Dunno, I have used both since I was like 13. Also, we used to weld and do all sorts of things (acetylene torching, lathe, casting, grinding, sawing, milling) mostly unsupervised with very little instruction in middle/high school metal shop. I don't remember any accidents.

Hello, Mr. or Ms. Survivor Bias! I used to cut firewood with my father using a 3 foot buzz saw made over 100 years ago*, and had but only the most token of safety guards (ignore the giant power take-off belt that's just waiting to consume some of your loose clothing, and you with it), yet I still have all limbs, fingers, and toes!

And yet I still think it asinine to shrug shoulders and say, "I dunno, nobody I know ever got hurt, yuk, yuk, yuk." If one cannot see the potential for harm in such scenarios, you are one of those accidents waiting to happen.

*yes, really

Speaking of a 3 foot buzz saw, my grandpa is rebuilding a sawmill with a 54-inch blade powered by a 1990's corvette engine. Fairly certain someone is going to get hurt on that one.

Is he angling for a spot on _Top Gear_?

1990s Corvette engine is just marketing wank on top of "boring 90s smallblock V8"

It was probably just what he had sitting around.

> If one cannot see the potential for harm in such scenarios

This is a strawman. Nobody claimed that any activity was perfectly safe.

> > these things are accidents bound to happen > Dunno, I have used both since I was like 13 ... I don't remember any accidents.

Seems like their response is kind of implying an inaccurate level of safety, along the lines of "Well I didn't have issues, so..."

Nothing is "perfectly safe". Many things are egregiously, unnecessarily unsafe.

Well if you got through high school without any accidents it must be a risk free activity...

Me, too. The class was called Agri-Mechanics, and it covered everything technical that farm boys were expected to do regularly.

Of course it's an unnecessary danger for the children of parents who would consider them failures if they grew up to work with their hands and backs.

Aren't lathes extremely dangerous?

Not nearly as dangerous as the cars those kids were driving a year or two later.

It's deeply unfortunate that the parental attitude towards tools these days is never "learn to use it safely" but rather "Hide it away! Don't you dare let MY kid near filthy manual labor!"

The college that I went to had all the engineers learn how to run a metal-turning lathe. ME, EE, BME, I think even the Computer Engineers had to learn how to run a lathe. They put us through a safety class first, which mostly consisted of how not to run a lathe (no loose clothes, no long hair, no jewelry below the elbow, no necklaces, etc). The only injury that I know from that class was from when we learned how to run welders - one of the guys caught his shirt on fire with an oxy-acetalene torch.

Yeah, lathes are dangerous, but no more or less dangerous than a lot of other things in the world. Cars are dangerous. Turning on a light switch in the wrong context can be dangerous. If you approach this stuff with the proper respect and caution, you should be fine.

Yes, but lots of things are dangerous. This is mitigated through awareness and mitigation of risk.

Lathes are only seen this way because they can go very big. The instant death accidents happen with the big ones, especially the ones designed to quickly remove lots of material from big metal pieces.

Otherwise lathes aren't more dangerous than any other piece of machinery with exposed moving pieces. In particular the ones designed to turn small pieces of wood can't do much harm.

Don't leave the chuck key in, wear eye protection, no loose hair, no loose clothes, don't be stupid and you will be fine.

> and (tack) welding

To be fair, Gasless MIG is basically a glue gun for grown-ups.

… where the glue gun has orders of magnitude more power and speed and the “use electrical resistance to create heat” portion of the show necessarily happens OUTSIDE the housing. It’s a cute comparison but a MIG welder is a lot more dangerous than a glue gun.

I’m also gonna pick a nit here and say “like a hot glue gun” is what you say about a MIG weld that is done entirely improperly. If the filler material is just acting like glue, you might be sticking metal together but you’re not welding. So this tongue-in-cheek description also misleads newbs into creating bad welds.

That is picking a nit. Bad welds are still welds, you just need more of them :p

It’s possible to weld so poorly that you are really brazing, not welding. And what a hot glue gun does is really analogous to brazing rather than welding.

"A grinder and paint make me the welder I ain't"

I discovered when I first bought a MIG that there's a world of a difference between "I have a welder" and "I am a welder". I used to be bloody good at oxyacetylene, too...