One lucky bloke ....

[onetrack]

Didn't know where to put this - but this bloke needs to go buy a Lotto ticket!!

 

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

When you're time's up, it's up.. When it's not; it's not...

 

 

[nomadpete]

See what happens when you deport all your cheap workers?

 

Clearly, the bloke who usually fitted the saw blade had been sent home

[facthunter]

You can't be bitten by a shark if the Bathplug's in tight.   Dog's too busy or away on holidays to Plan everyone's demise. Besides, Laws of Physics would have to be Bent. Please tell me of any instance of that happening.  Nev

 

[onetrack]

I can recall a deadly wood chipper accident here, in Jan 2004. A crew were widening a road down near Busselton (W.A.), clearing the roadside vegetation with a tractor/backhoe, and feeding it into a big wood chipper to mulch it.

The highway was still in use with traffic control, and a low speed limit for passing traffic. The chipper was operating on one side of the highway, and the tractor/backhoe was operating on the opposite side of the highway.

The disc in the woodchipper broke in half due to a faulty, sub-standard repair earlier in its life (these discs hum at about 4000 RPM). The disc was 1650mm in diameter and 57mm thick.

 

The biggest portion of the chipper disc departed the chipper and went spinning vertically in a boomerang fashion, straight across the highway. It sliced the entire front off a passing car (in front of the front wheels), glanced off another passing car, then kept going, still with massive levels of energy, and it hit the cabin of the tractor/backhoe, tearing through the heavy steel square tube sections of the cabin ROPS, and going halfway through the tractor/backhoe cabin.

 

Unfortunately, in doing so, it killed the operator of the tractor/backhoe. A truly dreadful accident, but there was no reason for the chipper owner to know that his chipper disc was defective, as it was all hidden inside the machine.

Worksafe conducted an extensive inquiry, and could never find out who had repaired the disc, as the machine had earlier been purchased secondhand in the Eastern States, and there were no records of any previous repairs.

 

Worksafe set out a lot more stringent controls over big woodchippers as a result of the accident, with frequent close inspections of chipper discs, and requirement that no repairs or modifications were to be carried out on the machines, without the input of a engineer or the manufacturer. There were photos of the chipper disc damage levels to the cars and the tractor/backhoe on the 'net at the time, but they have since disappeared.

 

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/12323073/17-04-wood-chipper-disk-failures