JLC Online: We sent out a survey over the course of a few weeks and received nearly a thousand responses. The survey covered practices relating to tool use on a jobsite or in a shop - and included table saws, miter saws, circular saws, routers, hammer drills, as well as personal protective equipment and first aid.
5 comments:
I found it very interesting to learn how other people - many of whom are professionals - deal with safety precautions and recommendations. Overall, people were slightly less safe than I was expecting, and my expectations were already fairly low. I have heard many horror stories about table saws, and I take such dangerous equipment very seriously. The main thing that stood out to me is how quickly people will sacrifice safety to get slightly increased efficiency. People did the more convenient safety measures (push sticks, eye protection, and ear protection) at much higher rates than using things like splitters and riving knives, which could potentially limit tool efficiency slightly. I think the potential benefit of using a splitter heavily outweighs the slight negatives that come from it, so I will always elect to use one. Many people do not, and many will never be injured by this at all, but I think it is always good to have that backup option in case there is a potentially dangerous kickback.
I found the article below fascinating. I always love seeing statistics show safety trends. Personally I know that I have not always followed the exact safety standard but sometimes you do not have much of a choice. I think it is interesting that most did not use a guard on a table saw. It is a pain but an important part. I do think it is a little shocking how many do not wear a mask or a respirator. At least a mask is very important, almost all use safety glasses and protect their eyes but they do not protect their lungs. I just think it is fascinating. It is also intriguing that so many of the people surveyed will trade safety because they do not want to spend 2 minutes putting on a guard or riving knife. Personally I have never had the opportunity to use a splitter but I have dealt with my fair share of kickback when cutting on a table saw. In the future I would like to be able to use the splitter to cut to protect from kickback and also to improve efficiency.
I really enjoyed this article, as I have never seen these kinds of percentages based on personal use of a tool. Since I have been around carpenters for my whole life, I have heard many conversations about whether of not to use the guard, riving knife, pushstick, eye and ear protection, etc. I do always love having these conversations with other people, and funnily enough we had a conversation about it the other day in PTM. I did not grow up using a table saw blade guard, and I still have some aversion to using it. I do think that a riving knife is almost always useful, as for theatre we don't always get the best wood and that means sometimes you might start pinching the blade as pressure is released in the wood. I think that eye and ear protection is always good to wear, but I will say that when starting in a new shop or using a new tool I will try to refrain from ear pro to make sure I know what the machine sounds like and what I should listen for if something were to be wrong. As in most things, especially carpentry, I don't know if anything other that eye pro can be listed as an always, just because what we need to build changes so often and might require different setups. It does come down to personal preference, but I think I speak for everyone when I say we would all like to go home at the end of the day will all of the body parts we came in with.
I should be surprised by the number of people that don't use personal protective equipment but I'm honestly not surprised at all and I don't think most people are. Everyone knows that PPE helps significantly in reducing risks of bodily harm to yourself and others, it was made for that purpose and not using it is practically asking for injury. But, I also know the other end of it of the person who's exhausted and just wants to get the work done and doesn't feel like setting up this 10-step process of the guard that makes it harder to cut in the first place. The need to always have to find the safety glasses and find your dust mask or get fitted for a proper respirator and pay the money for a proper respirator is very easily high enough barrier for most people while it seems like a dumb decision not to use it it's hard to blame people when it's often pretty expensive to use consistently especially what respirators that have their canisters that you then have to purchase more of and each time you don't use it you're saving a little bit of money.
This was a super interesting article, and it was really interesting to read about how all of the different people responding to this survey have different ideas of the perceived “best practice.” The concept of safety and what is the safest thing to do does vary a lot, which is really interesting because you’d think that safety would be fairly black and white. I know that throughout my life, every shop class or theatre shop I’ve been in has told me something at least somewhat different about how to use the table saw and what to do in order to be safe. I guess most things are situation dependent or dependent on the person operating the saw, and definitely every place has its own rules essentially, but it still is interesting that there is so much variety. I think with this survey in particular, I think that most of the answerers are people who essentially know what they are doing, so they might take shortcuts sometimes.
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