Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

we had a small explosion on our mill with some contact cleaner and compressed air. everyone was okay though. it was actually pretty funny.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

We just recently had a mentor hurt his finger. He was paying attention and he drilled right through it.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Every single part I make seems to have my blood and sweat on it. Especially today... Perf plate is sharp...

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Well this year our band saw blade snaped while moving at a high rate of speed. I was cutting and it made a very loud noise and suddenly...I wasn't cutting anymore:ahh:

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Our claw and arm was being worked on and someone pulled our pulley and it slipped off and fell 3ft onto one of our members head! He was fine and acted normal the whole time...but I ended up taking him to the emergency room to get 5 staples in his head. Accidents are scary.:eek:

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Yeah i was putting a handle on our controllers today and i didnt know it was on >.< And the next thing i know everyones yelling at me and i dont know why. I looked over the platforms were almost on top of one of our mentors

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

haha, well lets see... we didn't have any SERIOUS accidents but there were some.

- One of the parents drilled right through his thumb because the way he was holding the piece.

- There are scratches on most of our hands (up until elbow) from the robot.

- Few days ago, I sliced my left ring finger in half (never listen to the programmers when they tell you how to machine a part, no offense programmers). I should probably get it stitched but I think the alcohol pad and duct tape held up well.

- One of the kids cut his pinky because he "forget" to use a vice while he was using the drill press.

I like the thread title. Each one of us put a lot of hours into this build season. We bleed, we sweat for 6 weeks to create a machine. Once, the 6 week is gone, we want to cry. But, do you know how good it feels to know that you worked as a team?

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

I'm definitely thinking this is a great season for Safety Captains and team members to be vigilant with safety precautions and staying focused and aware of what's going on with and around the robot(s).

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

We haven't had any serious injuries or anything. During the building of the rack some weeks ago, I kept bumping my head on that middle center disk (I'm about 5'1" so it hit me right square in the forehead), and we've had a few incidents with metal shavings not being cleaned up and people getting little splinters in their fingers. I have like little scrapes but I have no idea where they came from. Oh, and then there's the problem with our exploding Victors...

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

lol that’s why safety glasses were invented, nut ya I had to learn that the hard way 2 years ago during my sophomore year. Note to all other teams expanded aluminum when cut is very sharp I cant count the number of cuts on my hands from this why did I decide this is what my team needed on our ramp. Freaken captain everything ends up my fault lol

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

I had safety glasses on believe it or not...and I was not close to the drill bits at all. It was just a random piece dying to get into my eye haha. Oh the joys that come with Robotics.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

My fingers hurt talking about how you guys just drill your fingers.

Not a robotics injury but yesterday my friend was next to the room we were working in and just passed out cold. I was at Lowes and came back to a huge scene. Luckily the robotics team isn't as dumb as the freshman class (the people just standing around) and got 911 called and made sure she was taken care off. She was diagnosed with some heart issue and is now on medication.

We have had a few small cuts, nothing to bad.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Well you know lets hope shes ok.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

My friend and I were given the task of making a casing for our battery, to hold it on the robot. So we decided to make it out of very thin metal.(since it weighed next to nothing:) ) Only problem was that when we were driving the robot around, testing the drive shafts, the positive and negitive ends of the batteries both touched the metal at the same time!

:ahh: Causing thick heavy sparks to fly 15 feet in the air!!:ahh:

We got the battery out of the way before the battery fried, and scrapped the metal holder for a plastic one. The irony of this story is that me and my friend are both on the programming/Electrical team!:D This happened in the first week out of six, and not a day has past where we were not reminded about it.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Man Oh Man...this is the best thread. Im glad I made it. Clearly all of us have some kind of accident. Tough kids we are haha.;)

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Nothing is better than the time we wrapped our battery with copper wire at UC Davis and during a safety inspection pulled our battery out and needless to say the battery touched and arched and then continued to melt through the outer casing of our battery....... we don't use this battery anymore.... and I still was named captain this year even after my many misshapes over the last two years.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

at comp last year, our mentor clipped his finger with the battery and was bleeding while we were on the field and we didnt have a bandaid but we had eletrical tape, and to make a long story short, eletrical tape is now called a first band-aid at our meetings

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

We decided that if someone dies, we would name the robot after ME!
(In all seriousness, an electrical cord snapped on me (someone was standing on it) and it snapped back and hit me in the nose slightly: Im alive...but I really wanted the robot to be named Jake)

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

This is staged. He really did get the staples in the head from the robot falling (and he is just fine) but we had some fun with the staple gun and camera.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

"Oh crap, it's really bleeding now..."

That says it all. Our driver should be on razor blade restriction...

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Where do i start:

1. band saw blade broke 2 times in 30 minutes.
2. debris from hack saw sliced my skin above my lip open
3. mill bit broke and flew into my neck
4. extremely hot (purple and blue) aluminum shavings from the lathe caused 2nd degree burns on my neck.
5. drill pres snagged on metal casing it to spin out of control and sliced my hand.
6. soldering iron burns
7. drill bit snagged hand and drilled through glove.
8. the robot's hand closed pinching the finger of our other machinist on the team.
9. safety captain gets his finger sliced open practically to the bone

this all happened this year and for the record were not jinxes these were all wierd things that in the 2 years ive been active have never ever happened.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

What has happened to me that I remember from this build season:

Burned myself quite a few times, once with the little butane torch we use on the lexan to get nice smooth edges, and a few more times with the soldering iron, although my other electronics friend went and grabbed the iron on the wrong end(it was off but still kind of hot)

I have cuts up and down my arms from various bits of stuff, and I got another cut going around half my thumb it looks nasty, but its really shallow and I've cleaned it out a bunch

And I have plenty of bruises from Juggling clubs waiting for the robot

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Why were you wearing a glove when drilling? Now you know what happens--lots of pain.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

The TechnoKats, for the first time in a really long time, had someone go to the ER to get some stitches. We had two students over the past two days get some pretty deep cuts that required some skilled work from our un-certified medic, David Abney. Of course we have had minor cuts and scrapes.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

i was working on the mill drilling "speed holes". I was drilling through two 2x1s at once and the top one popped off and attacked me.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Wow some of those are nasty!

I haven't got more then a scratch in my entire 3 years in FIRST. But hard times... Thats another story.

Here’s the usual scenario for machining parts on team 100.

-sponsor's CNC mill breaks -2 day setback
-sponsor machinist sick -(we have to make the parts ourselves:ahh: )
-forced to make parts in mentor's garage but the power goes out
-forced to make parts in another shop... power goes out again :ahh:
-programmers tell us we need to make a gearbox week before ship :ahh:

We also discovered this year that one of our mentors had installed a secret button on his mill to prevent strangers from turning it on;) It took at least an hour to find the little blighter which was disguised as a bolt!:eek:

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

That was a hardware problem as well as software. The gearbox was replacing a system of two seperately driven motors. You do not want to run two worm drives unless you are comletely sure that they will run at the exact same speed. With the speed controllers that we're using, one motor would go faster than the other, and something would be destroyed by the force put on the worm gears. There was no way to easily prevent this.

On a completely unrelated note, last year we managed to break a wire cutter on a ziptie. Luckily, no one was hurt.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Well lets see.....

Last year, we had a table fall on one of our students after "hugging" it.
Also one of our mentors (cough cough kim) had some trouble with a box cutter and soda can......yea that wasn't pretty.:ahh: :(

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

we are usually pretty safe with our tools and have had no major injuries since i joined the team. the biggest thing thats happened is one team member who was drilling last year, as the bit exited the other side and got stuck, caused the drill to twist really fast and it ate up her knuckles and the whole backside of her hand pretty bad. the mark was about to disapear completely form her hand this year when she came close to doing the same thing again. bad luck.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Some time ago I was welding steel with my torch and placed it to cool next to an identical piece. Walked away for chalk and came back to mark the piece of metal "HOT", but I marked the wrong piece (the cool one). I took off my gloves and picked up the red hot piece of steel that looked cool in the daylight. I got badly burned.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

A team member who graduated last year visited and was reminiscing about the cut he got on his hand from the robot last year and had to go off and get stiches, and he reached to the robot, said "Yeah it was right her--**** it! Get the first aid kit!"

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

I am just amazed Tytus hasn't chimed in.

I've been fortunate on my team, not one major accident to date. My finger came awfully close to a jigsaw this year though when I was holding back some wires while another mentor was cutting lexan off the bot. I did more damage to my wrist by yanking my hand out of the robot as quickly as I could; it caught on an edge that was not filed quite enough. 'Tis but a scratch, merely a fleshwound, I've had worse.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

The 'most serious' injury from our team this year (although in the grand scheme of things, is nothing compared to getting a couple staples to your head) probably could have been prevented.. we had a couple people on our team try to take out keyang terminals from the terminal housing the correct way, but we didn't seem to go anywhere, and then someone had an idea to be "creative". mentor with needle nose pliers on the terminal pulled, and I (yeah... ) held onto the housing... the terminal eventually came out, but also left a geometrically perfect cut that we all thought I'd need stitches for, but it ended up being alright.

The cuts look like brackets [ ] and now when people see it, they ask me, "Robotics?" My response: "Yep, battle scars."

It's a nice souvenir from Rookie year, I guess. :rolleyes:

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

With all of the safety discussions that go on in these forums, I'm pretty suprised at how many injuries there are during build season!

I wasn't present during the entire robot build session, but I'm pretty sure our team didn't spill a single drop of blood.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

We are usually pretty safe, I don't think there has been anything worse than minor cuts and scrapes in the history of the team, but there are tons of those.

While using our CNC minimill, I forgot to turn on the coolant for some reason. I finally noticed it was making worse noises than usual and ran to turn on the coolant. In the process, I accidentally touched the piece of aluminum I had been milling. Obviously, it was really hot, so I rubbed my hand on my shirt and burned my skin through the shirt. Ouch.

The first time our president got cut by a sharp edge on the robot, he yelled, "Yes! Now my blood, sweat, and tears are all on this robot!" All of the mechies, myself included, now have blood somewhere on the robot...

Another time, we were all really tired after cadding and fabricating the whole day but we were still working on the drivetrain. One guy, less awake than the rest of us, decided to test if a piece of key stock was sufficiently filed by slashing it down his wrist. Apparently, it stung a lot :rolleyes:

Ohh, and last year when we worked on sheet metal we were just covered in cuts. One mechie (same one that slashed his arm with a key) went outside to work on a big piece of sheet metal, and when he was done, his shirt was a different color.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

I was handed a soldering iron with the hot tip pointing towards me... stupidly I wasn't looking when I went to grab it cuz i was too concentrated on the wires... *sigh*





i couldn't move my hand for about 15 minutes... after I soaked it in a nearby kiddy pool for 15 more minutes...

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

We've never had anything too serious, this was probably the worst injury on our team this year. I was making a small hover bot out of some foam core, plastic bag, and two of the big fans included in the kit. I found that there were two types of big computer-case-type fans, the ones with a metal housing and the ones with a plastic housing. I also noticed that the plastic ones had a higher rating for the amount of power they would use so I, of course, used those.

I hooked one of the fans up to a power supply and that caused the hover bot to start to hover and move towards the edge of the table. My first reaction was to grab the bot to stop it from falling and I reached for one of the fans, which then sliced a piece of the side of my finger off. Fortunately, the power supply overloaded and cut the power when my finger caused the fan to stop spinning so I guess it could have been worse. The skin eventually grew back, but I do have a small divot there.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

its like on mythbusters when they don't let you know anything about the explosives so you cant make them yourself and blow yourself up. im keeping my mouth shut

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Reminds me of a time - my Freshman year on Northern Force (I graduated last year)

One of my classmates - another newbie at the time - was being cool and showing off and stuff, and decided to jump up and hang from the entrance door to the warehouse we were working in.

Surprise! The door was lined with sheet metal. Stuff cut right into the poor guy's fingers, and the whole ordeal didn't get much when he let go. Ended up with a nicely bandaged hand for a month or two.

Not really construction, but it does teach an interesting lesson about showing off, especially in environments like these ;)

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

I don't think we've had any "injuries" since 2005. We are very cautious when we use our tools and when driving the robot. Usually we get minor scratches from reaching into the robot with all the sharp endings on the zip ties and with fibers of glass and carbon itching. Hopefully it stays this way forever. I'm not aware of any injuries since 2001, but I cannot speak on behalf of the team before 2005.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

This is a good post. Practicing caution and using common sense with tools, machines, robots and build will prevent many injuries. Safety captains are not just for competition, they should be that set of eyes and ears in the shop that helps the team stay in top form/on top of their game - keeping safety at the forefront.
Jane

Edit: I thought a little bit more - everyone is responsible for keeping the team in top shape and keeping safety a priority - both as individuals and as a team. Accidents can and do happen but can be kept at a minimum with the use of caution, common sense, and vigilance. Precaution helps safety glasses and captains do their job.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

No real big ones during build, but at the Philly Regional we had a few. The worst I had were a few slips of the screwdriver that ended in blood. One of our girls tho was cutting with a dremel using a disc attachment, slipped, and ran it across her hand. Not a straight shot but a few skips. I didn't find out about it till later that day because she immediately wrapped a bandana around it and kept working.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

We don't really have "totally-emergency-accidents" in our team.
Just the little cuts.
But this year we did have a small fire.
Some cables or something got into where our batteries were charging....
Not a good mix
But it wasn't a big fire, the smoke cleared away and most importantly, no one was hurt!
Ovell, the driver, saved the day!
While the rest of us were like O_O he put it out! =]

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

I did learn one thing........DO NOT hold the work piece while Rosie's Dir of Eng'g Vinnie is cutting it with a hack saw!! I had five bandages on three different fingers.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

the biggest injury on our team from our regional would be getting scratches from the corners of the awards, well the Regional Winner award because of how heavy it was, it kinda digs deeper into the skin than GM Inndustrial Design. I've got scratches everywhere on my left arm holding it for pics.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Here's a good one, no one was hurt and it actually happened after the regional this year.
Driving home on the expressway from Philly we were rear ended in our big white van. We got hit, hit some one in front of us and they hit the following car. Just bumper damage but it was a bit odd.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

I almost cut my leg in the pits yesturday. I was sitting there cutting a piece of angle with a hacksaw and the blade flew off out of nowhere and it almost cut me. Luckily i moved

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

Often times although I try to be careful with the soldering iron, I tend to tap myself on accident on my hand. But one time, I was actually using the hot glue gun and someone called my name, and I touched the hot glue fresh out of the gun and had a blister that has been there for a bout a few days which I can barely see now.

I guess no matter how safe you try to be, something will always happen. Or it's just my luck!

Pavan.

Re: Blood, sweat, & tears.
 

My team seems to be able to find danger where it shouldn't be:

1) probably the most common occurence, people cutting themselves on our ROUND wheels. :ahh: Don't ask me how.

2)some members were in the shop area and drilled to fast with a spade bit through plexiglass, not lexan, plexiglass. Needless to say it shattered and fun bits of plastic went flying every where. No major injuries on that go.

3)Our extend-o arm has been deemed "the guillotine" for a quick drop when raising. Aah, pinched fingures galore...

4)Our arm can reach over twelve feet high, yet our ceiling was at about 9 feet. falling cieling tiles and dust everwhere. I was standing under that one.

5)tripping over tools left out was a big problem, we need to work on that.

6)not clamping stuff to the drill press. stuff spins, people scream.

7)broken scroll saw and band saw blades are always dangerous around experienced and in-experienced members alike. We lost atleast 5 blades on the scroll saw and one band saw.

8)our spinning robot early on slammed and bruised several shins in thhe 6 weeks.

I am still shocked by the cutting of hands on the wheel.

Chris