etherfarm

I saw horses

Later

01:25 on Thursday, October 09, 2003 • 5 responses

Earlier

This illustration is from a warning sticker affixed to a flush-cut saw I recently purchased.

Whenever I finish a big endeavor, such as a long roadtrip or in this case, making large furniture, I get this overwhelming feeling of surprise that nothing catastrophic happened in the process. It’s rather overwhelming, I think, that I can take, for example, a 6,700 mile road trip as I did last winter and not experience a car crash. It’s astounding to me that I can go backpacking by myself for 5 days and come out of the mountains alive. It’s not as if I go into these things thinking some terrible incident is in the cards. It’s just that when it’s all over with, I’m amazed that I’m still intact.

In this case, I’m overjoyed about the fact that I still have all my fingers after being around so much woodworking equipment for so long. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the dresser alone probably involved well over 1,000 cuts of wood with various very sharp-edged power tools. I’m a stickler for safety—I always wear my safety glasses or goggles, I wear ear protection, I use several different breathing masks, I use a push stick for the tablesaw, and I make jigs so I don’t have to put my fingers near the router bit on my router table. I hear that routers don’t merely sever fingers, they vaporize fingers, so I’m particularly careful around sharp carbide spinning at 23,000 times a minute.

I’ve obtained a few blood blisters and the requisite baker’s dozen of wood splinters. But so far I still have all my fingers—attached, even— which is good, considering the fact that I use them on a regular basis. I still have my eyes, which is good, because I tend to use those as well. As for my back, at the end of some days it feels like someone has put a sea urchin in it.

And on a related note, this illustration is from a warning sticker affixed to the T800 for which I did not vote.