Finding the drop saw damaged and currently inoperable has left me with concerns that equipment in the woodshop has been used with out inductions.
I would love to see any steps be taken to communicate and enforce machines being used only with an induction, or appropriate supervision. The supervison is currently my self on general tools and Jed on the cnc.
I am not specificaly concerned about the drop saw being damaged, but some one with a very obviously poor skill set was using the machine, and has left it in a dangerous state for other uses. The nature of the damage to the machine makes me very concerned about the users safety too.
The woodshop is not considered as active or available at this stage to the general membership and none of the tools down there have wiki pages or inductions.
Use of these tools without approval by the Head Maker would be a breach of the Tool Inductions Policy, as below:
If a powered tool doesn’t have a label on it or a wiki page, then it must not be used without permission from the Head Maker as it may not be ready for service yet.
Lets bring this forward as an infraction at the next general/committee meeting.
That is quite unfortunate. We haven’t had any major issues with people using tools they are not meant to previously. I suspect that now we’ve got quite a few members people are starting to get a bit lazy with following rules/testing limits. Thankfully, I have the next week off, and my number one priority is to finish the door lockbox downstairs, finish the vending machines (the part I was waiting for arrived while I was away), and finish v2.0 of my interlock board so that I can order the rest of them and put them on all the machines. This will be a physical control to stop people using machines, but it is unfortunate we need to start using them.
To be clear, when incidents like this happen, our number one priority is finding out what happened (which means we might need to find out who did it or they might need to come forward) so that we can adjust our processes so that it doesn’t happen again. Unless any damage was caused intentionally, or through absolute gross negligence, there will never be consequences for coming forward about damaging a tool or contributing to a safety incident occurring.
Btw I had a look at the drop saw today. The blade looked like it was slightly off balance. I took it out and reinserted it and it seems ok now. Did a few successful test cuts. For future reference it’s turn right to loosen due to the direction it spins - that may have been why it was so hard to remove the bolt.
