You can find lots of pictures of fingers that didn’t get cut off by a SawStop table saw. It’s really gratifying to see what could have been a life-altering event amount to little more than a scratch. This is one of the other pictures, and it’s the result of an unfortunate encounter with a jointer. Now I’ll tell you why it’s important to be 100% focused and alert when using woodworking machinery.
It was one year ago to the day that I was in the midst of making Gary Ragowski’s arts and crafts bed. Happy with my progress thus far, I was surface jointing poplar slats on The Bodgery’s 6 inch Jet jointer. On boards with a bow at one end, I remove the bow by running just that part of the board over the blade until the bow is gone. There’s no sense taking material off of the good part of the board when just one end needs attention. I had twelve slats to mill and I was in a production mindset. I was quickly passing the bow end of the board over the cutterhead with the my fingers gripping the edges of the board. This is not the right way to use the jointer. The only reason this was even possible is because the blade guard was broken. There was no spring tension to make the guard return to its place over the blade. If the guard was working correctly, I wouldn’t have held the board the way I did.
I felt the blades vibrate my finger as they passed through it. The feeling reminds me of the vibration you feel when you get shocked by an electrical outlet due to the frequency of the alternating current. I instinctively clenched my fist and pressed the end of my finger against my palm to stop any bleeding. After exclaiming some four letter words, I quickly looked at my finger to see how much was gone. It wasn’t painful, but I felt intense disappointment when I realized that enough was missing that it might not grow back. No one was in the shop to hear me swear.
I pulled the dust out of the jointer’s cabinet with my good hand hoping to find the end of my finger in case it was large enough that it needed to be reattached. In my state of mild shock I didn’t realize the pointlessness of my errand. The cutterhead on the jointer has three blades and it spins at 6000 RPM. A table saw will cut off just one piece of your finger, but a jointer won’t leave anything to reattach. The blades made a hundred little pieces, not one. There was no blood in the dust.
I looked at the end of my finger again quickly to reassess. “It’s bad,” I thought to myself. Would it grow back? I wasn’t sure. I went into the bathroom and got some paper towels to press my finger into. I called urgent care to see if I needed to go the emergency room. After navigating the menus, waiting on hold, and verifying my mother’s maiden name, I told the nurse that I cut off the tip of my finger. What did I cut it on? A woodworking tool. How much did I cut off? About a centimeter (it was actually less than that). I was relieved to know that I didn’t need an ambulance. As I held the finger pressed into my palm, I could feel that the end was missing and noted how unexpected that was, and that I still felt no pain.
After waiting in urgent care, it had been over two hours since the accident. Patients are seen in the order of need, and as I sat in the chair with a paper towel clenched in my hand, I noticed that elderly people, most of them with coughs, were seen before me. The nurse practitioner looked at the wound, put a bandage on it, and sent me for an x-ray to see if the blade had hit the bone. It just missed, but she prescribed antibiotics just in case. As I was waiting for the results, I held my hand in the air like I had a question to try to stop the bleeding. She said that was a good idea. She prepared to put a rubber sleeve over the finger to make sure the bleeding stopped, but noticed it had already started to clot. She replaced the bandage with one that wouldn’t stick to the wound and taped a piece of metal bent in a U shape to protect the end of my finger. She gave me instructions how how to take care of it and asked if I had any questions. I had one: would it grow back? Yes, she said confidently, though it might not be exactly the same shape as it was before. That bandage, and all of the extra non-stick bandages she gave me, stuck to the wound and were very painful to remove.
I went back to the shop and fixed the jointer’s blade guard. Then I went home, where I learned that stretching my arm out to reach caused extremely sharp and intense pain in my finger. I jumped up and down while spinning in a circle with my eyes closed, yelling “Owwwwww”. The tip of my finger grew back but there’s some padding missing on the end where there once was, though you might not know to look at it. I can feel it as I type this, and if I tap it on a table it sounds more like a wooden finger than one made of flesh.
In the wood shop these days, I still catch myself in moments where I’m not completely focused and a spinning blade is an inch or two from my fingers. The difference now is that I’m reminded of my accident and I get a visceral wake up call. I consciously take a moment to reprimand myself in the hope that I’ll remain vigilant next time. I never want my tally of days without an accident to go to zero again. The consequences could be much more severe.
This is actually helpful, thanks.