The December/January issue of AM has articles about table saw guards and riving knives.Reading about these, I was reminded of an incident that happened to me this past summer that I thought was worth writing about. I was cutting stakes from 1x2 spruce lumber, using my table saw to make the ends pointed. As usual when doing this, I have done it many times, the small triangle shaped pieces the blade cut off, dance around on the top of the table till I gingerly removed them, the saw still running to "save time". I had the blade guard removed as well, a recipe for disaster to begin with. Well, no surprise,one of the little pieces, the last cut, of the last stake was caught by the running saw blade and was hurled at my face, hitting me in the corner of my left eye, breaking my safety glasses. I was stunned by the force of the hit, didn't know exactly what had happened, knelt down covering my eye with my hand. After a couple of seconds, I opened my right eye and saw blood on the floor, one of the scariest things ever to happen to me in my 65 years on this planet. The blood turned out to be from a cut on my nose that the small piece of wood had inflicted on it's way to my eye. The eye turned instantly bloodshot and required a couple of trips to an opthamologist to determine that the eye survived. I was extremely fortunate to escape this incident. I thank God for the safety glasses.
I am a licensed heavy duty technician and over the course of many years at the trade I have developed a notion that if you do something wrong often enough, it finally comes around to bite you on the backside. Looking at the site of my injury, it suddnly came to me that I was using the wrong saw to make the pointed ends of the stakes, there was a perfectly good bandsaw standing 4 feet away from the tablesaw, that never hurls pieces of anything.