worry about the thing catching my clothes and pulling me in.
I don't think so.
It's probably OK. Your mask doesn't have to deflect a bullet. It's going to both deflect and spread an impact out over a larger area, reducing its effect. It also keeps the crap from flying into your eyes all the time.
That would be the inside of your lungs otherwise. I wear eye and lung protection when there's stuff flying around to get me. If it's noisy I wear hearing protection as well. If I had known way back I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself back in the days when I thought I was bulletproof.
Completely false. I remember an especially gruesome incident described either here, or on rcw, a number of years ago in which a long-haired turner failed to tie his hair back, and managed to get a pretty hefty lock of it wrapped around the spinning workpiece. I'll leave the results to your imagination, which likely isn't going to be any worse than the reality.
Never to me, but it has happened. Why not post in rcw (rec.crafts.woodturning) and see what folks there have to say. It seems to me that this is a problem mostly with bowl turning, where the workpiece is of a fairly large diameter and often being turned with the axis of the grain perpendicular to the lathe bed. If all you do is spindle turnings (e.g. pens, candlesticks, baseball bats, chair rungs, table legs, etc.) this is a fairly low risk.
Good enough -- and a lot better than simply goggles. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there are other things on your face besides your eyes that are worth protecting. Teeth, for instance.
Then it would seem that you have more sense than the others. Without the mask, the stuff that's making it dirty would be making your lungs dirty instead.
Pretty rare, injuries at a lathe. As far as life-threatening injuries, it's safer than walking across the street, certainly. Potential is there for the careless to ding themselves, but it's fairly easy to move the ON/OFF switch to where you don't have to lean into the disintegration zone to activate, reasonable to cut standing outside the zone if you push the tool handle. Makes you an unlikely impact point.
Eyes are very vulnerable and deserve protection. Face shields are often more trouble in distortion, distraction and discomfort than they're worth, especially when the above procedures are followed.
Cutting doesn't make dust, though sanding certainly does, so makes sense not to overload the body's natural defenses and wear something to cut down on access. Makes better sense to collect close to the point of generation. When that's done well, it's tough to work up a booger even if you don't wear a mask.
True -- but they are not the only parts of your face that should be protected. Teeth, for example...
It does not appear that you have much, if any, experience in wearing face shields. Mine gives *no* problems with distortion or distraction -- and comfort is one of the reasons I prefer it to goggles. Vision is so clear, and the shield so lightweight and comfortable, that I often forget it's there, even to the point of banging my knuckles on it when I reach up to scratch my nose. In addition to being more comfortable than goggles, it also takes less time to don or doff -- which means I'm *much* more likely to use it, as there's really no excuse at all for not wearing it. The one downside I've experienced with a face shield is the importance of remembering to flip it up when I feel a sneeze coming on. :-b
... I wear a full-face shield that is also a mask. Mine is a Trend, but there is also the 3M and Triton. There are two kinds of woodworkers, those that have wood dust allergies, and those that will.
I've been turning a lot over the last three years and have racked up a few injuries--none serious but enuf to make me take protecting myself seriously.
I wear a face shield. It gets dirty, picks up sap when I turn green wood, fogs in the winter, and when I sneeze you don't wanna know. But I turn a lot of wood right off the tree, and it does fling small split pieces off, as well as bark. Even at 450 rpm, they move. Several have caught me in the face (mask) making me glad I wore it.
I've had about 5 bowls come unglued from the face plate. They don't fly, they just sort of wander off of the lathe, mostly at the back.
I turned a plate from an old butcher block top. Got it all done, and spun it at 1200 rpm to melt the wax. There was one crack sound, and I stopped all to see what happened, didn't see anything. When I turned it back on, there was another, and the thing flew apart in three pieces. Two of the old glue joints let go. I caught one on the side of my arm, one in my gut, and had bruises for a week. I think my face shield would have resisted the impact.
I hit my fingers a lot with corners before I get the wood rough rounded. You can't see them. And really knocked my knuckles on "natural edges" spinning fast.
Finally, I've been turning some larger bowls--start with a chunk of trunk about 13" in diameter and maybe 15" deep. Have to balance it carefully before, but even thin it is off balance. I lag screw it to the face plate, make several checks of clearance and balance before I hit the switch, but when that wood (weighs in at about 30-35#) starts spinning and shaking its pretty impressive. I stand next to the off switch, out of the line of fire.
So, take care, you can get hurt, but sensible precautions and knowing which part of the air belongs to the turning and which part your hands can go into help.
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