[icelancer]

This is uncommon but not rare. Have you ever seen wheel blur or other artifacting of such? It's very easy to make happen artificially under controlled conditions which means it can't be that hard to happen accidentally.

Edited to add: Have you ever heard of a timing light for an engine? This works exactly the way you are describing.

[calvinmorrison]

Timing lights for engines work this way for clarity: The distributor on an engine has a spinning rotor and a number of points (one for each sparkplug) on the outside the circle the rotor forms while spinning are a series of contacts across which electricity jumps to send voltage to the spark plug.

The timing light is then pointed at the flywheel on an engine, which has numbers or marks stamped into it. Each time the spark plug fires the timing light (which is hooked into that same current via induction) lights up for a brief amount of time to show at what timing offset the engine is currently at. (this all happens at hundreds of rpms a minute).

so I'm not sure it's the same

[dsfyu404ed]

The effect might not be rare but getting hurt by it is incredibly rare. Machines produce noise and vibration. Nobody is going to be fooled and try to pull a moving part out of a lathe because of some LED lighting except in the most exceptional or bizarre circumstances.

[cc439]

Machine shops are very loud (plus you'd be wearing ear protection) and a lathe/mill that vibrates noticeably is either broken or incapable of performing the very task its designed for.

[roenxi]

Nobody? That is a high bar. Mechanics tend to be pretty cluey, but for the effort of getting proper lighting why nobody should be taking that sort of risk. Sight is one of those fundamental lets-feed-in-useful-information sensors for keeping situations safe.

[dsfyu404ed]

Most people spec'ing out machine shops are not experts in lighting other than more = better. This is a really, really low risk we're talking about. Like basically the stars have to align for someone to get hurt.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

I started to write a lengthy rebuttal, but decided to go with something more concise.

Never underestimate the ability of machinery to rapidly render you dead.

Never underestimate the ability of otherwise intelligent people to intentionally disable safeguards, or guninely make mistakes.

[icelancer]

No, it simply isn't that rare. You haven't been around wood shops and machinery much if you think that.

[mcv]

Are there any statistics on this? That seems like the obvious way to settle this issue.

So far, the discussion sounds like it's a theoretical possibility. If it's a real possibility, then it's something that should have happened a number of times.