Some people...

Yesterday or the day before at work, our "Assembly Manager" and maintnance guy was working on a press with some hydraulic guys and they showed him some pictures of what happens with high pressure oil injection. Now all of a sudden he's got a whole new respect for oil under pressure.

This coming from a guy who I saw stick his finger right over a seeping hydraulic leak on my machining center at work (coming through a crack on one end of a cylinder that changes gears in the head) a couple months ago and preaches about safety. He also has had his hand in the companies safety policies....

He was gonna have the pictures emailed to him and then show a bunch of us guys around the shop just to show us what they do at the hospital. I just kinda shake my head because it's nothing new to me, and I always try to be very careful around pressurized hoses and leaks.... I saw similar pictures when I was 12 in the tractor safety class through the county extension office. That's 16 years ago....

Bottom line is, it aint pretty and nothing you wanna go through- so think before you grab a hose. I know we all have that one peice around the farm where the hoses are in poor shape and will probably stay in place until they burst- it might be a good idea to fix them before they leak to avoid both the cost and mess of a hydraulic leak when it does rupture, and the risk of a high pressure stream of oil.

Donovan from Wisconsin

Back in the 70's I worked for an irrigation contractor. We were putting in irrigation on a new golf course. The golf pro was working on a weekend disking fairways to be seeded. Hydraulic hose had a hole in it. To raise the disk, he held his hand over the hole and hit the lever. He filled his hand with hydraulic oil. We never heard if they saved his hand or not. As a golf pro, I am sure his career was ruined. Never forgot that story!

Do you think they made him a manager so that maybe that would keep him away from the machine for safety purposes.

Naw- he still does a lot of the service calls and runs the press when testing tooling. But he's a conspiracy nut and is looking for a job down in Florida where his 2nd house is..... Kinda hoping he finds one because I'm sick of listening to his tyraids when he's on one... Let him be Florida's problem...

He's one who thinks he's irreplaceable in the shop. I feel that everyone can be replaced. Some are better and some are worse, but there is always someone else who can do your job. If I were to walk out, you can bet they'd find someone to do exactly what I'm paid to do.

Donovan from Wisconsin

A class I was in the instructor said that hydraulic oil has nastier chemicals in it than other oils.

Worked with a guy who was the forklift safety person. When ever he got on a forklift, everyone got out of the way. He constantly broke safety rules. He always said that it was OK for him because he knew what he was doing

I worked at a shop where we had a PITA for a safety rep. In his eyes, he could do no wrong. One day he took a shield off of a saw to use it for something that he wasn't supposed to. He ran his hand into the saw and lost 3 fingers. Blood everywhere. About a month later, he was back at his old position and the management made him give a sermon on why he lost his fingers. In other words, tell everybody else exactly how he made his mistakes. Instead, he kept going on and on how he had no idea how it happened and he kept ranting on that we'll never know how it happened. Everybody else hard a hard time keeping a straight face because we knew that he had taken a guard off of a stationary saw and the only way it could of happened is if he moved his hand into the saw. Call me callous, but it couldn't of happened to a more deserving guy.

In my company all the safety people are either missing two or three fingers or have maimed or killed people through carelessness and stupidity. They get safety ''religion'' after a bad screw up or two and talk a good game even though most are still incompetent.

I've noticed that compared to years ago, many of todays safety managers are less inexperienced, are easy for the boss to intimidate and they are somewhat reckless themselves. I suspect that is now part of the hiring criteria.

Is this the guy? If in a hurry skip forward to 3:00.
Forklift training video

I worked at a job where that was very adamant
about reporting safety issues or potential safety
issues. That is until my boss fell about 8 ft. off
a beam trying to put a tarp on a roof in a wind
storm. I was the welding supervisor and he knew I
wasn't letting him keep it quiet. I heard later
that he confessed to another long term employee
that he broke his arm. He did admit to me that he
scared himself pretty good. He landed about 3 ft.
from the edge of some scaffolding below the roof
narrowly missing the pin sticking up to attach
more scaffolding. Had he missed the scaffolding,
he would have fell to his death about 30 ft.
below. I think if this was reported would have
shut the place down pending an investigation. I
think he got a real wake up call trying to be a
show off!!!

I used to like electrical work until I went through an arc-flash safety course at work. I shudder now thinking about all the live 600V stuff I used to work on, with NO safety gear.

I don"t know if that is an effective training, but it sure is gruesome. Maybe that is to show that it isn"t an actual event.

He can be a good guy, just dense sometimes. They actually handed the safety off to our shipping & receiving guy now as that doesn't take up all of his time and he's got lots of training from other jobs. Before that another manager/supervisor/whatever his title is had it, but then they loaded him up with other responsibilities so he's not able to work on it.

My oldest brother actually does OSHA qualified safety training through a technical college, and I got them to bring him in a year ago for some lockout/tagout training. Hoping they can bring him in for some more training once they start to get back on track with it.

Did like the video though....

Donovan from Wisconsin