Safety Tip

Listen up, kids. Here's an important safety tip from your friend Jim:

Tip: Don't stick your fingers in the spinning 12,000-RPM blade of a router. It'll mess you up quick. And it hurts.

Actually, it didn't hurt at all. Not at first.

It was the sound that tipped me off.

There I was, minding my own business, routing some pine boards to make half-lap joints. These will eventually become the in-wall cabinets in the 3rd-floor bathroom (more on that later). Routers have a remarkable capacity to generate enormous piles of wood chips and sawdust. Honestly, it's like working on a British car: you wind up with more pieces left over than you started with. And since I'd neglected to hook up the shop vacuum to the router ("how much sawdust can this possibly make?"), the wood shavings really piled up. So much that I couldn't see the blade or the piece I was working on.

So naturally, I brushed the wood chips away.

Actually, first I blew on it. I leaned in and put my face right up close to the whirring blade and puffed. It was at this point that a little alarm bell went off in my head. "Hey," I thought. "This is really dangerous. I shouldn't put my face so close to the router. I might, y'know, get hurt."

Apparently that feeling lasted for all of 1.5 seconds because I then brushed away the sawdust with my finger. I was careful. Honest. I moved slowly and kept my finger (singular) away from the blade. Trouble was, the other four fingers weren't paying attention. And one apparently strayed into the router's killzone.

Router blades are sharp. And they spin really fast. So sharp and fast, in fact, that you don't even feel it as it chips away at your soft fleshy parts. Like a surgeon's scalpel, but with more sawdust.

The good news is, routers don't have a lot of torque, so when they're chipping away at wood (or whatever) they slow down. And you can hear the difference in pitch as it contacts the "work surface." So I heard, rather than felt, the router dig into my finger. And 6 million years of evolution trained me to yank my hand back. Lucky thing, that.

Oh, there was blood. Way too much considering how shallow the damage was. The only uncomfortable part was cutting away the loose pieces the router hadn't finished. Yuck. And the gouge was remarkably straight and well-defined. Hey, nice router.

So now I've got a new Band-Aid and a new appreciation for all the brightly colored safety stickers they print on power tools. Too bad they weren't bigger.