A week ago today I received an important reminder about shop safety.
You see, I was working on cutting some mortises, and had paused to flick out some chips, which I do with a screwdriver. I put the screwdriver down, picked up my mallet, and noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the screwdriver was rolling off the bench. I grabbed it... and discovered it was actually the chisel.
Fortunately, this was a fairly cheap lesson: It needed four stitches, but only did real damage to skin, so there shouldn't be any long-term damage except the scar, which will probably be fairly significant.
There are two important lessons here:
1) If something is rolling off your bench, DON'T TRY TO CATCH IT!
2) There's a tool rack on my bench. This is pretty much exactly why it's there.
Hopefully I'll learn from these, and in the meantime I'm going to have to find a different way to cut mortises.
