- Joined
- Sep 6, 2011
- Messages
- 12,810
- Location
- Philadelphia
- Tractor
- John Deere 3033R, 855 MFWD, 757 ZTrak; IH Cub Cadet 123
My primary hobby and preoccupation at one point earlier in life was antique woodworking machinery, and although I've sold most of it off, I still have a few of the vintage machines in my shop. Belt guards, and even blade guards on most machines, had not even been dreamed up, yet. The most frightening, were the jointers built before about 1930:
Those built before ~1910 had square cutterheads. The problem with these is that any item that even touched the cutter heat would get sucked in by the nature of a square body rotating in a circular arc. You didn't lose your fingertips when slipping with a square cutterhead, you lost your whole hand, nearly every time. Lots of gruesome photos were used in the marketing of the later round "safety" cutterheads, to demonstrate why you should buy the more expensive and new round cutterheads over the old traditional square ones.
The round cutterheads came out ca. 1910, and were probably market-wide by 1915. Trouble is, many of those relied on a "clamshell" clamping system, that would occasionally fail without warning. This is back when jointer blades were as thick and heavy as lawnmower blades, but razor sharp across the entire length of one edge, or sometimes both edges if reversible. The cutterheads would spin ~5000 rpm, and occasionally launch a blade at the operator, at speeds that would often propel them straight thru the roof or the floor above. This would usually happen with zero warning, often after starting the machine and before feeding wood.
I also have a 32" bandsaw with zero guards on the wheels or the 16 feet of blade circling those wheels. Fun stuff.
