Dumbest armouring injury

[Qwertypolk]

it's about an inch long and very red.

Careful now

I've not done too much really. Was making a hole in a piece of ply for a centre grip shield once, using a single speed mains drill. Turned it on, it shot off, twisting my wrist. I then proceeded to do the same thing for half an hour 'till I got right through the wood My wrist's never been the same again.

Another one was while using the bandsaw, a friend of mine walked in, I turned 'round and kept going on the saw. Whenever I straighten my left index finger now, I've got a nice smile-shaped scar there.

Almost dropped a sledge hammer on my balls once, that was a rather worrying near miss

[Klaus the Red]

I was armoring tired after midnight one time and bounced the 25# ball stake off of the edge of my scrotum.

Bounced? Alcy, that just demonstrates that you've got stainless steel balls.

I did the obligatory stupid pick-up-the-still-hot-workpiece thing once, after grinding off the peened end of a bronze vervelle inside my helmet. The superheated other end burned a little ring-shaped mark in my thumb and forefinger. I wondered if the scar would help me locate the Well of Souls...

Just yesterday, I was wire-wheeling the rust off a piece of pipe on my bench grinder, and took a chunk of skin off my left elbow because I leaned into the grinding wheel on the other side, from which I have removed the safety guard.

Not much to brag about compared to some of the self-immolating and scrotum-puncturing exploits here- but I figured I should admit my stupidity in a public forum as penance. And laugh a bit. Thanks, gentlemen. Your pain is my comfort.

Klaus

[RalphS]

... and took a chunk of skin off my left elbow

Klaus, that's elbow grease, not skin you're supposed to use.

[Klaus the Red]

I've been fresh out of that, since I came back from a war three weeks ago with tendonitis in the same elbow and it's been creaking ever since...

[Jonathan Atkin]

I think I'll just bump this up because I can.

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[Ingelri]

I put a phillips screwdriver through my left hand between the thumb and the index finger in the big meaty part. Left a really cool star shaped scar.

Ingelri

[Ckanite]

I was setting up my forge, and I was using a vacuum cleaner engine as the blower, I was testing the air flow, and I must have knocked a piece of something loose, I was using an old tractor wheel as the fire pot, and the motor jumped and one of my fingers went into the side. the tip got cut off. but not too much that is didn't regrow, but wow did that ever hurt...

[Vilhelm550]

Little back story before I get to the fun part.
I would rather go through Basic Training again than continue to live with my inlaws. And yes, my mother-in-law said I do not get to take a day off, because that means she gets a day off. She offerered to watch my almost three year old son and 18 month old daughter while my wife and I work. She's a bat-shit crazy mean bitter old woman who hates men, so yeah, we have our differences.
Anyways, I took last Cinco De Mayo off of work, didn't tell anyone, and went down to my shire's indoor practice site to work on my finger gauntlet project. Here I am thinking I'm going to have 8 full hours to work on these babies, which in the end turned out awesome.

So, I'm two hours in, things are going well. I had my tools and parts in a tactical style backpack with all the little pockets and clips and whatnot. So I reach in for something, and feel...something...on my right index finger.
What I was feeling was the exposed portion, over 1/4 inch, of the slim razor-sharp blade of my strap cutter slicing through my finger. from tip to first knuckle. I pulled my hand out of the bag and looked at it for a moment. It didn't bleed right away, but when it did, it was a gusher.
I found a rag in my tools, wrapped it up, then had to pick everything up and carry it out to my truck, leaking blood on my gear and clothes. Our practice area is not a very secure place, so no way was I leaving my tools or equipment down there. Basement of a factory shared with other local community groups.

And fast-track ER my ass. I sat for over 3 hours listening to some gal who was either having a panic attack or just overdosed on something.
Got my finger glued and taped shut. I hate stitches...had too many already. Have a nice long pink scar that stings when my kids squeeze my finger.

Told the wife I cut my finger while working on armor on lunch break, which I do alot anyways.

[Jofthepeace]

Dang'it Jonathan Atkin....I'm going to a forge tonight to start learning smithing.....and now, after reading all these.....I'm gonna be cautious as hell.

Can tell my story about metal casting though. Working with a Lee production pot, melting pewter. I had one glove on, cause the molds get hot, and one glove off for ease of pulling the pour-handle and removing clamps.

Passed my right (un-gloved) hand under the spout as it decided to clog, and a nice nickel-sized glob of liquid metal hits my hand. My teaching kicks in, and I hold my hand level for 20 seconds while the metal cools to a solid...then tip my hand so it clinks to the table. Hand blistered, popped, and blistered again in that time, and still have the scar.

[Ckanite]

...twice?!?!? btw, why do you wait till the metal cools? I'm getting into casting and this would be very very valuable information to know...

[Keegan Ingrassia]

Keeping your hand still or tipping it is the difference between having just one spot on your hand burned...or the entire back of your hand, as it flows across.

[Ckanite]

ahh ok that makes sense enough.

[Grimr]

Dumbest personal injury while armouring.............needed to tweak a 10g occular here awhile back and so I decided to brace the piece against my chest/ribcage and pull on both sides of the occular to spread it just a little.......found out that sometimes bone gives before steel! Duh!! Snapped a rib in the process.........heard it CRACK and then it broke clean through. Rather painful.

On the bright side, the following weekend I still was able to compete in a 6'/9' spear tourney, was in the final which came down to the last fight of best 2 out of 3. Came in second which I figured wasn't a bad showing considering a broken rib on my dominate thrusting side combined with the fact that this was my first time fighting tourney after having knee reconstructive surgery.

Grimr

[PatternWeld]

One of the dumbest armouring injuries I've seen.... guy preps a llame for drilling, has a scrapwood slip supporting it inside a vice. drills his pilot hole at low speed, then changes bits & slips the belts to up the rpm. He misread the chart and set it to 4200 rpm... on a 3 HP floor drill press. He changes his bit and just reaches up and hits the "On" switch....

The rather large chuck key held in for maybe 5-8 revolutions as that spindle wound up to 4200 rpm and then shot out of there with a vengence.... bounced right off his skull, continued to fly across the shop and surprise whacked me square between the shoulderblades hard enough to illict an OUCH!
Well...I was in my own world and whacking a stubbon piece of 12 gauge with a 3 lb leather face mallet.... I got surprise hit just as I swung... and smashed my hand with a direct blow.... thankfully nothing broken or dislocated but my whole left hand was a swollen bruise for a week.

To dudes credit.... he didn't go down like a poleaxed steer. That was also the last time he was allowed to use powertools. You could teach him to use a vise or a c-clamp or not to hold items above the horizion level on the buffer but he just couldn't foresee the consequences of things you hadn't warned him about.

[Louis de Leon]

I've got another one! This was a month or two ago. I was working a piece hot and it popped out of my pliers. So I reflexed and grabbed it.

Pinch your first finger and your thumb together. Got that? That's the skin that got burned. And somehow it also bounced off the back of my hand and carved a crescent out of the back of my second finger.

Best part is that I reflexed (again) and squatted down real fast and stuck my hand in my shop water bucket. Remember how I just had ACL surgery? Interesting crunching noise from the knee. Didn't hurt too much, and fortunately I didn't damage anything.

It was an interesting minute of bouncing around my shop on pure reflex though.

[Thomas Powers]

Need more hot work---my reflex is to get out of it's way and let the floor examine it in peace and then go for it with tongs---putting out the floor as needed. Though I do get to do a lot of yelling *NO*! when new people are learning at my forge.

[Malek]

Hosted an armouring workshop at my place. I use it mainly to help get local newbs into their own armour. It's a lot of strapping / padding and fitting of things together.

People were using my sewing table, steel ruler and cutting mat with roller cutter throughout the day. Every time someone new picked up the roller cutter I warned them about how sharp the thing was and to be very careful.

Then it was my turn to cut some straps. So I am cutting away, did not pay as close attention as I should have and the roller cutter rode up on the ruler . . .

Took the outside pad of my right index finger and a little less off the middle finger. No bone or tendons, just meat.

Now to the amusing part of the tale - the ER nurse asked if I was working on armour when this happened. I had said nothing about how it happened and he was doing his initial evaluation. Turns out he made a semi-resonable guess based on the T-shirt I was wearing. It was from Excalibur in Las Vegas and in bold letters across the front: WANNA JOUST?

[Konstantin the Red]

When i was weaving maille i use a needle nose and a vice grip. well i have this problem with the needle nose that it keeps on sliping when in close the ring. one time a ring was being particularly (sp?) stubborn and so i added a little EXTRA force. the needle nose sliped on and hit my beastbone dead center with enough force to knock the wind out of me. i think i manged to dislocate it because it was sore for like 2 months afterwords.

I only had to get two blood blisters on my fingers to stop using needlenose pliers for butted mail making. Haven't had a moment of "ouch" since switching to slip-joints.

Pick up a couple Crescent or Klein or Craftsman 9" slipjoints. You'll never go back to the kluge tools you're using now, trust me.

I do use a needlenose by itself for certain steps in adjusting riveted links, for which tasks it actually gives a good grip and its narrowness is an advantage.

I have also had numerous cuts and a few pinched fingers from my rolling the coils. but all's fair in armouring and war

I think you need to review your technique: you're bleeding too much. Search the big mailler sites on the term "GROPP" and stop putting your hands on the wire.

[Vilhelm550]

The othe day I passed a diamond cross-section awl through the tip of my right index finger, not quite an eight inch in, but all theway through, just to the left of the nail.

It's not armor until someone bleeds on it, right?

[Oskar der Drachen]

The othe day I passed a diamond cross-section awl through the tip of my right index finger, not quite an eight inch in, but all theway through, just to the left of the nail.

It's not armor until someone bleeds on it, right?

I'm so glad someone else noticed this too! I thought it was some kind of weird sympathetic magic special/cursed to me!

[Vilhelm550]

Well, I didn't get any sympathy from my wife...and I was working on HER armor!

[Louis de Leon]

It's not armor until someone bleeds on it, right?

Last night I gouged myself in the thumb working on my new splinted legs. Not anything massive, but enough blood to where I had to stop working because I didn't want to make a mess.

Then I thought of your post, and dotted the wound in the leather articulation behind the knee. A single dot on purpose.

[Koops]

Displaying my catlike reflexes, I was raising an elbow when it slipped out of my clamps. I caught it before it hit the ground...I now know what I will smell like when I am being cooked by cannibals and my fingerprints have almost grown back!

[Vilhelm550]

LMAO. Yeah, I did the same thin. I was working on my wifes vambraces. Kydex riveted to leather, then a lith leather cover that has been tooled, dyed and painted. I was saddle-stitchign the edges and...ooo...ow...hey, my finger is bleedin good...Heh, here's a bit o me blood for my Lady's honor...and all that...SLapped a butterfly bandaid on it after the bleeding slowed and kept on sewing.

And damn, do these vambraces look sweeeet. I'll be posting pics as soon as her new harness is complete.

[Milos N.]

A couple of weeks ago, managed to cut myself with a 0.8mm cutting disk while trimming some pieces of a Milanese harness. Was dead tired, but managed to figure out that I was doing something bad, before dealing some serious damage to my finger. It ended up being just a small shallow cut.
A day after that, while polishing finger plates for the same harness, I figured out that buffing my nails along with the plates was not a good idea. Finished the job by moving sideways to the buffer and holding the plates with pliers.
A friend pinched his finger with a RW#5.

I am seriously surprised how we didn't get hurt more on that occasion, as we were pulling long hours to meet the deadline.

[Michael Cartwright]

Cheers guys i needed cheering up and by God you managed it... (:

[Peter Baker]

Reviving this old dog!
I have a few new ones, none from armouring.
Doing an overhead welding job (emergency patching a boiler stack, if you're interested) with a bic in my breast pocket and no welding jacket. Hood channeled the fireball and I lost my beard and eyebrows, along with some mild thermal burns.
Doing emergency repairs to a dock crane after a boat slammed into it. Overhead. In a Bering sea blizzard. The steel was cold so the puddle didn't always want to stick, and the wind kept blowing the puddle around, I got set on fire dozens of times, but only lost some chest hair.
Helper dropped a stainless sheet we were bringing into the welding shop, laid about half a finger open down to the bone when my end slipped.
Had a ball of molten aluminum catch my notebook on fire and burn the shit out of my wrist because my helper struck up without warning while I was doing some math. I also didn't have my hood down. Yes ther same one as the sheet. No, he did not last too long.

Put a razor knife into my wrist while I was working on a belt. Cat jumped up onto the side while I was cutting and I slipped.
I have plenty more, but hopefuolly that gets the ball rolling.

[Jeremy.G]

Knock on wood- I've been fairly cautious (and lucky) since I started working metal.
But here's my "black heat is still hot" lesson from my first blacksmith project about 2 years ago...

burn.JPG (56.89 KiB) Viewed 666 times

I wouldn't recommend the inside of the bicep as a branding location. It's rather tender in there...

-Jeremy

[J. Hillard]

Two-

One was nearly disabling- My first few months of armouring, I decided "Oh, I don't need to use eye protection when cutting metal!" (lol), Turns out, cutting with a hand shear locked into a vice can produce a LOT of extra force, which caused a 5" metal piece to fly about a centimeter away from my eye, point first. That was when I decided to start wearing eye protection

Second- I forgot that when you heat metal, it gets hot. I grabbed a piece that I had just finish burning, nearly glowing hot. Ironically, I was picking it up so I could dunk it in water so that WOULDN'T happen... ah well...

[Jeremy.G]

Reminds me of the time I noticed a dangerous looking splinter on a wooden stepladder I was using.
I decided to remove the splinter in the interest of safety.

My hook-blade knife slipped and I got three stitches...

[Llewelyn Gododdin]

I have done a LOT of stupid stuff in my shop. Probably the dumbest was when I finished up a weld and then for whatever reason lifted my mask and rubbed my eye with my gloves still on. I accidentally pushed a 1mm piece of metal into my eye. It took two trips to the eye specialist to get it all out.

[Peter Baker]

I have done a LOT of stupid stuff in my shop. Probably the dumbest was when I finished up a weld and then for whatever reason lifted my mask and rubbed my eye with my gloves still on. I accidentally pushed a 1mm piece of metal into my eye. It took two trips to the eye specialist to get it all out.

Niiiice.
I had a similar eye problem. I was putting up a field fence with wooden posts and fencing staples. No safety goggles. Had a staple splinter a little and lodge a sliver in my eye. Trip to a specialist later, that eye has a little gold fleck to this day, and I am no longer weirded out by needles going into my eyes.

[Cap'n Atli]

Just noticed that this thread has been going since Dec. 9, 2003. Lots of "learning experiences."

[Tableau]

No hospital visits for me yet. I just came here to complain. I have a pretty small shop and when I turn around or stand up suddenly and get smacked in the leg/back/balls with a stake or an anvil horn, makes me real mad.

[coreythompsonhm]

So far, only had a backplate spring back and catch my in the lip while giving it a bit of a curve. Two stitches inside and out.