All:

I am one of the mentors on Team 811 and we had a serious accident with a student and a table saw a week ago.

Short summary is that the student cut his thumb to the BONE on the table saw blade while ripping a piece of wood.

He had been through safety training and was experienced on this piece of equipment.

The student is now fine, but a millimeter in the wrong direction and he could have severed his thumb.

ACCIDENTS can, and will happen; so please be careful.

As a result we have tightentd up policies with all tools to always have a mentor supervise the work, NO EXCEPTIONS!

I suggest that if you are a mentor or team lead, you consider adopting our policy.

Just today (as a safety mentor), I had to ask one of the other mentors to stop his work and continue in a safe manner. Had I not, he was about to injur himself with a jig saw.:ahh:

And also make sure that the robot isn't on when your working on it.

The robot doesn't necessarily need to be on for you to be injured...last year at nats, i was backdriving chain on our basket lift with our human player after a match, and he pulled really hard and i couldn't move my hand fast enough. End result? my fingers squished between chain and a 6" diameter sprocket. It didn't feel good.
But this year so far the only injuries (for the whole team) have been minor cuts and splinters :D

Similar thing happened to my friend. he had his fingers in the chain, doing something, and a moron on our team decided to play with the controls. Needless to say, his finger could of been destroyed by our drivetrain, luckily it barely got caught before we stopped the fool.

Cory

Widowmaker
 

Last year at LA regionals i was working on the motors mounted below our robot. We had a thingamajig in the front that was supposed to align the goals so we could grab them, and that was tensioned by those constant force springs and it was held in place by a nail and a piece of wire. Well, as i was working on the motors, my teacher decided to pull the trigger makin that pointy stick go straight for my head. Thankfully all i had to show for it was a rip on my shoulder....Beware of things that are sharp, pointy, and tensioned by constant force springs....

last year we took motors from the year before's robot, a prototype frame for that years robot, and a bunch of random electronics we had sitting around, and created a wheelchair thingy.... we bolted a chair down on top of it and made a seatbelt out of duct tape and a beaner.... the thing worked fine for ten min and then started to smoke like crazy.... it was fast (for two old drill motors and a steel frame) and we almost ran over some other kids who were in the hall

eek
 

The one smell that strikes the most fear into anyone who has been on our team is this: acrid sinus-stinging smoke. Usually accompanied by "HOLY WOWSERS THE MOTOR IS SMOKING!" or "ALRIGHT! Who let the magic white smoke out of the wires?!" :ahh: (last year we had a nuclear 'shroom cloud in miniature proportions when we managed to melt a bunch of our wires and the insulation when we turned the bot on to check something, it wasn't pretty). So far, that horrible smell has incured the death of about 3 motors (old drill motors and 2 other motors Mr. Stokely brought in the other day. No wonder the motor wasn't working properly, it was being fried because the transmission was grinding in ways it shouldn't be) Oy. Poor motors. :eek:

Some of these stories make me wonder if teams are bothering to do any safety training . Mentors are supposed to make sure that these incidents don't happen. Common sense is not enough(as the saying goes "Common sense isn't all that common.") They seem funny now but if someone gets seriously hurt, maimed or killed I don't think anyone will be laughing at all.

when i was in junior high i was in a science fair and some one from my school found out that diet sodas freeze faster because of the diferant ammounts of caffine and suger(i think) but it was really cool to watch the cans explode. also if you would have dropped the regular cokes from about 2 feet from the ground they would have exploded to(that is really really cool)

We had one team member who had a few incidents with steel pipe. In 2001, he had a weighted steel pipe dropped on his hand. Last year, he was threading a steel pipe, then slipped and cut his finger on the threader. He just didn't seem to have much luck with pipes.

Interesting combination of post and signature. :rolleyes:

My injury did not happen all at once, it's more of a "Progressive Injury" We got the shafts for our Transmission today, and of course they were 5 thousands oversized, the shaft was too long to put in the drill press we had, so we had to use emery paper and sand it down by hand, After you do that for about an hour the tiny metal shavings you take off when you sand were working there way in to my thumb, I cant get them out cause there so small, so tomorrow I'll just do it some more and shove more metal in to my thumb, by the end of this week they will be calling me Steel Thumb:yikes:

set up a 10" cylinder to act as a vaccum...put your thumb over the hole and it should suck those little buggers right out.

It's one thing to live life in the moment and another to live life without regard.

Wow, so many near misses with teams this year. Let's be safe out there everybody! A little safety precaution goes a long way because it does not take much to be seiously injured and serious injuries are not cool. Lets not give the paramedics any business this year!


Sean Roberts, EMT-1

former Safety Officer, Team 330