I have had a few days in Emergency Wards and hospitals culminating in an operation tomorrow for skin grafts and rebuilding the bed for my now non-existent finger nail. I was working on my router table doing a job that always worries me ... routing across end grain. This has always worried me and so, some years ago, I bought a spiral cut pattern bit so that any cross grain cutting would be shear cutting rather than cross grain. All went well until Wednesday evening!
I was routing a large radius on the front of some seat cushion frames. I screwed an MDF pattern to the top of the workpiece and this allowed me to have both hands on the workpiece and about 200mm from the cutter. I had successfully done 2 of the 8 but, on the third, it all went horribly wrong! Literally in a split second, I remember seeing the cutting edge, feeling pain in my left hand and leaning forward to turn the router off with an emergency off-switch located at hip height.
Luckily my neighbours were home and I was in hospital literally within minutes.
I had plenty of time over the next couple of days to think it through and I had a clear image of seeing the cutter which I should not have been able to see as the workpiece and pattern were between me and the cutter and it was lowered so that the top bearing was running along the pattern. When I got home bandaged and plaster cast, I insisted on going to the shed, ignored the blood at the door and router table and quickly worked out what had happened.
20141016_171957[1].jpg
The router bit had come loose and, because of the down-cut spiral, it had risen, the cutters dug into the pattern, spun the workpiece and drew my left hand into the cutter. You can see the cutter rising from left to right on the pic.
I couldn't believe that I hadn't tightened it well enough and I do even remember giving the 2 spanners an extra squeeze just because it was going to be cross grain routing! I haven't yet ( = can't!) pulled the collet apart to see if it is clean but I did measure the shank diameter (only with a digital vernier) and it is identical to other 1/2" shanks i.e. 12.63mm?
Unless I find something wrong with the collet, it simply must be 'operator error" but I'm not facing that yet!
I will be out of action for a while and off end grain routing FOREVER!
fletty
I was routing a large radius on the front of some seat cushion frames. I screwed an MDF pattern to the top of the workpiece and this allowed me to have both hands on the workpiece and about 200mm from the cutter. I had successfully done 2 of the 8 but, on the third, it all went horribly wrong! Literally in a split second, I remember seeing the cutting edge, feeling pain in my left hand and leaning forward to turn the router off with an emergency off-switch located at hip height.
Luckily my neighbours were home and I was in hospital literally within minutes.
I had plenty of time over the next couple of days to think it through and I had a clear image of seeing the cutter which I should not have been able to see as the workpiece and pattern were between me and the cutter and it was lowered so that the top bearing was running along the pattern. When I got home bandaged and plaster cast, I insisted on going to the shed, ignored the blood at the door and router table and quickly worked out what had happened.
20141016_171957[1].jpg
The router bit had come loose and, because of the down-cut spiral, it had risen, the cutters dug into the pattern, spun the workpiece and drew my left hand into the cutter. You can see the cutter rising from left to right on the pic.
I couldn't believe that I hadn't tightened it well enough and I do even remember giving the 2 spanners an extra squeeze just because it was going to be cross grain routing! I haven't yet ( = can't!) pulled the collet apart to see if it is clean but I did measure the shank diameter (only with a digital vernier) and it is identical to other 1/2" shanks i.e. 12.63mm?
Unless I find something wrong with the collet, it simply must be 'operator error" but I'm not facing that yet!
I will be out of action for a while and off end grain routing FOREVER!
fletty
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