Just lathering on a lam coat and something flies in my eye ( and I wear glasses). I thought it was a bug until the burning started. Ran inside and washed with lots of cool water. Remember to wear safety goggles. What’s your worst injury while making a board?
Usually my ego and self esteem are th only things that get injured when I make a board.
In the fall of '67 at Surfboards East in Freehold, NJ, Dean Ward was the laminator and the drum of resin was nearly empty, he was trying to get a good pull on the pump and it burped a large resin bubble from the spout, the droplets went right for his eye.
He had no choice but to get handfuls of clean acetone and wash that eye out.
I ran out of acetone in Hawaii, my father, CO of the 1508 th, took me down to the flightline that night where there was a drum of acetone, it only had a faucet and was on end, he flipped it on its side, but it was full enough that the flow was nothing.
He started to unscrew the bung to let in some air, but the acetone was sloshing end to end in the drum and as he undid the last threads of the plug, it sloshed to the front of the drum and blew past the sliver of an opening straight up into my eyes. This was the first time I swore in front of the old man, but in a few seconds it had all evaporated.
I was not injured in the following accident but, I was laminating the bottom of a custom order for BC’s in Ft. Lauderdale, when I went to step around the tail, there was the drum of acetone blocking easy movement. The floors were really built up bad and I put my left foot on the resin mound to test the traction, it felt safe, but the second I raised my right foot up to take the next step my left foot shot out from under me and I landed on my back in the resin run off on the floor. That’s not the bad part, my left elbow came down hard on the tail of the board, I had a bucket of resin in my left hand too. The boards nose went about 4 feet in the air, then flipped off the stand and into the tree with shaped blanks on it, but bounced back into the stand on its rail and came to a rest bottom up.
I jumped up, put the board back on the rack, all the while running around like my head was cut off, I whipped off my gloves, pulled my resin soaked shirt over my head without getting resin in my hair. I grabbed a towel and soaked it in clean acetone, gave myself a super quick wipe down, pumped some more resin in the bucket I had dropped, the glass on the board had bunched up in the middle from the flexing like a rubber band when it pinballed around the glassing room.
There was dirt on the rails from the floor, several big gashes in the rails and huge dents in the deck from me impaling it on the rack heads. With plenty of fresh resin I managed to get most of the dirt off quickly, straightened out the cloth and finished tucking the rails, the worst gash was right in a comp band sprayed on the foam.
When the bottom had set up, I took it into my shaping room, the board had enough thickness to keep block planing down the stringer and sand the flats out towards the rails, after about 45 minutes I had the rack dents out of the deck.
It had a glass tailblock, and the nose had been whacked, so I put on a matching mitered nose block, laminated the deck, resprayed the comp band on the sanded hotcoat.
I called the customer to tell him his board had hit the floor and did he want me to shape him new one, he had driven up to Cocoa for the shaping session and liked what I had done for him.
He was waiting at BC’s when I delivered the board he thought that I had been pulling his leg about the board crashing
Piece of plywood shot out of the tablesaw and hit me right above my junk. I just crouched there doubled over for a while. Sensory overload. My johnson turned purple.
I've been pretty lucky so far because I'm not as careful as I should be. I had a funny rash all over my stomach and chest after scraping gummy epoxy off a board. I had a speck of surfacing agent hit me in the eye. It didn't hurt, but a moment later I had a strange soapy taste in my mouth. Wierd.
Jim, you always have the best, funniest, knarliest stories. Keep them coming, please. Mike
I was just learning to use a power plane, had a few boards under my belt, when the one I was shaping at the time started to slide off the racks. I took my hand off the front of the plane to hold the board and proceded to slice about 1/8’’ or more off my finger. No pain, at first, just a perfectly sliced piece of meat and bone. Still a little mumb after all these years. I get shivers when I see guys planing with one hand on the planer.
Mine was a ''Worst, But No Cigar!'' I was shaping at Hansen, in bermuda shorts, using a Skil 100, and really concentrating on the job at hand. As I completed some banding passes, I stopped at the tail of the board to assess my progress, by sighting down the board from tail to nose. As I lifted the tail with my right hand, I lowerered my left hand, holding the still running planer, to my side. Yikes!!!! The spinning blades grabbed the leg of the shorts, stopping the planer, and clogging the throat of the planer. It was totally jambed. I had to cut the material of the shorts to get the planer off my leg, and then get some tools to remove the material from the jambed planer, and replace the broken belt. After that little exercise, I got real careful with power tools! The surprise to me was that I was not cut, but it was WAY TOO CLOSE, and I cringe today, when recalling the incident. It could have turned out real ugly. I was lucky.
I once hitch-hiked 30 miles with a bottle of catalyst in my pocket. A friend needed some, and I told him I’d hook him up next time I came down his way. The bottle cap leaked. A few days later, my left thigh began to itch. Not long after, the skin began to ‘rot’ away. The stuff ate a hole in my skin. Maybe 2 or 3 mm deep. It bled, it oozed, it hurt like hell. I still have a scar, 40 years later.
When I was in high school I was glassing one of my first shape jobs. I just mixed up a hot coat batch when I knocked over the bucket and spilled the whole contents onto my belly, crotch and down my legs. I was shirtless and wearing only gym shorts with no underwear so the stuff soaked right thru the shorts on to my nuts and wiener. Well I had no acetone. My brother suggested I try some gasoline that was in the lawn mower. Tipped the lawn mower on it’s side to drain the gas out of it on to my Tshirt that was now a rag and franticly started to try to wipe the resin off. By then the resin had started to gel. Around that time my sister and a bunch of her girlfriends had come out to see what the commotion was all about. So there I was naked in my backyard going berserk with my crotch on fire surrounded by bunch of giggling 13 year old girls . Well gasoline didn’t work - it made it burn even worse. I grabbed the garden hose and started to hose my crotch and legs with water. That got the gasoline off- didn’t do much with the resin. I can say that as a 15 year old it was quite embarrassing, but worse, in order to get the rest of the crusted up resin off, I had to shave my privates and my legs. That got me some funny stares in the showers during Phys Ed at school.
This one’s not shaping related but I took a fin to my head from my twinzer up at el porto a few days ago… Lifeguards wrapped my dome like a turban. Lead fin cracked and has blood, hair, and skin stuck up in it. 3" slice from 1/2" in my hairline to the middle of my forehead. Gonna be a lovely scar.
Sammy, while living in Hawaii in the early years, I needed catalyst, but being a high schooler and broke, decided it would be OK to boost a 4oz. bottle from the Hickam wood hobby shop retail store.
I slid it into my back pocket and went back into the wood shop, about 30 minutes later it felt like I had a bad itch or ant bite irritation, but it started really bugging me. I went into the bathroom and drop my pants and my right ass cheek was cherry red in about a 5" circle, the cap on the bottle wasn’t screwed on tight and it had been leaking. Over the days ahead, the skin turned brown and started peeling off where the burn was, I got a lesson that day about bad carmel !!!
Ouch...Ouch...ouch...
Those stories are all making me cringe.
I have a couple.
I've cleaned out a spraygun so many times I do it without thinking. This time however was different:-
About 1990...I was in an open-ended spray bay, semi-outdoors, in a factory in a beachside ex-automotive garage, with my apartment next door.
I had the lid on my Iwata gravity-feed gun, with the second-hand thinners for first rinse. I blocked the nozzle with a rag for blow-back. The little hole in the top of the lid was blocked and the pressure blew the lid off and thinners into my eyes.
Dirty Thinners burns like fuck. I was screaming. I scrambled blind amongst the abandoned car tyres, feeling around for the garden tap...
I necked myself on the clothesline and fell on my ass...got up, shinned myself on the saw-horses I used for board hosedowns, slid in the puddle...
Eventually found the tap and rinsed my eyes. The anxious shop-girl emerged, but having missed it all, only caught the tail-end of my cussing spree...
And...
Same factory:-
A fan-free sanding room, one of those loose-fitting paper gauze dustsuits. Stooped over a Makita, I snagged the machine in the billowing loose front of the suit...
The sander was ripped from my hands as it wound the suit tight around the spindle...the trigger handle zipped around with the pad whirring hard against my guts.
The whole machine spun around, the handle whacking me in the nuts, and the head, the nuts and the head before I was able to kick the plug out of the wall.
Ouch ouch ouch...
Josh
Great stories guys! Haven't laughed this hard in a while.
Atomized, you tell a great tale! Makes it even funnier since I can relate, especially to the brothers great idea. Here try this...
The catalyst stories remind me of one I posted on an older thread on the same subject:
A long time ago, a guy I worked with took some resin and catalyst home with him to use in some hobby project he was working on. He pumped himself a pint of resin into a plastic bottle and he filled an empty Visine bottle with the catalyst. He put the Visine bottle in his pocket and went home. Some how he forgot about the Visine bottle. His girlfriend when doing the laundry found the Visine bottle in his shorts and put it in the medicine cabinet. A few weeks later she used the Visine and blinded herself for a few days.
Wood splinter in my eye...has happened twice. First time I wasn't wearing any safety glasses, second time I was. The pain goes from feeling like there is something in your eye to pain severe enough you can't even open your good eye after a few hours. I always wear full wrap around glasses when using power tools now.
Just the other day i was mixing a batch of resin for a lam coat and was stirring a little vigorously as i added the MEKP catalyst and a bit splashed up the side of the container and straight into my right eye. never felt burning like that before, thought I was going to blind myself, in panic I rushed to a tap and held my eye open with my fingers and turned tap on full! then managed to stumble my way to the first aid kit , where I got saline mixture and squirted that in then back to the tap again for more water. I managed to get back to the resin and do the lam coat so the resin wasnt wasted. Then about half an hour later I decided to do some sanding with a dremel, with a sanding sleeve on. Was grinding away and the sleeve broke and flicked off into the same eye! Doh! … ok so im going to wear some safety goggles next time…
planer to the finger... almost chopped it off, will post pics later
Wow these are classic! Catalyst and solvents in the eye...... resin on the nuts......yikes!
One of my most memorable was using a gum rubber block to clean off my grinding wheel - not giving the machine enough respect, the block was taken from my loose grip and my thumbnail/thumb took the place of the gum block - think carrot getting pushed into the juicer - brrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Same, with the exception of taking a small amount of skin off with a planer. Nothing serious, just required a plaster.
Hunter Joslin was in Fiji, he wears contacts, upon waking one morning, he starts putting in his eye drops, but it was the vial of super glue instead, had to go to a main island for help