How many fingers should a real carpenter have
"They say the king is not real!" Remember this phrase from the movie "Ivan Vasilyevich Changes Profession" So I always remember it when in comments to my publications appear statements that they say the author is not a real carpenter, he has all fingers in place.
For example - from recent comments - "What a strange carpenter, all fingers are in place, this cannot be"
Where did the popular belief come from that a real carpenter should have a few fingers missing?
I tried to find the source of this stable opinion, but I did not find anything intelligible, so I will express my opinion on this matter.
A carpenter is a profession in which you can very clearly see how a person shoves a piece of wood into a terribly squealing machine, while holding it only with his hands. To third-party it seems to the observer that the part is about to break out, the fingers will not hold it and will fall under the cutter or saw.
In other professions, this is not so clear, or rather, it is more difficult to see. After all, now there are many videos on wood processing on machines and often these are household or home-made machines in home workshops, but to see, for example, a metal milling machine in a home workshop is a must try. I have never met such a thing.
In fact, woodworking machines can be intimidating. About five years ago I was buying a cube of a pine wood block. I took material from the carpentry shop with old Soviet machines. So it’s scary to approach those machines, which is a miter saw, on which six-meter blocks were cut in half for me. Imagine an open saw blade about 500 mm in diameter, the noise from it is literally deafening, and the block is cuts with just one movement. Yes, it's scary to stand next to such a machine.
As for the loss of fingers and other serious injuries, all the cases that I know of are industrial cases. And this happened either in a hurry, when the deadlines were adjusted, or from fatigue during monotonous work, repeating the same operation from time to time, or from a hangover or intoxicated. And nobody canceled the accident.
Yes - it is true that adherence to safety precautions will reduce the incidence of injury, but it does not guarantee.
In my home workshop I work for pleasure and I do not need to rush and work late. There is no tedious monotonous work - the whole product is made by one person and there is a constant change of operations. It makes no sense to talk about drunken work - why should I get up at this time to the machine.
You also need to take into account that people are all different. Someone appreciates their strengths, coordination and assessment of the present well, while others are in the clouds. Someone learns from the mistakes of others, while for someone the loss of fingers will not be a lesson.
So, to assess in the skills of a joiner by the number of fingers on his hands - this will be fundamentally wrong. It's like saying about an auto mechanic that if his hands are clean, with no knocked out fingers and no stubborn grease, then he is a bad auto mechanic.
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Alexander.
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