3w ago

I had a neighbour friend who was not a mortician but embalmed his own wife.

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I witnessed a fatal lathe accident. The kind that would have easily been featured in rotten.com back in the day. They shut the whole shop down and noone worked for a month. It was awful.
- Yikes, remember kids no loose items near the violently spinning things.
  I used to be a plumber and spent a lot of time running a pipe threader all I ever thought about while using it was if I mess up this thing will force my body through a 5 in gap.
  
  if i mess up, this thing will force my body through a 5 in. gap.
  which isn't totally unfeasable
  
  Jesus. What a way to go
  
  like a hotdog in a shop vac, crummy way to go really
  
  At least the hot dog is still edible
  
  I'm sure some sea creatures were more than happy to eat pureed human
- I've never worked with a lathe, but PTOs on the farm were terrifying. I was taught to be afraid, and I was.
  
  Basically the same ideas for safety, but those PTOs tend to have way more horsepower behind them. I don't care how cold you might be, loose clothing is bad.
  
  My cousin got his arm ripped off by a tractor PTO when he was a kid. Some quick thinking by his dad got him a tourniquet and his detached arm on ice in a cooler, drove him to the hospital and they were able to reattach it. He doesn't quite have full function with it but you'd never know. This would have been around 1990 so pretty impressive medically.
  
  PTO? Is that the spinny thing on the back of the tractor I would attach the mower/seed spreader to? If so, thinking back we never had much concern with it. Now I'm rethinking the wisdom of the adults in letting us preteens use it.
  
  Yep. Preteen seems a bit young without supervision.
- Not "Russian lathe incident"? Sounds like it might potentially be identical if it's not that one.
  
  Nah, I'm in the US. And, honestly (this is painful to recall) it wasn't an arm stretched around the lathe chuck. It was mostly red mist that left some organs around. This was on a large machine that had a 30 foot long bed, and around 90 HP to drive it. The guy was trying to turn down a cam shaft for a ship at about 100 rpm. The forces involved are insane. He kind of... disappeared.
  
  Sounds like he didn't even have time to realize he fucked up. Jesus, it's hard to believe anyone would knowingly do a job like that.
- Lathes are fucking scary man. Sorry you had to see that.
- We were shown videos during my apprenticeship and that was already horrible. I don't want to imagine what it's like to see it live.

321 comments