After watching numerous videos of people working on lathes, and noting how many of them had scarred up knuckles and fingers, I decided to put some safety guards on my lathe. One that covers the rotating chuck, which has those jaws with rather sharp edges to them that would make a mess of anything flesh and bone they might contact when the chuck is rotating at high speed. Although I try to be real careful, all it would take is one moment of inattention or distraction to end my keyboard playing days forever. Plus it seems that the chuck is always throwing a stream of oil out of it. When I first bought that chuck and set it up, I decided to run it at high speed to see if it had any notable vibration. While I was reaching for the speed control, I could feel a little alarm bell going off in my head. Yeah, I was standing right alongside the chuck's rotation, and had a line of oil running from down my shirt that got slung off of that chuck. Wasn't the first time that had happened, neither. So a guard to keep me from doing that again and having to explain to Connie how I ruined another shirt would be money well spent.
Then I wanted a guard to ride on apron with the cross slide to keep it covering the cutting tool area seemed like a good idea. Even though I would wear safety glasses, all it would take is one real unlucky piece of hot metal falling behind the glasses into one of my eyes to really ruin my day. Plus just having hot metal chips hitting my face and chest really unnerves me. Actually I haven't run the lathe at very high speeds, but I think I am running it too slow. At least slower than I should. I am basing this mostly off of the little lathe I used to have, but I can blame that on the fact that chuck speeds needed to be done via changing gears, so I just didn't bother with that. This new lathe has electronic speed control, which is MUCH better and more convenient to work with.
Anyway, better to be safe than sorry, I guess. I am getting older and my brain doesn't work as well as it used to be. So best to try to protect my body from my aging brain's failings as best I can.
