Hot Chips

[1Kenny]

Just a reminder that when cutting steel, the chips coming off are still getting hotter as the are flying across the shop. Watch for smoke and fire.

 

[Cedge]

Kenny
Why do I think there is more to this than you've shared?...LOL

Steve

 

[1Kenny]

Well Steve, I guess I did leave out the part of how one little chip can make a white paper towel 4'11" away have a brown spot. It took 3-4 minutes to notice it.

 

[dparker]

Kenny: I was going to be a smart alec and say "What made you come up with this statement?" but Steve beat me to it. My favorite trick was lighting fires in a shop rag or on my shop apron with a 9" right angle grinder or while welding. Never felt comfortable to leave the shop if I had been doing either of these within the last hour or so of the day.
don

 

[rake60]

I've stomped out a few rag fires at work in my days.

The clean-up kids used to initiate a new guy by telling him they all
dipped their brooms in kerosene to make them sweep cleaner when
cleaning up the heavy chips around the big mills. :lol:

My worst experience with a hot chip involved a heavy chip flying up and
instantly melting in to the inside of a side shield of my safety glasses.
I saw the smoke and smelled the searing before I felt it.
I swatted those glasses off and they went flying about 10 feet.
I still carry the branding mark from that one. :roll:

Rick

 

[Tin Falcon]

Never had a problem in the machine shop but the Fab shop I worked at for a while was different story. seems like rags and cardboard were always catching weld spatter or cutting torch sparks. torch hoses would shoot flames and we had to put out the occasional co worker. I can laugh because thank God I never saw anyone get seriously hurt.
The reason welders wear heavy leather gloves is so when they snuff the flames out on their pants there hands do not get burned DAMHIKT.
Tin

 

[BobWarfield]

A few more chip-related thoughts:

- I wear a Tilman welding jacket to work in the shop. It's fire resistant and hence heat resistant. It's not loose fitting or blousy so it's less likely to get caught in any whirling parts. It has no pockets or cuffs to catch chips. I know a lot of folks need a pocket to carry things, but it doesn't bother me not to put tools in my pockets.

- Swarf and chips are horrendously sharp and painful. The worst are the steel needles a lot of edge milling jobs can produce, but long stringy ones are sharp too. They stay sharp forever, lying in wait to slice you open. I never run my hands bare over anything that isn't spotlessly clean in my shop. I bought a couple cases of cheap chip brushes ages ago, and these brushes are all over my shop. I use them or sometimes pliers to move chips around. The pliers are good for the long stringy stuff. I also keep paper towels handy.

- Chips are just coarse metal powder. Metal powder is an ingredient for rocket fuel and fireworks. We add an accelerant of one kind or another to our metal powder all the time called "coolant". We make sparks all the time too. Don't go boom!

Cheers,

BW

 

[rake60]

I have another true hot chip story for you.

An older coworker was running a manual lathe.
He had a habit of leaning in closer than I was comfortable watching to give the tool
a visual check while it was cutting.

From nowhere a puff of sulfuric smoke erupted burning his eyes.
He thought it was a spot of oil on the shaft he was working and
didn't pay much attention to it.

Later at break time he pulled a book of paper matches out of his shirt pocket to light
a cigarette. There was a chip stuck in the match book and all of the heads of the
matches were burnt away. :

 

[zeusrekning]

I could input more than my fair share here! : Sparks in ear, catching lathe on fire turning steel when plastic was lst job ran on it and the plastic chips weren't removed from chip tray.
Baggy pants take a lot longer to let you know they're on fire after welding.
Had chips burn't into arm, forehead, and between eybrows many times.
Learned last week that no matter how cold it is , you don't weld with a flannel shirt on.
And had a shirt removed unwillingly while using a 15" colchester lathe.
Tim 

 

[Powder keg]

I think everyone that has ever ran a lathe has a story.

Ounce I was running an Axelson lathe taking a fairly heavy cut. .300 deep was my standard roughing cut. The chips were coming off perfectly, Big , Blue, "C" shaped, mostly dropping into the chip pan:O) It had been a long day and these shafts have a lot of roughing to get them to where I could start to work on them. I was sitting there on my stool and I yawned....

One of those Blue Meanies landed under my tung. It instantly dried all the spit up in my mouth and I burnt my dirty finger's trying to get it out.

Wes

 

[chuck foster]

my story here is not so much hot chips but long curly chips from a 28 inch dia. shaft that a co-worker was turning down. one end had to be turned to about 18 inches, so he was taking a 2 inch deep cut (the chips where hot ) but a long curly chip wrapped around is leg and then got caught on the shaft and yanked him off his feet and into the lathe (by his leg) the foreman was just 2 steps away when this happened so he stopped the lathe just seconds before it took him for a trip around the shaft. we had to cut him free of the long curly chip and then clean the lathe, man what a mess! the guy was cut right to the bone all the way around his leg.
after a lengthy stay in the hospital he healed up quite nice,he has about 90% mobility in his ankle.
i don`t mean to gross anyone out and this story happened on much bigger equipment than we have in our home shops.
my point is like rick and several others have stated things happen and they can happen very fast, if the foreman wasn`t there i was the next closest to him and i was 40 or 50 feet away..........he wouldn`t have survived.

the size of equipment we have at home can still take a finger off or an eye out, so please be carefull.

if you have questions or concerns about machining something get help, there is enough guys on here that any problems you might have they can help!
all you got to do is ask!!!

ok enough ranting we take you back to your regularly scheduled broadcast.

chuck

 

[rake60]

One of those Blue Meanies landed under my tung. It instantly dried all the spit up in my mouth and I burnt my dirty finger's trying to get it out.

Wes

Now that has to be close to the worst!

But I have one more.... LOL

The original owner of the company I work for ran a lathe when it first started out.
To show the employees what he expected from them, he was talking a heavy cut that was
spitting chips like a machine gun. He had his shirt tucked in to demonstrate the safety of
no loose clothing. A chip flew out and hit his neck just above the collar of his shirt.
It went down inside the front of his shirt. He pulled the shirt away and the chip dropped.
As the chip fell he continued to try to keep it away from his body.
It passed the waist band of boxer shorts and hit an obstacle that it didn't get around.


Chuck
Our programer at the shop got tied up with a stringer once when he was running a manual
lathe years ago. The scares and stitch marks on his chest and right arm look like a road map
Manhattan.

 

[chuck foster]

i've got one more and it is not for the faint of hart.
i won't got in to great details but when i was 18 i worked in a custom shop and i ran a big russian lathe (can't remember the make).
we were winding big cooling coils for a heat exchanger, i think the copper tube was about 3 inch in dia. and the coils where wound left hand so the lathe had to run in reverse.
the guy on night shift was winding a coil and his tie got caught between the copper tubing and the winding form/drum, he was able to hit the estop and get the lathe stopped.
this lathe was running about 10 to 12 rpm's and it had a big d.c. motor for the drive so it would stop almost instantly. almost instantly was not good enough, that dam tie was strong enough that it snapped his neck.

he was told several times not to ware the tie but he said he was a gentleman machinist and back home in the u.k where he did his training all machinists wore ties.
since then if i see a guy in my shop with a tie on he is told, not asked to remove it if he won't i will push him out the door!
i never want to take a body out of a machine again...............22 years ago this happened and it still brings tears to my eyes thinking about him. he was a great guy and ...............well thats enough from me.
rick if this is not suitable to be on here please remove it.

chuck

 

[rake60]

It' perfectly suitable here Chuck.

Many people here may think I am over safety conscious.
There is no such thing!

My brother was working for a company in an upper management position a
few years back. He answered a call from the production floor with the message
a woman had just reached into a machine and got tangled up.
What they pulled out of that machine held no resemblance of a human body.

Our small home machines may not be able do to that kind of destruction,
but there is NO good reason to give them the chance to try...

 

[Powder keg]

I think they should be left here also. Just because we have machines at home, doesn't mean they are small. I have a 13" X 60" LeBlond here. It could hurt me. People need to be aware of the dangers and maybe these stories will scare someone into paying more attention when they are running their equipment.

Please be safe, Wes

 

[te_gui]

I have certainly had chips land on my lip and stick then when you instinctively try and flick them off with your tongue burn the tip of it too. I have also done the dance trying to shake a hot chip out of your shirt too when it goes down your collar. I have had a rag taken out of my pants pocket by a lead screw on a lathe once, could just have easily been my apron strings. It really got my attention.

We had a guy running a big radial drill once. It was a hot day so he was only wearing underwear beneath his ratty coveralls. He had about a 3" drill in the machine and around behind the machine to knock some chips off the table while it was in the cut. Somehow his coveralls got stuck in the bit and it started to wind him in at about 30 rpm. He was on the wrong side to reach the controls so he braced off with his arms and started to yell. We all ran and got there just about the time his worn out coveralls ripped off him and he was standing there in his equally threadbare shorts watching his clothes spinning with the bit. Once we figured out everything was OK it was pretty funny thing, I doubt if he has ever lived it down.

 

[ronm]

Another high-school story-one of the old machines in our shop was a big ol' hydraulic planer, the bed was about 10 ft. long. One kid had a big workpiece mounted up, I think it was a big vise that we had welded the jaw up, & he was planing it back into shape...other kid was guiding him in w/the tool, as he moved across to start the cut. after a couple small moves, he said, "Come on, you've got a long way to go!" so the guy gives the crank a couple turns, & next stroke the tool took about a 1/4" cut, which didn't phase that big cylinder at all...a big ol' full-curl, smoking, dark blue ram's horn flew off the tool & stuck right in the middle of the second kid's chest-stuck in his nice white T-shirt...He screamed like a girl & pawed at it like it was a tarantula. Everybody had a laugh, but it could have been serious, of course. I still remember the sound of that old machine, it had about a 10 horse motor on the pump. It's probably a Toyota block by now, or mixed with tin cans & turned into a Harbor Freight machine tool... :'(