Tool Safety

Safety is often spoken of, overstated, and underheard. Complacency will get you injured. A lack of awareness around tools will lead to injury and possibly evencan lead to death. This is not to say, “Tools are dangerous, don’t use them!”, it is to say, “Tools are dangerous, so when you use them to accomplish a task, be careful.”

You may think that is overstated or a low chance. Here are some of the most common examples of what happens to people.

COMMON INJURIES

1. Smashed fingers – Even with the simplest of tools, the hammer, it can be very easy and simple to hurt yourself or someone else when simply trying to hammer in a nail. (convert to star method or add it on?)

BULLET POINT LIST where each point is roughly one paragraph. Use the S.T.A.R. short story method. Specific situation, task, action, and result of the situation you are describing.

It is very easy to tell someone to be careful, what this does not provide in any way is what that means.
I wish to impart what being safe around tools functionally is.

To understand what is safe, you should always look for places where energy is stored or where your movements can create enough energy to hurt you if you were to contact something else.

Examples of stored energy include rotating objects, being located in a place where an object can fall, any form of spring where energy is stored by compression, expansion, tension, or torsion, chemical energy, electrical potential, thermal energy, pressurized gasses or liquids.

This energy, often in the form of momentum, can suddenly strike in a way that is unpredictable. A dire example of this is ‘kickback’ a term used to describe the loss of control over a circular saw where, as it slows down it rolls backwards towards the operator after it binds in the material. Kicking it out of position. Typically this results in injury to a leg or a thigh, which was not being considered at the time because it is not directing the use of the saw.

If I tell you to be careful using a circular saw, what I’m talking about is not asking you to pay attention to what you’re doing that is given, but rather to pay attention to possible unintended side effects of what might happen. That’s why being careful and being safe are not the same thing. When you are being careful you become safe because when a safety concern arises you are ready.

Compressed springs are another example of unpredictable stored energy that can cause injury. They can be found in everyday household devices and may not always look like coils; they can be bent pieces of metal or gas pushing up on a piston. When released without proper control, they can throw dust or objects into your eyes or break and hit you. An unconventional example is a piece of wood held down by a clamp; if the clamp releases, the wood can spring up forcefully.

Whenever you are using any tool I want you to consider precisely where the energy in the tool to do the work is and where that energy can go.Our previous example of a circular saw for instance holds the vast majority of its energy in the form of momentum inside the saw blade.In the past these saw blades did not have very good breaks in them and so the blade would continue spinning when you let off the trigger.Although this is not a concern with modern tools It does give you an idea about how hard it is to stop a blade once it is spinning. Enough that if the tool were to grab something it shouldn’t the energy has to go somewhere and it can pull the tool directly from your hand A good way of thinking about it is: If don’t think you could grab it with your bare hands then you  probably can’t hold the tool When something else grabs the other end stopping it instantly .

Several people have broken their wrists or Smaller bones in their hand When driving Screw into a material or drilling through a material as the power drill stalled and the drill’s force was suddenly directed into their hand or the wrist of the other hand holding the object they were drilling as the drill becomes the spinning object not the drill bit.

Last year using a power drill to turn an ice auger. I was surprised by this very effect as I had used my drill for many years but had not accounted for the torque provided by the auger also coming to a complete stop. As a result, the battery of the drill I was holding smashed into my other hand.The reason I did not sustain an injury was because i simply got lucky and it hit the middle of my palm, not my wrist.

And while I sustained no injury, it is still a valuable lesson to remember that tools can always surprise you. Complacency will lead to injury and lack of awareness of the potential threats, Could potentially result in an injury that causes death.

Being safe is not only found in how you use tools but also in understanding the limitations of your tools.The largest concerns here are the wasting of time and money as tools need replaced, and additionally sometimes breaking tools will result in fragments of them injuring you or others.
A fine example of this is I’m sure you have heard at some point you should never hit two hammers together.This is a result of the history of hammers. Typically Hammers were made of harder steels this would cause them to chip instead of dent or break. And other hammers would mushroom out slowly along their edges and the edges of these could break into segments at high speed toward your eyes or others.

Today, however, this is a worry that remains mostly with cheaper hammers made out of stainless steels that have these problems.

The modern framing hammer typically will bend and dent long before it chips.even smashing to framing hammers together is likely to cause any risk as it did 80 years ago.

The failure mode of tools can also be a major thing to consider. Lots of tools will bend and sag long before they snap well others will snap Like glass sending fragments everywhere. This is called being brittle in metals finding brittleness is thankfully obvious, as brittle tools will often ring when struck or make a higher pitch ping compared to a similar material.

.For one material to cut into another at the bare minimum the cutter must be at least as hard as the material you wish to cut. Tools designed for cutting or Drilling will be harder than the material you’re attempting to cut and with steels this also means they will be more brittle.

Brittle materials typically don’t grab on to a tool  that is in the process of cutting them successfully. Whereas softer metals and even woods will grab a drill bit.

When this happens the energy of everything coming to a stop needs to go somewhere and sometimes this will cause the drill bit to snap.When this happens the potential threat to eyes is quite a serious concern small fragments of drill bit even some too small to directly see with the eye can actually cause significant damage at high speed. This is why being aware of the potential danger is important so that you are wearing your safety glasses before you need them

The act of using the drill bit seems insignificant and is very unlikely to harm you but the act of breaking a drill bit most certainly can so when drilling it’s something you should consider.

Simple tools in use  breaking risks.

Need to list out the specific types of injuries and the types of things that can be done to protect yourself with PPE and what that term means. List such as: eyes, bones, skin cuts, abbrasions, tearing of flesh, burns, shocks, slip, muscle damage (kickback), etc.

When to replace tools: 

This category is unfortunately so broad I could give you a hundred pages of rules.

So instead, I will offer you the chance to learn how it is to determine when something needs replaced. Very often tools will come with manuals that describe their expected life.When you receive one of these manuals you should first open it, find out how long this tool should last and then mark down the 50% life expectancy. When you reach it at this point you should begin looking for signs of wear.

An example is your car is only supposed to go on average between 5000- 10,000miles or 8000-16000kilometers Before replacing the oil however at the halfway mark between getting oil change is when you should check it.

This gives you the opportunity to catch problems while they are small rather than waiting for them to become a major problem possibly costing more money.

If manuals are not present, another good rule of thumb is that most tools are mass produced and so their parts will be used in other places.If the news somewhere else typically you can find a source on the internet that will tell you how long that part has lasted in other machines.Which offers a good guess at how long it will last in yours.

Another good metric to look towards is heat, if a tool is getting abnormally hot in it’s use when it wasn’t before something is making that heat, and well this might just be the tools time coming to a close it might be something simple like a stuck contact brush for the motor.

The final metric is as aways safety. Power tools in disrepair fail and when they fail bad things can happen. Most hand tools fail softly and just die but other tools do have catastrophic failures if you see something like sever rust on a breaking mechanism or wear on the tool significantly thinning one of it’s parts don’t use it. If the tool looks unsafe thats because it is, or it’s unsafe in your hands in particular because your level of experience isn’t there to support how to use it safely.

Simple tool concerns: 
We do not want to be working with tools that use blades and have dulled, this is because dulled tools require more force to push through material and that force is released by the blade going 5 or 7 inches through the material instead of the 1 we were aiming for. This is called slippage, a material like cardboard is a fantastic example. Once a razor is cutting into a material it becomes easier to cut at speed.

NOTE: We will need to give basic things to look for on a very limited list of basic tools.

Failure Modes

Important concept to introduce and give examples of. Get people used to the modes of how things fail so they can look out for them. Without the term with a concept, it is hard for a person to think about.

Old vs New Tools

People should be aware of old tools and new tools and that there is a huge amount of variability so to be careful with older tools just as you would with low quality tools. It’s the unknown to be aware of. Such as old electric drills with the metal casings may have old wiring and you can be shocked while drilling.