The A to Z of Woodturning Safety

Introduction

All too often ‘Health and Safety’ is referred to in a derogatory manner – invariably being given as a reason that a task or project has not been started – let alone completed.

However, would we really want to go back to the days when little consideration was given to the well being of people, whether workers or innocent bystanders?

We certainly would not want to return to where untrained workers were regularly killed or suffered horrific injuries from being caught up in unguarded machinery, or where people were poisoned by substances such as lead or arsenic in the materials they were handling nor to seeing whole communities such as Aberfan devastated by industrial waste.

When I started work, several older workers had fingers or parts of fingers missing and it had been accepted that these sort of accidents occurred if you worked with machinery – even if it had resulted in extreme pain, reduced one’s ability to work or play and had taken a long time for whatever recovery was possible.

This series will examine some of the risks we are exposed to when woodturning and what we can do to minimise the impact on our well being.

Trevor Branton