EEEEEK I’'ve never seen the flex shaft\long hair accident but I
have heard stories.
That’s nothing. A friend who was in building trades told me a
couple REALLY bad ones.
[1] A guy is using a power nailer to put together wall
framing. [A power nailer uses cartridges that are just like
blanks from a gun. Instead of driving a bullet, the shot drives
a nail.] This guy was driving twelve penny framing nails, (4"
long x 1/8" thick, with a very rough galvanized coating). His
attention lapsed for just a moment and …
BANG! He drove one of those big spikes straight through the
middle of his thumb, right at the first joint.
To get him loose, they had to cut part of the framing timber
away with a power saw, (imagine how good the vibration felt as
it was transmitted up the arm through the shattered joint), and
then cut the nail with a hack-saw. (More vibration, only
slower.) All of this so they could take him to the hospital,
with the nail still in his thumb.
[2] A teenager in a woodshop class is using an industrial
size/power table saw to split a 2x4 length- wise. Thinking he
could get a better view of what he’s doing, the kid stands
directly behind the piece of stock as he feeds it into the
multi-horsepower machine. He has the blade adjusted wrong, and
he tries to force-feed the stock, rather than letting it go at
its own pace. The saw, running at full-speed, “kicks-back”,
i.e., the blade gets jammed on a knot or nail and, unable to cut
through it, spits the board out. The force of this causes the
2x4 to skewer the kid like a gigantic arrow – driving straight
through his liver, breaking his back, killing him.
From the auto-repair industry.
The flex-shaft long hair accident makes you go EEEEEK!? Try the
fan-belt, running engine, long hair accident. Pulls the
person’s head into the fan.
But, here’s the most HORRIFYING, DISGUSTING one of all. [This
one I read about in the Washington post. It was also on our
local tv news.]
A guy hears a loud grinding noise, and looks out the window.
His next-door-neighbor is having some yard work done. The noise
is the sound of tree limbs being fed through one of those
gigantic shredders. Hoping that the racket will end soon, the
guy goes back to his morning paper. Well the sound just goes on
and on and on until the poor guy is going nuts. He goes
outside, and the machine is running, but there’s nobody around.
Great, he thinks to himself, they leave the *#&@ thing running
and take off somewhere.
Not quite.
Nobody knows exactly what happened, but, somehow the worker
feeding the tree limbs through the shredder must have gotten his
sleeve caught on a limb as he was feeding the machine. The
powerful diesel motor fed the tree limb through the shredding
blades. Since the worker was stuck to the limb, the motor
pulled him through the blades too.
There was nothing much to bury.
Sweet dreams,
Tom