I'm making some passage doors for the house this weekend; my wife is due with our second child in May and it turns out she thinks we ought to have a door on our new daughters bedroom! So I figure if I'm going to make one, I might as well make several and replace the last few hollow core doors in the house while I'm at it.
Anyway, I'm spinning a 7" donut on the shaper, I can't get rid of the snipe using the stock fence (not a great idea to have a 7" fence opening anyway though I have been doing it for years) so I decide to finally make a much overdue panel raising hood and do it right. Hood works great, takes up more of my valuable time than I would like but once done was worth it. I run a test piece, I need to add .005" to the panel tongue so I step up to the TS to quickly rip off a half inch or so for another test.
I get about 4" into the cut when WHAMMO. I'm diving to the right, the panel is flying over my left shoulder, and now I am wide awake. I had been using the TS as an assembly table to dry fit the door frame for panel measurements, I had taken out the bies splitter and not replaced it, my focus was on the shaper set up and new fence/hood set up. I was in a hurry and wasn't really pushing the rip through correctly. The perfect storm. Lapse in judgement, lack of focus, bad technique. If I were at the TS thinking TS I would have processed the cut differently and doubt this would have happened. But it did.
In any event I survived unscathed save a small nick on one finger where the sharp edge of the flying panel glanced me on its way by. I felt for a split second that something was going very wrong and in that split second I started to dive for the floor. I knew instinctively that I had lost control of the stock and had better let go and move like heck. I got lucky basically. The panel was a mess. It looked like someone had tried to freehand scribe a curve with a sazall along one edge, and there were several chunks missing from the back that looked like someone had run it over with a roto tiller. I guess the panel got hung up once or twice on the blade which bought me just enough time to dive right.
My first reaction was to shut off the saw once I knew it was clear of wood. Then I looked up at the ceiling for a few long seconds and wiggled my fingers one at a time to see if they were all still there before doing a visual inspection for bodily damage. It all happened so fast I had no idea if I was hurt or not. The realization that I had through my own bad judgement placed my self in such great danger that I had no idea whether I still had fingers was extremely humbling and unnerving. I took a few minutes to mill around and clean things up a bit, replaced my splitter, made a new test piece and processed my panels as planned, this time with considerably more focus on EVERY aspect of the work.
Don't do what I did. Please keep a minimum safe distance of at least 5" between head and buttocks at all times when using the TS. Scarry stuff, thanks for listening.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by David DeCristoforo
This is not my first experience with kick back, but it is my first with sheet stock, and the first in which tension in the wood was not a factor. Basically i turned my cabinet saw into one of those baseball pitching machines.
