There is nothing more important than protecting yourself from the dangers of your work area. If you demolish and rebuild things like I do, you work around tools that are sharp and dangerous and use chemicals that are toxic to you. This is one of those "do as I say, not as I do" blog posts.
Story #1:
Quite a few years ago, I needed to remove rust stains from fabric. I went to the grocery store and bought a liquid rust remover, came home, popped the lid, and proceeded to scrub away. Voila! The rust magically disappeared. Oh, and I never read the label. That's the important part of the story. I bought it at the grocery store, so it must be benign. Right?
An hour or so later, my hands were on fire. Not that "I touched a jalapeño pepper" kind of burn. More like someone doused me with oil and lit a match. On to the Emergency Room with the bottle in hand.
After several calls to the poison hotline, the ER lab had to concoct a custom ointment which I would have slathered on my hands for the next 72 hours. Apparently, this "benign grocery store" stuff can disintegrate your bones like that scene in Harry Potter. Awesome. We got it in time.
Story #2:
My shop is in my basement. To get to it, I had to pull a series of chains to turn on the lights. As I groped in the dark for the first chain, I felt a searing pain in my left leg followed by lots of blood. I accidentally ran into a power drill which I had left on the floor. It wasn't actually running, but the drill bit was sharp and tiny. And, after my "encounter", I couldn't find the tip of the bit.
After two weeks of convincing everyone that I had a drill bit in my leg (everyone said that it was impossible), another trip to the doctor. Since a picture says a thousand words:
The lights are all on the switch at the top of the stairs, now.
Story #3:
Ever had wood shavings swabbed out of your eye? Yeah…..I did.
The moral of these stories is obvious. Wear safety glasses. Wear gloves appropriate to the chemical you are applying. Keep tools stored away in a safe place. Read the manual. Read the label. Read BEFORE, not AFTER.
Hopefully the sign in your shop won't read, "Accident free for 15 minutes".
Peace,
N
