Safety

[pauluffel]

Based on the Injuries thread, There were lots of fun stories of flying boxes, melting wires, and exploding coke cans, but also alot of stories about serious injuries as a result of breaks in safety. My favorite part of FIRST is that it is a competition of students, which leads to lots of great innovative designs, genius ways of confronting problems (such as the different grades of a part fix), and all of the wonderful experiences at competitions (what could be more fun than cramming several hundred nerds into a stadium?), but this also leads to injuries, as the machines used to build these robots are generally far beyond the skill levels of most high school students. The easiest way to fix this would be to have all of the work done by mentors with training, but not all mentors have the experience to do this and taking the manufacture of parts out of the hand students makes it into a big pinewood derby where the adults do the work and the kids watch. My father taught me lots about using power tools and the safety that accompanies their use, so I was generally the person asked to go use the band saw or milling machine.

Safety training needs to be a much larger part of FIRST, yet FIRST has enough on their hands organizing the events and appeasing rabid participants by editing the rules, so we need to take this upon our selves. With all of the accumulated knowledge of the members of this forum and the people we have met through this experience (such as machinists and mechanics who have helped us with our robots) we need to assemble a guide or at least some safety rules to propose to FIRST for all of the teams (especially rookies) to use. A simple 2hr course in machine safety along with the roookie workshops would do a world of good.

Do any of you have safety proposals or any current things you do to ensure safety on your team.