Woodworking Safety Week 2012 Kick Off

Welcome to another Woodworker’s Safety Week! A big thanks again to my friend Marc Spagnuolo for kicking this whole thing off waaayyy back in 2009 (a lifetime in Internet years). The amount of text, images, and video created because of Safety Week is huge and it has hopefully raised awareness for many woodworkers and prevented some injuries. Now that we are embarking on the 4th Safety Week I was starved for ideas since so much has been covered. I started by looking through the posts I have written in the past, then I took a look at what some of my blogging colleagues have written. Then I started to shake my head in disgust when I realized that I had broken a few of the rules these posts talked about. I had done some unsafe things in the past year and I even had an injury incident as a result of one of those bonehead moves. That injury was caught on film and I’ll be sharing it later this week. So what the heck is my problem? This site alone has over 35 posts about safety. You would think that after all that filming and writing I would have safety tips ingrained in my psyche.

The truth is that as I have gained more and more experience in the last 4 years I have started taking things for granted. As I have sold off my power tools and moved into a zen meditative state with my hand planes I have assumed I was working safely. Remember what assuming does? It makes an ass of u and me! No matter how long you have been woodworking or how many masterpieces you have built, we are all beginners when it comes to safety.

So this year I will cover some new ground, but I want to go over some old ground too and figure out some ways we as woodworkers, beginner and advanced, can build checklists and processes to help us remember our safety basics. Reading and writing blog posts is a great starter but the practices espoused must be integrated into your shop workflow or they become useless. Reading about woodworking safety and actually working safely are two different things.

Let’s start with some review. Click over to my Safety page or just follow the link in the navigation bar under techniques. I have 16 posts here from Woodworker’s Safety Week 2009, 2010, and 2011. Highlights include:

• Working Safely in Someone Else’s Shop
• Safe Chisel Use
• Lathe Safety
• Hand Tool Safety
• Router Tips
• Push Sticks
• Safety Lessons Learned

Be safe in your shops