Oh Well - it was an old shirt

[Logan Novice]

With a chill in the air I decided to put on an additional shirt; kinda like an open front jacket. Working with the spider in place on the lathe means I can't leave the end gear cover on the machine. Extra shirts left loose around an operating lathe is a bad idea. The lathe ate my shirt. To make matters worse, the fabric engaging the gear set(s) caused a stripped out a fitting in the gear train. I can make another fitting - I just need to have a lathe to do that. Hmmmm ... lesson learned. Part on order.
( Sometimes we get so involved with a project that we forget about the safety lectures we got from a shop teacher of other source. What I did was stupid. I decided to share the story to stimulate some discussion about shop safety. Looks like it worked.)
P.S. I did find a way to make a fitting to keep my lathe operational until new parts can be had.
Addendum: This experience generated a flashback to my days in the machine shop at school when we watched videos of Primitive Pete.
From this day forward I will keep those entertaining and impressionable videos closer to my frontal cortex.

Tools 101 with Primitive Pete

Five years ago, I obtained a copy of a 1945 publication entitled, ABC's of Hand Tools , for five dollars at a local flea market. What cau...

www.drawntoimagination.com

 

[vocatexas]

Before I ran my first lathe I sat down one night and watched You Tube videos of lathe accidents. Those are worse than the films they showed us in defensive driving. Glad you were lucky enough to just lose a piece of your shirt. It could have been worse. Take care!

 

[mattthemuppet2]

jesus, that's lucky. Good job it wasn't the chuck that sucked you in, you might not have been in a state to tell us about it.

 

[Z2V]

With a chill in the air I decided to put on an additional shirt; kinda like an open front jacket. Working with the spider in place on the lathe means I can't leave the end gear cover on the machine. Extra shirts left loose around an operating lathe is a bad idea. The lathe ate my shirt. To make matters worse, the fabric engaging the gear set(s) caused a stripped out a fitting in the gear train. I can make another fitting - I just need to have a lathe to do that. Hmmmm ... lesson learned. Part on order.

Thank the good lord you were not hurt. Could have been really nasty. You won’t do that again, right?

 

[addertooth]

It is events like this, which makes novice machinist become more familiar with "emergency stop drills". Things can go bad really fast.
I once had an industrial transmission spinning in a lathe, and the balanced jig started to go South... you would not believe how fast I got out of the way. In that case, I did not hit the emergency stop, or it would have flung it across the shop. I kicked it in neutral, and let it coast down. It made a multi-ton Mori-Seiki 50 HP turret lathe hop up and down like a bunny. We had another Machinist get his face laid open, when a large ring he was parting decided to zip straight at his face. He finally understood the value of chamfer on the outside edges before he got to the bottom of the parting function. For some reason, the worst accidents seemed to happen to our welders. We had one welder that got his hand ran through a 5 sprocket gang-chain. He was trying to get the keyway in the sprocket aligned with the shaft as he was sliding it on. He asked his helper to just briefly "jog" the motor. You can probably guess the rest.

 

[jcp]

The safety poster that got my attention was one that had a scalp hanging from a lathe chuck.

 

[vintageiron]

The same caution goes for those with a long beard.

 

[aliva]

One positive You won't do it again

 

[FOMOGO]

Seems this is the way we learn. Just glad to be alive after so many years of working around all kinds of machines, and heavy equipment. You do seem to develop a type of Spiddy sense if you live long enough. Mike

 

[sycle1]

Where I did my Apprenticeship, they had a fellows finger tendon hanging from the big Lathe light frame as a safety story for young apprentices.
He used a rag on a turning part in the lathe, one grab and tendon removed from arm.
Never use a rag on a lathe.