Rough Wood

In honor of Woodworker’s Safety Week, it’s time for a heart-to-heart. Let’s talk about the magical safety unicorn that is protecting hand tool users from harm.

First off, yes, a big machine with whirling knives is more dangerous than a hand plane. Table saws are very hungry for fingers. Kickbacks can send you racing off to SpleenMart. “Router flour” can cake your lungs in seconds flat. In comparison, a discussion of the dangers of hand tool woodworking might seem like comparing freeway driving at high speeds with a romp in a bumper car with flames painted on the side. Bear with me.

Conventional wisdom recommends occasionally walking away from the big metal beasts and picking up a hand saw for a pleasant vacation in HappyLand. This is definitely “safer” in comparison; that doesn’t mean that it’s “safe.” With hand tools our guard is lowered, and we get sloppy.

When I saw and plane in my office/not-shop, I leave some amount of a very fine dust on everything within a 5 foot radius. Early on, I noticed that dust was being sucked into my wind tunnel of a computer, and it was constantly spewing small amounts back into the environment of my office. I had inadvertently created a dust collection and dispersal box. I would also find dust in my nose, which means that it’s getting into my lungs as well. These things showed me how much dust I was generating, just using hand tools.

I consider the risk of dust exposure to be greater than the risk of mangling a digit. Surely, cutting yourself (or losing a finger) is a horrible thing. But those sweet-smelling clouds of wood aid in the formation of various cancers, and other lung issues. It’s not only the volume of dust that’s a concern, it’s the size of the particles and the amount of exposure. Fineness determines how deeply into the lungs the particles go. The finest particles can settle into lower portions of your lungs, and it’s much more difficult for your body to get rid of them. ”Woodworker’s Lung” was around long before we learned to harness electricity. Some species of wood are directly associated with cancer, and you don’t want any amount of that in your body.

In a power tool shop you might switch on the dust collection system and wear a mask, because you expect it. For hand tools, many people skip lung protection entirely. While it is sometimes reasonable, and currently fashionable, to overlook something as simple as a dust mask, you might be surprised at how much dust can be generated using a hand saw and a plane.

Rip sawing turns each cut into a fine powder, which can easily be seen drifting around, waiting to lodge itself in your lungs.

Planing can also generate some nasty dust clouds. It is not usually associated with dust because you’re aiming for shavings, but a very thin shaving is not like a stable sheet of paper, it’s more like a tight web. Some of that is going to generate dust. As well, some species of wood (generally softer woods) generate more dust than others since the fibers tend to crush before being cut.

At times I feel like I’m an overzealous planer, almost like I’m channeling the Tasmanian Devil. The instructional and demo videos of plane usage on the web are usually meant to show form and technique, at a snail’s pace. This is not how it goes in real life. To really get somewhere (especially if you’re thicknessing a bunch of stock at once) you have to generate a rhythm, and since you have a lot of ground to cover by hand, you tend to do it rather quickly.

When the dust clears, it’s either on horizontal surfaces, in your lungs, or stuck to the mask that you should have been wearing when you first noticed it floating around.

Until next time, may the safety unicorn smile upon you.

My wife was an amazing cook for many years, and was in a chef program for about 6 months—finally turning her experience into a career. We found some interesting parallels between woodworking and cooking, the most notable of which is that both of these pastimes involve the use of very sharp tools—and extensive hand skills. Literally 1 minute before the end of her final presentation for school, having never cut herself with a knife in decades of heavy knife use, she cut her left index finger and ended up in the ER.

I had just sharpened the knife for her.

About 10 months ago, as partial justification for spending money on sharpening gear, I had offered to start sharpening her knives. The knife in question is pretty serious—it is ice tempered to a hardness of around 58-60 RC. That’s tough chisel territory, and is almost as hard as a Lie-Nielsen A-2 plane blade. It took an amazing edge, which didn’t budge for quite a while.

As my tool sharpening skills improved, so did my ability to sharpen her knives—quickly and to an absurdly keen edge. I kicked myself for providing the means for her to literally remove a piece of her finger—through fingernail.

Fast forwarding to the ER, when I arrived and she was waiting for a doctor. I wanted to see the wound so I could reassure her of whatever the results might be. There was a clean, oblique slice, which removed about 1/3 of the nail, and a lot of nail bed. I mentioned my self-imposed guilt trip to the nurse, and she reminded me that sharp is actually better. If you are cut with a dull blade of any kind, which has more of a rough serrated than a rounded edge, the wound is much rougher—and the cut does more damage. These cuts take longer to heal, and are more prone to scarring.

It was a rough night, and she was heavily medicated, but she was fine. She wasn’t able to use that finger for a while, but the doctor was confident that it would heal ok. Ironically, the cut happened when she let her guard down, rather than being due to her nervousness. Upon having realized that her presentation was almost over—and that she was in the home stretch—she stopped concentrating on the cutting.

There are two huge lessons to be learned here:

1. Considering that a knife is just another kind of hand tool, this is proof that even hand tools can really, really mess you up. Hand vs power is no excuse to slack on safety. Always be careful. Always.

2. Though it may seem to be more dangerous, sharp is better. You don’t have to force the tool to do what you want (as much) and if you are cut, you have a better chance of healing.

Just saying. Be careful out there folks.