Stolen from the Bluebird Project website[1]. This is an excerpt from a rant about the HSE and what they don't tell you. "And here’s another thing… they can never tell you what type of grinder ejects what type of projectile while working any given material and which are the bad ones so here’s a health and safety lesson born of long (and often painful) experience. Bits of hot, abrasive grinding disc are quite nasty because they hit your cornea with a lot of residual heat and stick but they’re quite smooth and don’t scratch too badly whilst being easily removed with a cotton bud. Shards of stainless steel stick too and they’re anything but smooth so your eye protests angrily within seconds but they too can be quickly swept away with a cotton bud so long as you’re careful to lift them away as you go to avoid any scratching. For real anguish what works best is a high-velocity shaving of cast iron. They’re usually needle-sharp and red hot so they stick into your eyeball and weld themselves there with the heat. The trick with splinters in the eye is to shift them immediately. You can trail to A&E where you’ll be seen after all the overdosed druggies have been mollycoddled back into society but by then it’s too late. Once your eyeball gets angry all you’re going to get, apart from agony, is anaesthetic so you leave the hospital looking like a pirate, orange dye that makes the world look like it’s lit with sodium vapour lamps and a total stranger jabbing at the offending piece of shrapnel with a cotton bud just as you could’ve done yourself two hours earlier. One of those cast iron spikes can even mean scraping your eye with the blade of your Swiss Army Knife… that takes a little more resolve, but with a bright light, a mirror and a steady hand it works every time. Aluminium splinters are totally harmless, by the way, because they cool quickly in flight, have little mass and therefore little energy and never stick so they can be quickly blinked out. There now – you’d not get that lesson from the H&S lot any more than they’d admit how painful a ball of molten welding spatter trapped in your steel-capped boot can be or how fragments can ricochet off the frame of your safety spec’s and hit you squarely in the eyeball anyway." [1]http://www.bluebirdproject.com -- Lozzo Versys 650 Inter-Continental Hyperbolistic Missile , CBR600F-W racebike in the making, TS250C, RD400F (somewhere) BMW E46 318iSE (it's a car, not one of those 2-wheeled pieces of shite they churn out)
They probably *do* tell you that it's a good idea to wear goggles or summat though. Not that I'm giving the H&S bods any credence.
+1 I only have the one pair of eyes and since starting to learn to weld Im (probably) over safety concious! -- Donnie "**** the world, it's time to fight back" Lambretta Series 2 186cc "The Shitter" Lambretta LD 175cc "The Chopper" Honda CB500R "Look out, Donnie's about!"
Or you could be a "Reet 'ard basterd" and think your eyes are tougher than hot steel. It only takes one good sized chunk to make anyone realise that eyes aren't that easily replacec.
I also learned that welding under a car with one's head cocked to one side and not wearing ear coverings can lead to a pretty painful experience as hot spatter bounces and sizzles its way down an earhole. It's very weird a few hours later hearing an odd 'Pop' and feeling a cold draught through one's earhole the next time one coughs, I can tell you.
A friend of mine years ago was involved in a car smash and the car caught fire. During the crash, he had an earring ripped out and the fire melted it and it all dropped right down to his eardrum which (obviously) din' survive intact. He gave up wearing earrings after that My missus once jammed a tail comb tail down her ear causing much the same problem and it didn't help her hearing either, which was a big problem, coz she's already stone fucking deaf. Selectively too Ear and eye protection may be looked at as a wussy thing, but **** that, I'll live with the sights and sounds. I've even ridden with ear plugs for as long as I can remember and just got some made to measure ones. they're fucking brilliant too.
