[jfunk]

LOL... I have been soldering for a long time and but still occasionally hear that tell tale sizzle and faint waft of bacon that lets you know you have properly burnt your self. 
I think the worst one was when I knocked the soldering iron out of the stand and it fell tip first in between my shoe and ankle - AAAAAW 

 

[Uncle Erik]

A couple dozen small burns from the iron and being stupid enough to touch things I had just soldered. I've accidentally touched mains voltage a few times, too. Though not electronics, one time I set some tile at my cousin's place and was cleaning up grout with steel wool. I dragged it over an exposed j-box with live power. I got a jolt and the steel wool caught on fire. I managed to toss it into the sink and turned on the water.

DIY in the kitchen has proven worse. I have a 1cm scar on my hand from cutting a lemon when I was five. The knife slipped and went into my hand pretty deep. It cut into some thumb muscle, too. The weird thing is that it didn't hurt that much. But a lot of blood came out and my mother freaked. Mymdoc patched it up nicely and it healed fine. But there's still a noticeable scar.

The one that did hurt was when I got mirrored third degree burns on my arms. There was a potato in the oven and in this not-so-well-planned kitchen, the oven door would open about 1/3 and stick on a cabinet knob. Well, it usually did. This time the door slipped loose and closed on both arms while they were in the oven. Smelling myself cooking is not something I want to experience again. I got my arms out and had silver-dollar sized burns on each arm. They eventually healed, but I had discoloration for about 10 years. Not much hair grows there on my right arm.

 

[ardgedee]

I spent a couple years working production at a newspaper in the days when layouts were assembled using strips of typeset, adhesive and knives. In general the people who got injured least were the ones who expected to get stuck eventually. If you thought you'd never get hurt if you were careful enough, you were wrong, and your reflexes would work against you - eg, you'd grab for a moving knife. I make it sound like an abattoir, and that's not true at all, but anywhere you have a bunch of people in close quarters wielding pointy things, somebody will get poked.
 
It can make you very good at jumping out of the way of falling knives, though. I've got scars on my hands (cooking accidents rather than workplace accidents, as it turns out) but none on my feet.
 
So far I've only gotten minor burns on my hands from glancing touches with the soldering iron but I figure sooner or later something will necessitate salve and bandages. If I wasn't fatalistic about it I'd probably be too afraid to learn how to solder.

 

[skkhai]

A hot heatgun slipped off the table and into my lap tip first while I was sitting indian style in my boxers. I permanently branded my inner thigh with a half circle. Lesson I should have learned that day: don't work near hot things wearing nothing but your underwear. I still do it.
 
I haven't burned myself with an iron yet. I tend to jump out of the way whenever I fumble a hold of an iron and disregard any other potential safety hazards that may be behind me. 

 

[Lurkumaural]

I can relate with just about every story here.
 
I remember all my buddies crammed into my cubicle one day, taking turns touching AC mains screw terminals.  At some point someone rationalized that we needed to get familiar with what 60Hz looks (or feels) like because it may come in handy for troubleshooting a customer's system.  I don't remember it hurting.  My mom later said we could have stopped our hearts doing that.  I wrote it off as being young.  Half of us were over 40 at the time.
 
I've caught my soldering iron; it hit the ground anyway after I let go of it, and when I realized that, I got so pissed off about catching it.  I've had that slow burn because the handle is very hot, and like jfunk I only realized I had hurt myself when I smelled chicken (I guess I'm not bacon).  I've had my iron plummet toward my lap, instinctively basketing my legs to catch it only to widen again and allow it to very narrowly miss the goods.
 
When I was in my mid 20s I was soldering electronics or under my car constantly.  During that time my hands and arms were never free of burns, scrapes, or cuts.  I think that also during that time I had no painful experiences, and would often discover wounds hours or even days after I was done working.
 
Between DIY and cooking I've managed to deaden my hands.  I always use my hands to grab food out of the oven.  I usually only think to use a mitt or tongs if I'll be grabbing the pan.  I've sliced off the fleshy tip of my thumb (while working at a bagel counter in college... oh the horrified customers) and I've also managed to shear off the outer layers of fingernail, to the skin, at home using my good knives.  I very much straddle the line between having great manual dexterity and experiencing mishaps.  I guess I should be glad I can't afford a wood shop yet.  I'd probably be short a few appendages.

 

[samsquanch]

I was using a drill press one day to drill some holes in a 6"x6" metal plate, someone came by and said, "You should clamp that down instead of just holding it with your hand."  "I'll be fine," I say.  Then when I moved to the second hole, the drill bit caught the plate and spun it out of my hand, which if I had not moved back quicker, would be missing two fingers.  I still have two nice scars on my left middle and index fingers from where the plate hit them.

 

[anddy78]

Quote:

 

that reminded me of bobzach.
 

 
 
Hey man, if something at 400 C is rolling to land between my legs, Id gladly sacrifice my hands to save my ... lap. 

  LOL!!!
 

 

[Armaegis]

I'm curious how many of us used to lick 9V batteries as kids*.
 
*by whatever your definition of "kid" is

 

[wakibaki]

It wasn't DIY, although Lord knows I've injured myself in minor ways many times doing DIY.
 
One day at work during my student placement I was testing a shortwave military radio with a built-in antenna tuner. The radio was only 12 wattts, but the antenna tuner was set at the high impedance end. I just brushed the end of the collapsed antenna with the back of my finger and it drilled a little hole through my fingernail into the flesh, neat as you like. It hurt like hell. I looked at it under the big Mantis 3D scope, it looked just like a tiny little volcano.
 
After that I was a lot more careful with the 100 and 200 watt radios.
 
Yeah, I've licked a few batteries, recently even, but very carefully. Mostly now I lick a finger and touch one terminal before touching the other with my tongue. Batteries have improved a lot since I was a kid, licking one now can be a painful experience.

 
w

 

[youngngray]

This is... well I don't want to say great, but great! Keep it up. And really, I didn't mean to limit it to just electronics things, post any DIY-ing injuries. Another that I can think of right now: I'm on a robotics team and when we're trying to get something built fast, I tend to pay less attention to the safety of my hands. So when I use pliers (and I'm sure just about everyone here has done this at some point) then they slip and part of your finger is in between the back end and gets pinched--bad. Keep 'em coming! 

 

[Armaegis]

A couple weeks ago my mother was trying to fix a broken lamp without unplugging it first. She had no idea what she was doing, and was armed with a pair of pliers. I was in the other room helping to clean out the storage area with dad when I hear her say "I think that's a piece of dirt in there I can get out"... Before I could react, there is a large *ZAP* and the lights flicker. That "piece of dirt" was actually the contact terminals for the lightbulb. Fortunately, the pliers had a rubber grip so mom was ok, but she managed to melt the tip of the pliers when she shorted the connection.
 
She got a very stern lecture from me afterwards.

 

[DigitalFreak]

I got all your stories beat hands down. I worked 14 years as a butcher in a meat packing plant. Usually when we work with knives we wear steel mesh aprons as well as a steel mesh glove on one hand. Wearing a steel mesh glove has saved my left hand countless times from a misplaced blade stroke but there is a drawback to wearing that glove. Long story short NEVER EVER stick your meshed gloved left hand into a slasher machine to yank out a jammed pig jowl because you will regret it. Almost 10 years later the tip of my thumb still has no feeling. I was lucky there was an emergency cut off switch right in front of me. If there wasn't the machine which had my mesh glove hooked in it's blades would have pulled my whole arm into it's blades.
 
One fellow I worked with wasn't so lucky. He worked on the circular saws lining up the shoulders so the saws could split the jowl from the shoulder part. The shoulders come down spaced out on a moving automated table. One day he fell behind because the speed was to fast and he reached to far forward to line up the jowl under the saw and lost the top half of his two middle fingers. I was standing behind him doing my own work when I heard him yelp. I turned around and got a closeup of his two tipless fingers pouring blood. I rushed him to the company nurse and she called him an ambulance. Unfortunately the doctors said it would be useless to try and sew the fingers back on because the nerve's were dead and the bones where the cut occurred were completely crushed. We spent a good 10 minutes going through processed product trying to find the tips of his fingers and when we did the foreman threw them into a bag of ice and ran off to the emergency ward to give it to the doctors. The next day our union was at the plant with the labor board screaming at the head plant manager about line speeds. The plant manager was moved to another plant a few weeks later to try and pacify the union complaints. Moral of my story is if you can avoid it never get employment in a meat packing plant it's not worth losing your digits.

 

[Lurkumaural]

^ excellent story.  My initial thought was "Chain mail FTW," but further reading of the story squashed it.

 

[JamesMcProgger]

 
mental note: never get employment in a meat packing plant
mental note 2: stop eating processed meat, it might have human blood/flesh

 

[rdvolk]

This thread brought back vivid memories of when I was a field engineer for a computer company. I was repairing a circuit board with a hot soldering iron nearby when I moved my head close to the circuit board looking for a cold solder joint. As I did, my arm brushed the iron and the tip grazed my right eyeball. Man did that hurt. Fortunately the eye doctor said there was no permanent damage, placed some eye drops in the eye and put a patch on it. For the week or so that it took to heal, it constantly felt like there was sand in my eye. Safety glasses DO have a purpose