Angle grinder spanners

[mouldmaker]

Since cutting a perfectly agle-grinder-blade shaped - and bloody painful - slot in my thumb a few years back, I never, ever use one without a guard. Too scary.

[Dave_L]

/winces

Sounds bloody painful!

[IanMelb]

Sounds bloody painful!

Sounds bloody AND painful

[andpartington]

the worse i did was a bit of steal grinding/ spark in the eye i didnt even notice it was there until i was watching the tv that night took 4 trips to the hospital before it was right they numb it and flick at the shit with a needle not fun i always where the glasses now
(and i have regained sight back to what is was)

i had a pair of steal caped boots with i nice line across the right toe from where the 5in grinder kicked back / blade failed when i was cutting a steal pipe
they never where waterproof after that!

andy

[matt h]

the worse i did was a bit of steal grinding/ spark in the eye i didnt even notice it was there until i was watching the tv that night took 4 trips to the hospital before it was right they numb it and flick at the shit with a needle not fun i always where the glasses now
(and i have regained sight back to what is was)

i had a pair of steal caped boots with i nice line across the right toe from where the 5in grinder kicked back / blade failed when i was cutting a steal pipe
they never where waterproof after that!

andy

at least you can still tap dance

[Tony McC]

Back when I was 17, cut-off saws were relatively new in the trade and tended only to be used on exceptional jobs, such as the re-furb work we were doing on a development in Bolton at that time. I was in an awkward position, because although I was still technically serving my time as a streetmason, I had been working on sites for years and my owld feller reckoned I was good enough to leave, unsupervised, on this job laying the fairly simple paths to front doors.

The main contractor had a cut-off saw, and I was desperate to have a go with it. It looked like far more fun than the usual hammer-and-pitcher cutting of flagstones, so I blagged a loan of it for 10 minutes while I cut a relatively complex notch out of a big piece of yorkstone.

Those early models tended to "hover" when at full revs. The high-speed rotation of the blade had a sort of gyroscopic effect and the yoke sort of floated in your hand, seeming to weigh far less than it did when stopped.

So I'm cutting away at this piece of stone, the saw is sort of balancing itself, and I'm fairly mindful not to press down too hard as that just burns out the abrasive blade (diamond blades were almost unheard of back then), so I've a light hold on the machine. Suddenly, the blade hits a nodule of iron-rich stone on the flag, the blade kicks and the saw flies off at an angle barely missing my left knee.

I decide I've had enough of saws, and there's enough of a cut to allow me to trim-up just using a cold chisel and a punch, so I get down on my haunches to start doing that, when I notice an incredibly neat cut in my jeans near the left knee. A few minutes later, I sense my left foor feels damp, or even wet, so I stop what I'm doing, pull off the steel-toe-capped welly that was very de rigeur for young Irish lads at the time, and pour out about half a pint of blood. My blood.

The blade had nicked my jeans and sawn straight through what little flesh is present over the kneecap, exposing the bone, but I hadn't felt a thing. It must have been so clean and so fast that my nervous system just ignored it.

Lucklily, I was literally across the road from Bolton Royal Hozzy, so I ambled over there and they sprayed it with something like a second skin, and bandaged it up. I still have an "Action Man" scar on that knee, and I've always been extra careful with cut-off saws ever since.


Most stupid use of a saw? I had to suss out a yorkstone quarry for a client a few years back. I went up there unannounced, just to check out what they were doing and how they could possibly supply new yorkstone flags as the price advertised, and found a team of three lads, not one of them more than 20 years old, all wearing shorts and trainers, no sign of any PPE or RPE, using Ebay-sourced cut-off saws with cheap'n'nasty diamond-like blades to cut what they assumed were rectangular flags from huge scants of stone dragged out of the ground by a tracked excavator.

All around lay scants that had been abandoned, and many of them featured an abandoned blade stuck into them like a knife. These eejit lads had been cutting the stone and, for one reason or another, the bade became jammed, so they simple loosened it off the saw, left it in place, and attached a new ten-for-a-ton bargain diamond blade to the saw and started cutting somewhere else....

[lutonlagerlout]

we used to have a 13 " lectric cut off saw and as T says it was like flying a helicopter,you felt the revs building and the bloody thing started to take off sideways
i hated it,plus the fact the thing rotated the wrong way IYKWIM
we get blades at 20 for 200 and i have to say they are not bad for general cutting,i have had the £100 a blade ones and they do not last 10 times longer or cut 10 times quicker
our roofer sliced his calf passing the stihl down between his legs to the apprentice,the young fella grabbed it by the trigger and revved it up,right on to G's leg
you have to respect these tools,i know another guy who has lost an eye from washing the mixer out with a claw hammer,a chip of metal flew in his eye and that was that
LLL

[seanandruby]

on t5 a lad was cutting above his height and saw kicked back and sliced his face. next day another bloke did exactly the same thing.