My son sent me this story from a website. The story is a good caution, and make sure you read the last few lines.
Simple advice that may save us some fingers. Blessings, Tom Stuart's Router Table Accident Several people have written me to ask how my finger is doing. My fingers are fine, I was not hurt. It was Stuart, not me that was injured on his router table. I hope that anybody reading this learns something from the accident. It's the sort of mistake that I could have made. June Update The last I heard Stuart was in physical therapy and he was expected to make a partial recovery. He will have the use of his fingers but they expect him to lose partial range of motion and they will feel tight/stiff on some days. Update: 7-31-2003 (about 2 months later after the accident) The swelling in Stuart's ring finger is still very large and he still has problems in his range of motion. I'm not a doctor but I'm hoping that as the swelling goes down the range of motion comes back. He's going to physical therapy but they are hesitant to predict how the injury will heal. He is in a great deal of pain. Update 8-16-2003 Stuart is still in pain and physical therapy has been a difficult process. The good news is that he's able to touch his finger to his palm and the pain, on a scale of 1-10, has decreased from 9 to 8. That doesn't sound like much to me but he seems happy that it's getting better. Update 9-12-2003 This will probably be the last update. Stuart can straighten his finger to about 80 degrees and the healing is moving at a better rate than it was. He's decided to get back into woodworking but he's still getting used to all the danger involved. They don't expect a complete recovery in that he probably won't be able to straighten his finger out completely. However, straightening it isn't that important compared to closing it. His pain is far more manageable. First, I wanted to reference the following thread: climb routing I had read that thread the other day and thought I was fully aware of what climb cutting was. Unfortunately, I didn't understand the concept fully as it relates to the router table. I was building some coasters for my wife. The plan (WOOD February 2002) calls for 5 pieces of 6 1" x 6 1" x 3" maple to have intersecting dados (like a plus sign) of 3" wide by 1" deep cut into each piece. I set my fence 2 3" from the 3" straight bit and proceeded to make my cuts. I took shallow passes (1/8") with each cut, until I had reached the full 1" depth (it took 4 passes). So far, so good. I wanted to make sure each dado was the same width. 3" wide strips of walnut are laid into the grooves, and if some grooves aren't the right size, there could be some slop or the fit may be too tight. I checked the dados with my dial calipers, and wouldn't you know it, some grooves were measuring .02" larger than others. I'm thinking that the fence may have slipped 1/64" or so during the routing. In order to clean up the dados so they were all equal, I moved the fence closer to the bit by about 1/32". That was my fateful mistake, although it didn't occur to me until it was too late. I proceeded to push the wood through the bit (fully exposed at 1" height since all of the cut was pretty much completed), with my right hand pushing along the fence and my left hand guiding the wood so it didn't come off the fence. The split second the wood made contact with the bit (powered by a PC 7518 at 21,000 rpm), the wood was thrown from my hands, and it felt like my left hand punch a cement wall. I should have been so fortunate. I looked down at my left hand and almost lost consciousness. All I could see was a bloody mess all over my fingers and blood all over the fence and table. I immediately put pressure on my fingers by pressing the back of my hand into my shirt near my stomach area. When I pulled them away so I could get a better look, I could see that my ring finger and middle finger were severely damaged. My ring finger could not stay straight without the support of my right hand (undamaged), and there was a chunk of flesh missing right where one would wear a ring. The nickel size cut was so deep, I could clearly see the bone (about 1" worth of length). My middle finger didn't appear to have any bone damage, but was very chewed up on the palm side and the side that touches the ring finger. My wife drove me to the ER while I continued to keep pressure on the wound. 4 hours and an unknown number of stitches later, I was released. The nurse that did my stitching had a difficult time finding where to attach the skin since it wasn't cut but was more like ground up. Sorry for the graphic explanation, but there is really no other way to describe it. The x-rays showed no bone damage, but they do know that the tendon in my ring finger is "gone". Not sliced, not torn, but gone. The ER doctor spoke to a hand surgeon on the phone, who was out of town. If he had been in town they would have operated immediately on it. So, tomorrow, I'm to call the hand specialist to see about surgery that day. The ER doctor explained that what they'll need to do is remove an unnecessary tendon from my thumb (apparently, it's not used), and use that to repair my finger. My wife could overhear the doctor explaining the surgery to the nurses (nearly every nurse and doctor on the floor had to come into the room to see what happened). He said that I'll be able to move my finger but it will always be "tight" when I try to make a fist or grip something, or release my hand from a fist position. I guess my future on the PGA Tour is zero. Also, I have a guitar that may become a nice coat rack. How did this mishap happen? Climb routing. But, I wasn't pushing the wood from left to right. So how was this a climb cut? Since, the dado was already cut, if I wanted to rout it out a little more to make it wider, I should have moved the fence a hair further from the bit. This would keep the wood pushing against the spinning bit. What I did was the opposite. I moved the fence slightly closer, so that when I pushed the wood through the bit, I was pushing along with the bit. Before I could even feel the wood leave my hands, it was too late. Another mistake I made was not using a push block (like the jointer type) to hold the wood. I'm not sure that would have totally prevented this accident, but my left hand probably wouldn't have even been on the wood. One thing that is difficult to envision is that when using a router table the bit is spinning counter-clockwise, as opposed to clockwise when routing handheld. It's always best to think each cut through and know the pitfalls before they can happen. It just goes to show, that no matter how careful you are, accidents can still happen. I found that out the hard way. by Stuart (aka Stugotzo) Vanguard's note: A lot of people read this and have a hard time figuring out what the mistake was. In a nutshell it's this, "The edge of the bit that's closest to you should do the cutting on a router table." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
