When doing anything involving a cutting disk on camera, I feel I should say something about wearing eye protection. Those disks will shatter and fly off in all directions no matter how carefully you use them and while I've been lucky so far, a face full of cutting disk chunks isn't funny.
As a glasses wearer, I'm a little more protected than someone with 20:20 vision, but even if I don't care about my health, it wouldn't be hard to scratch a lens requiring a pricey bill for a replacement.
On camera, of course, I want to look good (!) so those rubbery goggles aren't going to cut it. No, I need something sleek and here we have the latest in fashionable eye protection - a pair of Overspecs from Screwfix.
Price?
£1.39. Cheap enough I can afford to leave them lying around to get lost. Which is what happened to my last pair...
6 comments:
G'day Phil,
You mentioned -
"As a glasses wearer, I'm a little more protected".
This is a misconception, unless the seeing glasses your wearing are made of a safety glass material, you are more prone as your glasses will shatter into your eye & by not being of a metallic or a coloured material, they won't be easy to locate within your eyes.
The doctor removing those glass fragments from your eyes won't be able to clearly see the fragmented glass & will more than likely do more damage attempting to remove the foreign matter.
You have 2 options:
1. Obtain prescription safety glasses
2. Always when necessary wear your overglasses
Both options have Pros & Cons:
The 1st option is convenient but expensive.
The 2nd option you have to remember to wear them when required even if your at a friends or the club rooms but cheap, so cheap you could have several pairs say like 1 at your modelling bench, 1 at the club rooms, 1 in your traveling pack (as long as you take that pack everywhere you do modelling) & leave a pair at a friends place where you do regular dangerous activities.
You also mention -
"On camera, of course, I want to look good (!) so those rubbery goggles aren't going to cut it."
How good will you look without 1 seeing eye or a loss of an eye or both !
Both above previous mentioned options would look good on camera & prior to the activity highlight that you are wearing appropriate eye & any other necessary protection for the task at hand.
The most overlooked protection is ventilation when using glues.
Cheers Woz
So you are arguing that wearing plastic-lensed glasses (can you even get glass lenses now?) is no more, or even less safe than no glasses at all? I don't get that.
I'd be confident that they would stop a broken slitting disk from a Dremel better than no glasses. Mainly because I once whacked myself in the face with pliers while re-trimming a car seat. The resulting gouge on the lens ruined it but still kept the pliers away from my eye. I was undoubtedly lucky but do credit my specs with some of that luck.
I'd say this is horses for courses. If you are using a lathe or even a pillar drill, you need to take greater precautions than hand tools. For serious tools, you need serious PPE, but if I say to someone on camera while using a slitting disk you'll need to tool up with a full-face armoured mask then they will ignore me. Over-glasses are a reasonable precaution, especially when they are so cheap. I suspect most people will go with the rubber mask as they are so much easier to find.
As far as the camera is concerned, I went for option 2. Remember, my audience is casual model railway builders, not model engineers. You'd be more likely to harm yourself doing DIY than anything I demo and I'm not using any less PPE than you see a builder wear.
G'day Phil,
I was referring to power tools as per your original comment.
A projectile flying of a power tool at serious speed is quite different to your hand or a model part flying out of a pair of pliers at your face.
Yes, you are more fortunate than non-spectacle wearers when hitting yourself in the face with a tool in hand, we've all done it & for that task we tend to not think of wearing eye protection because you don't anticipate that to happen.
It is a shock to you when it happens & if you are not hurt I tend to have a laugh at myself after the event & think I just punched myself in the head, haa hhaaa.
Cheers Woz
They were big pliers and came at me at quite a rate of knots - the impact would be far greater than the bits from a tiny slitting disk.
These glasses are very cheap (throw them away when they get scratched) and comfortable bit of PPE for light work which is why I recommended them. There are literally NO excuses for not having a pair to hand when you can buy 3 for the price of a pint!
Phil, I'm on Woz's side on this one. We can get a false sense of security. He isn't saying don't wear protection just that you shouldn't rely on spectacles to provide it.
Living on a smallholding I should really be shocked by the injuries I get rather than shrugging them off. H&S and model railways should be built into everything we do, not an afterthought, however tedious that might sound.
One reason I love my new studio/office/workshop is that for the first time ever I can use an airbrush safely.
If I was relying on spectacles, I wouldn't have bought the special protective glasses. All I'm saying is that plastic specs are better than nothing, but overglasses designed to provide protection are better still.
We are talking about a tiny carbodium cutting disk, not heavy machinery. I'm trying to be proportionate. I could simply say that using one is too dangerous and you should never do it.
The main point of the post though was to point people in the direction of some ridiculously cheap eye protection. I'd hope that it might convince a few people to spend a couple of quid to give them some protection.
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