Crazy/Insane Shop Accidents

Ahhh yes...the Mustang of doom.
about 7 years ago I worked as a carb man for a local dragster/pro mod effort. the owner was also a top notch tune up guy, so we usually had a few real bad ass cars laying around.
It was not uncommon for the boss and his partner to take off for lunch and leave me there building carbs,so I was pretty comfy with the thought of being out in the middle of nowhere alone for a couple of hours,until the day the tornado came.

I listen to the radio while I work and an announcment comes over basically "If you are in or around Hutto Texas, dig a hole and get your ass in it NOW"

NOT GOOD NEWS IF YOU ARE INSIDE A TIN BUILDING.
Being the somewhat inteligent fella I am, I decide go outside, look around, get outta dodge.
on the way out, I realize that I am in no immediate danger, but it is begenning to hail and right in front of our shop doors is this really nice dragster. a 68 mustang with a mid engine sbc that runs high 9's. black and well painted.
I first tried to push it in, but it is too heavy and now the hail has gone from nuisanse to marble size. what to do?
hop in that bastard and drive it in.
( I should mention that before this moment, I have never been in this particular car,but a race car is a race car,right?how hard could this possibly be?)
no problem. big switch says FUEL flip it and hear dual holleys blaring away.
big switch says START. push it, motor spins over while simotaniously flipping big switch that says IGNIT. Pow! fires right up.
okay... gotta back it up. pull lever into reverse...nothin. Crap.little gas and it seems to wanna go. lots of gas and it goes a little. (aha!big ass stall converter,right?WRONG!)
I have very large feet.
about the time my right hand pushes down the button for the trans brake,
my foot hangs on a peice of sheet metal on the tranny tunnel and...
BBBWWWWAAAAHHH!!!!!! reverse in full 3000 r.p.m.
directly through the pole fence.
knocked the decklid and spoiler off of it, finally got it stopped(about 300 feet from the shop)
figured out the trans brake, car still got hail damaged, and my boss laughed his ass off at me.
a week later my boss drove it forward through the shop wall.
that car never did drive right...

 

The ancient Greek God Mechanicus watches over us but slowly loses interest as we get older and keep ignoring our experience & do dumb things anyway.

 

Can I use that as the epitath on my headstone?

 

This happened a few years ago, dropped a piece of 1" plate steel on it, corner first. The plate wieghed alot. I had steel toe boots on too, had to cut the boot off. Broke in 3 spots, some soft tissue damage to. Doc said I was lucky I didn't lose the toe. Hehe, fun shit, good times...

 

Posting injury pictures!! Now we're getting somewhere!!!

Good to hear you kept the toe. Bet that stung for a while.

 

Yes sir, it still hurts today when the weather changes and such. Healed up pretty good though, hehe...

 

Okay one time i was over at my friends place because his dads has a street rod shop planning on doing some welding on a tube kick up for my model a frame so anyway i was grinding the kick up to get it ready to weld and the grinder kicked outa my hands dug across my forearm and scrapped across my bicept somehow missing my shirt and long hair but leaving a nasty scar on my arm. Well i guess that kinda hurts my chances of getting hired.

anouther time one of his workers was dong the air lines for a set of bags and had the car all aired up and it looked good decided to lit the air out and dropped the car on his foot. So he stood there with the car sitting on his foor trying not to look stupid while he fished for the air hose


I was workin on my 30 plymouth tourching about a dozen large carrige bolts off the bottom edge of the body kinda workin my way down the car when i feel something kinda biting me on the forearm since i'm outside i figure its probably a spider or a small bee sting so i dont even lift my gogles and just swat it but but it continues i finaly look and the head of the last bolt left a 1 inch round burn on my arm

 

I had my favorite flannel shirt catch on fire yesterday. Burned most of the right front side off before I got it out. Slightly burning my hands in the process of putting my self out.
Probably looked pretty funny.

 

This made me cringe, a young guy at the tyre depot we use for work had nothing to do and was fooling around with an impact wrench and managed to run a wheel nut up his finger and over the 2nd joint. The manager was away that day and the stand in not wanting to get hell grabbed the wrench and wound it off again before it swelled up to much. The kids finger was kind of ok but you could hear the scrteams from down the street.

 

One place I worked at for a minute, the owner was sick so his brother was keeping an eye on things for awhile... One Saturday afternoon it was slow and this guy decides to clean the floor in the garage... He proceeds to pour about a gallon of gas on the floor, and scrubs it with a floor brush. I was doing a tune up on a truck. I wasn't paying attention until I heard the sound of the wet/dry vac start up... I somehow managed to jump OVER my toolbox and pulled the extension chord out of the wall before it ignited... I left immediately and called the owner and told him I would return when HE returned....

 

Damn, this has been a real fun read. My favorite had to be Tingler trying to grind his nuts off. I cried for about 5 minutes. Here's a few of my own.

Got a friend who builds custom minibikes and shit that had a goatee about 8 inchs long that he was very proud of. He caught it in the 4 1/2 inch grinder, which ran up his beard as it twisted it around the shaft hitting him in the chin and almost knocking him out as well as ripping a patch of hair about 1 inch square right out of his chin. Took him a while to live that down.

I was in the shop one day looking for something and I stepped on a rim that was on the floor to look up on a shelf like I have thousands of times. Well I just happened to get close enough to the edge that it flipped up and the opposite edge hit me right below the knee cap. I dropped like someone shot me and could not put weight on it for about ten minutes. Luckily no real damage.

I too have had an eye scratched by flying debree while wearing safety glasses. I ws grinding some weld in the door jamb of my brothers 60 Biscayne and the best I can figure is that it ricocheted around between the door and the jamb till it found an opening. Cut the covering over my cornea pretty good, luckily thats all. Wear google and a face shield now.

Set myself on fire alot of times, More burns that I care to remember.

Once when I was about 13 or so at a friends house we were on his roof goofing around and were watching the local illegal aliens down the street working on an old ford truck. There was about 5-6 dudes around the open hood. all of the sudden there was a pretty lound noise and we look over and there is a large fireball coming out from under the hood and a old metal gas can flying throught the air like a comet. They were pouring gas in the carb to get her started right out of the can. I guess she backfired, ignited the fumes in the can, and so on... Couple of those guys didn't have much hair left. Pretty damn funny.

Last but not least, my brother ( Droplord49) and I had unloaded one of many aquisitions at my shop and we were putting the ramps and stuff up on the trailer. Well I dont remember exactly why but we has to use the floor jack for some reason and the arm was under the edge of the trailer. Dustin reached down and slid it out from under the trailer. ( just like I probably would have done ) When the handle came out it stood up since it's spring loaded and hit him right between the eyes. It did come up very fast and he was still bent over so it didn't travel far but when it hit him it sounded like when you thump a watermelon really hard. He of course muttered some expletive and I'm sure I did to. I asked if he was okay and he looked up and it had split him open pretty good right between the eyes. I think he was a little loopy for a minute. Got him cleaned up and he was fine. Felt bad but was glad it wasn't me.

 

cut the tip of my finger off when my lakey retarded helper put a razor blade into a magnetic tray and it just so happened to be faced up. i was doin a motor in a dodge neon so i had a pile o nuts and bolts in a mag tray and sliiiiiiiiice.

cheers

 

I blew the end out of a socket one time when I was tightening up the positive battery post in my yota and the handle touched the body of the truck. Those Autozone tools don't take too well to massive amounts of electricity. Oh, and I damn near cut off all my left toes one time at our shop when I was welding a shock mount onto a new drop control arm. It was sitting on a 3/8 in thick steel plate about 3 ft long on top of a table, and the stick weld got stuck, so when I went to yank it off, it pulled the whole thing off the table and down it went. Guess what was in the way on the floor.....my left foot. So, needless to say, I was very careful to take my boot off, so I could check to see if my toes were still attached. And, to make my week even worse, a few days later as I was undoing an upper balljoint from the 58 Chevy I was bagging, I had my left hand under the rotor keeping it held up, but when the balljoint nut came off, the rotor dropped onto the concrete floor with my hand under it. Imagine blowing a surgical glove up like a balloon, and that'll give you an idea of how my hand looked.

 

When I was in shop class back in high school, someone was going to do a brake job, and put the car on the two post lift. Somehow he managed to lift the car right into an I-beam in the ceiling. They ended up having to pop the roof out, straighten it and repaint the car.

Got my share of cuts, puncture wounds and eye injuries. One thing to watch out for is flash burn. I was working in a shop and another guy was welding on a chassis, although not really close to me. I was at least 20 feet away and never looked directly at the arc so I figured no big deal. That night, my eyes were real irritated, hurt like a bitch and felt like sandpaper when I blinked of closed them. Went to the ER thinking I got some metal in there since I was doing a lot of cutting and grinding, but they couldn't find anything. Finally figured out it was some pretty bad burns. So now I'm real careful when anyone's welding around me.

One other story I have is off topic, but it's pretty funny. I was working construction and we were clearing a tract of property for a new subdivision. I was cutting up some timbers from an old barn with a chain saw. Well the saw hit something, bounced back and the blade hit me in the face. I got a pretty deep cut extending about an inch and a half above and three quarters of an below my mouth on the right side, including through the lips. It was bleeding pretty bad, so I took the bandana out of my pocket and put some pressure on it, and then went and found another guy to drive me to the ER. We get to the ER and they ask me if I want to have someone there sew me up or wait for a plastic surgeon to come and do it. Based on all nasty looking scars I have from ER doctors sewing me up on previous occasions, I figure I'll wait for someone who knows what he's doing. So as I'm waiting for the plastic surgeon, the guy who drove me in asks me if the cut's real bad. I take the bandage off my face to show him, and the guy literally falls out of his chair onto the floor. His head must have bounced two inches when it hit the ground. The nurses come running up and ask me what happened to him. So they picked him up and put him in the bed next to me. I was trying real hard not to laugh because my face hurt like a bitch, but it was funny as hell. I ended up with 30-something stitches, but the guy who sewed me up was a real pro because you can hardly even see the scar.

 

damnit somehow I lost most of my new post. I'll try again later.

 

I was stripping the paint off of a car with some very caustic paint stripper, I had it on my hands when I had to take a piss..........

 

Here's a nice simple one that must have looked like a Warner Bros. cartoon...
I was a teenager with junk deuce. We needed to borrow both of its axles to get a junk '33 we had bought for $11.00 onto a trailer...yes, we had lots of energy and no sense.
I noted that the frontend I wanted to lift, the complete setup with brakes and all, was a bit unwieldy as well as heavy. Standing within the triangle formed by axle and wishbone while picking it up by the tie rod looked like it would put me pretty close to the balance point...
I went to work. .00003 second later, as I jerked the thing off of the floor, it pivoted around the axis of the tie rod in my gloved hands and the ball of the wishbone, traveling at warp speed, contacted the exact center of the back of my head smartly, just as the axle itself followed through into my shins...

 

Had the same experience too. Now I'm much more careful. If I see welding on TV I still find myself instincively closing my eyes and turning away. I look like a real twitchy dork watching stuff like Monter Gargage or Trucks when the fire up the welder...

 

1. I wanted to go thru the chassis on my '32 so I took the body off and put it on top of my 3x3 welding table that had casters so I could easily move it around the shop. Ya'll can probably see where I'm going with this one........... at that time my forklift didn't have brakes so I was the only idiot alowed to drive it. Well one day I needed to move some crap around the shop, and I drove it right into the table......... which sent it rollin at a pretty good clip across the shop until it crashed. The poor body ended up on the ground. Fortunately it nailed the trashcan there was only a little push to one rear 1/4 panel, but the terror of the moment will scar me for life.

2. I went to bleed the brakes on my '40, didn't want to make a mess so I used one of the many empties laying around as a catch. Next night I went for my beer and uh-oh....... I don't think it was good for me. I'd still drink 12oz rather than watch my '32 fall 4' to the ground.

I don't remember the many many injuries. Fingers grow back and burns tend to heal.

 

Reeeeaaaally. Mine didn't grow back.

My Dad's shop foreman was cutting a hunk of wood on the tablesaw. He was pushing it with his hand instead of using the contraption he should have to push it. Well... he wasn't paying attention and pushed too far and mangled his middle finger.

But wait, there's more...

A week later he wanted to show the crew what happened, so he recreated the incident... all the way to pushing his finger into the spinning blade for a second time!

 

I too can tell you first hand that fingers do not grow back..
I remember the day very well.. Nov 17, 1985 2:41pm.. 2.5 ft of snow (which is rare around here).
I bought a 71 Dodge Demon at an auction.. I knew the timing chain was bad.. but was not sure if the engine was good or not... had it sitting in my yard with no front wheels.. I replaced the bad chain with a used "double roller" and did not put it all back together!! Stupid me!!!!!!.. Just tossed on the chain.. put in a battery.. manually pumped the fuel pump... hot wired it.. and fired it up... exposed chain and all!!.. it ran but sounded like the previous owner pulled the timing up to compensate for the old bad chain.. I attemped to reach back to retard the timing.. lost my footing.. knees hit the bumper and I instinctively put out my hand to stop me from falling... My palm lands on the intake manifold and thumb goes between the spinning upper timing chain sprocket and double roller chain.. POOF... took it off right behind the thumb nail!!...
That afternoon I learned a whole new meaning for the word.. "pain"!!.. just after tossing what was left of the cut off part into the trash can the doctor was snipping off the jagged bone with what looked like a pair of "side cutters" proceeding to sew it up... made mention that there were more nerve endings in that little 1 inch part of my thumb than there is in your entire face.... It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.. I had a VERY tight grip on the chair was sitting in!!

 

Oh No,No, No. I just threw up! I guess you can't miss it until it's gone and ain't never coming back. Sorry man. Why do I keep coming back to this post? Stop the madness! -stick

 

WOW!
Iam going to be very carefull, ouch..

 

my dad was telling me about an accident that happened at the power plant he was working on at the time. a pipe fitter had fallen something like 8 stories and died and the only one that saw what happened was his twin brother. so when they were investigating the accident they had him reenact what happened and he ended up falling and dying to....

 

Oh my God!!!
Ever since I was a little kid, my dad drilled into my head that you should NEVER demonstrate how you hurt yourself, because you'll do it again.
Seems an old farmer friend of my grandmothers had lost both hands to farming accidents. He was running a corn picker, and it jambed up (common in those days). Rather than shut the tractor off, he simply jumped down and started pulling stalks out of the picker to unjamb it. It unjambed and grabbed his arm, cutting off his hand.
Years later, he was working with a hired hand (no pun intented) picking corn, when the corn picker jambed. They were cleaning it out when the kid asked the old man how he'd lost his hand. Old man says "The machine was jambed, so I stuck my hand in here like this..."
I heard that story regularly since I was 4 years old, and live by it today.
-Brad

 

When Zman was putting the Jag suspension in his Buick, I was helping him with the small stuff. I was cutting out a piece of mounting bracket from this thick sheet of steel (1/4" I think), when I turned the grinder the wrong way the cutting disc bound up, shattered and jumped out of the cut I was making. It was heading straight for my belly so I bowed forward so it would miss. The jagged cutting disc promptly caught my shirt and started climbing. Fortunately the fabric caught around the disc and bound it up, but I was desperately trying to maintain control of the grinder with one hand and turning it off with the other. Unfortunately Zman saw all of this. At least he was nice enough to ask if I was okay before bursting out with laughter. Since then it's become a shop rule. You have to ask if they are okay before laughing.

While helping my dad put a rebuilt 302 in this Fairmont he had picked up used, the come along he was using (The garage was full and this was a "quick and easy thing) the pin that hold the rachet in place snapped. I was guiding the engine in by holding the harmonic balancer from underneath with my hands. I heard the "ping!" of the pin, looked up and say the ratchet fly up. Being as young as I was guess I had really fast reflexes cause I got my hands out of the way in time but I was only an inch or two from the top of the radiator and had I been a split second slower I'd have lost my fingers at the knuckles.

 

most recent - dropped a jar of gas in low springs engine compartment because my arm was on fire. we almost burnt his truck AND garage to the ground...

keep a chemical fire extinguisher nearby at all times and of course, for the mentaly challenged (we all get a bit retarded sometimes), dont pour gas down a carb while cranking the engine over. sheesh.

 

My first day as a machanic I had the pleasure of waching the lead machanic at the shop try to run himself over. It was a nice summer day, so we worked outside on the apron to the shop.When I walked up he was adding ATF to a jeep charokee. You see, he was about 5'5",so to reach the dipstick his feet had to be way off the ground. So he was completly under the hood when all of a sudden the truck takes off backwards! The silly fucker left the the truck running in reverse. When He added enough fluid that when things got crazy. the truck circled the lot (a gas station by the way) at least twice with him under the hood. It finally stopped when it hit the shop owners new toyota 4 runner. All siad, no one was hurt and there was about four grand in damage to the two vehicles. If the wheels wasn't turned just right the charokee would have hit a gas pump or gone out onto a crouded street.

 

A friend was towing his racecar back to his shop a few years ago. He stopped at a light at the bottom of a down hill stretch of road. A couple of seconds later a trailer went sailing thru the intersection. His first reaction was to laugh at the numb nuts who didn't know how to hookup a trailer. Then he recognized the car riding on it.

Not really a shop accident? Guess where the trailer finally stopped. The insurance adjuster pretended he didn't even know this guy.