Donald Trump’s yes-men at the Consumer Product Safety Commission are withdrawing a series of proposed safety rules, including an appendage-saving safety mandate for table saws. This will mean thousands more fingers lost per year.

  • Tower@lemmy.zip
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    18 hours ago

    I don’t know if any other machine comes close to a table saw for demanding my respect and full attention.

    While not used nearly as often, a lathe can take a lot more than a finger.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      18 hours ago

      Yeah. Table saws and lathes are typically the two scariest machines in a shop. Table saws tend to get more injuries purely because people tend to use them for mindless tasks. With a lathe, you’re hands-on and focused the entire time. So accidents tend to be because the piece snapped free and went flying across the shop at Mach Jesus. But table saws are just the right blend of powerful and utilitarian, to be really dangerous.

      Oh. I need to cut 50 identical pieces. Set up a jig on your table saw, and have at it. You get into a pattern. Set material in jig, grab sled, push sled to cut, retract sled, move cut piece, repeat… But by piece 20 or 30, you’ve started to think about what you’re going to have for dinner tonight. Maybe there’s still some leftover soup in the fridge? But the wife won’t want that, because we had it yesterday. Maybe we could get a rotisserie chicken from the grocery sto- Aaaaaaand your thumb is gone, because you pushed the piece directly instead of pushing the sled.

    • anon6789@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Very true. That’s something that will keep pulling you in.

      Most of my lathe time was threading and knurling on a metal lathe, so more hands off than a wood lathe.

    • SoloCritical@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Yep. I’ve definitely seen what a large industrial lathe will do to a person. It very rapidly makes them into what I refer to as “human paste”