[sliverstorm]

I absolutely buy they are dangerous, but are they as dangerous as a chainsaw or big angle grinder? I'd take a nail 2" deep in my leg over a chainsaw in my leg any day of the week.

(Personally I'd wear PPE with either type of equipment)

[jacquesm]

How about that nail in your eye?

Really, I can't stress this enough, the kind of energy you can imbue a 4" nail with using a crowbar is something fierce.

Or maybe the crowbar would just fly up and split your head open. 4' of nice steel makes one hell of a spring.

Big angle grinders are actually safer than small ones... until the disks shatter, then you have a real surprise. Circular saws will do fun stuff as well every now and then, they just love it when they get pinched in the cut. So you have to plan how the material will warp before you start cutting otherwise it might cause the dangling part to squeeze shut the cut (when you want the opposite).

Chainsaw in your leg? Not good. Wear ballistic protective covering and you should be fine. The clutch in your saw won't like it one bit but should you ever need it you'll be very happy you spent that money, and a clutch is so much easier to replace than a leg.

With a grinder you want to wear safety classes, no gloves (so you can't get caught). For chainsaws there are as many opinions on safety as there are chainsaw wielders. Even the pros are surprised every now and then, usually not by the saw but by the tree.

The best advice I can give you for saws is don't use one with too little power and keep it sharp at all times (and that goes for all edged tools). Wear a helmet with a screen and ballistic gear (pants, jacket).

If you're super experienced then you can make up your own mind and you'll likely disagree with all of this :)

[girvo]

My dad is a builder, and I've worked for him as a labourer many many times. It really gives you a better perspective on how dangerous all this is...

Anyway, circular saws: dad was cutting some pretty nice wood for a fence. Circular saw hit something in the wood, bounced up, then straight down onto his left hand thumb, severing it entirely.

He then drove to hospital. They reattached it, he was lucky enough to have Australia's best nerve surgeon on call at that hospital that day, and now he's got near 100% movement in it. Very very lucky.

Angler grinders blowing, now that's something that will put the fear of god into you...

[jacquesm]

I agree your dad is very lucky. That's about as good an ending to that story as you could possibly have. One day I was cutting staircase support (all those triangles you have to cut out) from a 2" x 12" board, the same thing happened and the saw just jumped right out of the cut. I slammed it down before it could get out of control and it still managed to cut a really nasty gash into the wood before it finally stopped moving. Incredible how fast that went from everything fine to literally fighting the saw. Nobody got hurt that time so all is well but still it gave me even more respect for rapidly rotating disks of steel.

I had an angle grinder disc blow on me last fall when cutting through a rooftile, that too was quite an interesting experience. It would have been less of a problem if it had shattered completely but of course one segment on one side decided to hang on. If not for eye protection that would have ended in the hospital for sure.

The one thing I've noticed is that if you rarely work with tools you are really at risk. Then as you work more more with powertools you get more experience, you become a bit more confident and more aware of the risks. That's good.

Then when you're working with them for a really long time two things will converge in a bad way: all that experience and confidence will lull you into a false sense of safety an then the law of large numbers catches up with you, very rare occurrences will happen to you because you are doing it so often.

If you're not paying attention right at that moment you could very well end up in hospital or worse.

[larrys]

"all that experience and confidence will lull you into a false sense of safety"

I've noticed that that happens with many different things in a similar way.

You get confident, you slip up, you work faster, you make mistakes.

When you start out boating (with a new boat) you are oh so very careful.

Then you gain confidence and you start to take more chances. All the sudden things that you could never imagine yourself doing when you start you do. An example might be getting caught in an inlet with a boat during a period when larger boats are all trying to go in or out at the same time and you are tossed left and right.

Programming as well. Say doing a rm -fr foo * in stead of rm -fr foo* and not catching it because you hit return to fast instead of making sure the statement was correct. [1]

[1] I got into the habit of doing for i in foo* ; echo $i ; done and then inserting the rm -fr statement (by using uparrow) just as a precaution to slow me down.

[jacquesm]

> I got into the habit of doing for i in foo* ; echo $i ; done and then inserting the rm -fr statement (by using uparrow) just as a precaution to slow me down.

I do the exact same thing only I use 'ls foo*' first, and when doing bulk updates / deletes with sql servers I again first do a select and then modify the select once I'm sure it will hit the right rows.