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[–] 73 points 2 years ago (16 children)

I witnessed a fatal lathe accident. The kind that would have easily been featured in rotten.com back in the day. They shut the whole shop down and noone worked for a month. It was awful.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Yikes, remember kids no loose items near the violently spinning things.

    I used to be a plumber and spent a lot of time running a pipe threader all I ever thought about while using it was if I mess up this thing will force my body through a 5 in gap.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    if i mess up, this thing will force my body through a 5 in. gap.

    which isn't totally unfeasable

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)
  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    like a hotdog in a shop vac, crummy way to go really

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I've never worked with a lathe, but PTOs on the farm were terrifying. I was taught to be afraid, and I was.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Basically the same ideas for safety, but those PTOs tend to have way more horsepower behind them. I don't care how cold you might be, loose clothing is bad.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    My cousin got his arm ripped off by a tractor PTO when he was a kid. Some quick thinking by his dad got him a tourniquet and his detached arm on ice in a cooler, drove him to the hospital and they were able to reattach it. He doesn't quite have full function with it but you'd never know. This would have been around 1990 so pretty impressive medically.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Not "Russian lathe incident"? Sounds like it might potentially be identical if it's not that one.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Nah, I'm in the US. And, honestly (this is painful to recall) it wasn't an arm stretched around the lathe chuck. It was mostly red mist that left some organs around. This was on a large machine that had a 30 foot long bed, and around 90 HP to drive it. The guy was trying to turn down a cam shaft for a ship at about 100 rpm. The forces involved are insane. He kind of... disappeared.

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