What happens when your hand gets in the way

Issues related to safety

What happens when your hand gets in the way

Postby Fred » Wed Feb 20, 2013 9:49 am

Am I the only one who's been careless enough to get my hand in the way of the beam? I can't find anyone else admitting to it, so maybe it's just me.

Obviously my own stupid fault. I'm making a Z table for my Chinese eBay special and I wanted to measure how close the end of the beam's travel was from a bracket. I'd removed the existing table so I thought I'd hold a piece of wood in place and measure where the dot was burned. I forgot that the beam doesn't just magically come out of the lens and had my hand in the way of the unfocussed incoming beam.

Image

The sudden pain wasn't that bad. I initially thought I'd had a static electric shock. Until the smell like burning hair of course. Had it been a focussed beam or more than just a very brief flash it obviously could have been a lot worse.
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Re: What happens when your hand gets in the way

Postby mattrsch » Wed Feb 20, 2013 1:03 pm

Oops!

I managed to get the very tip of my finger in a steady state beam once. I didn't realize it was on at the time (mis-wired the TH vs TL on the power supply and powered it up). I had it in there for about half a second before I felt anything. That was long enough to give me a black fingertip. Not one of my proudest moments.
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Re: What happens when your hand gets in the way

Postby canadianavenger » Wed Feb 20, 2013 1:49 pm

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Re: What happens when your hand gets in the way

Postby Gadroc » Wed Feb 20, 2013 2:58 pm

Doh! I've done it once, but luckily it was during alignment and I had the laser set down to "barley fire" power levels to just mark the paper. That was enough to make me much more careful about things from then on out!
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Re: What happens when your hand gets in the way

Postby orcinus » Wed Feb 20, 2013 3:33 pm



Next step - CNC mill tattoo. :roll:
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Re: What happens when your hand gets in the way

Postby Nickwit » Mon Oct 20, 2014 6:13 am

Yea - done that 3 or 4 times when calibrating. Usually just pinging a thumb etc.

It's generally due to this laser-cutter being a bit of an arse - when you do a test-fire, the beam is there for a fraction of a second... sometimes though, it stays on, and it's invisible... so when I'm putting a bit of tape over the mirror-hole, it zaps me.

Hasn't happened in a while - I guess I must have learned my lesson.
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