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A word of caution. after playing with cars for years I got careless a few weeks ago and dropped a trailer on my hand, resulting in 2 broken finger and a cracked bone in another finger.
was changing tyres on the car trailer had it up on the jack and wriggling new wheel to line up bolts and the jack slipped and fell over.
I had my han on top of the tyre and the edge of the mudguard pinned my hand to the tyre, with the sharp edge of the guard digging in to my fingers.
I was lucky it only dropped a couple of centimetres or it could easily have cut the fingers off.
I was stuck there with pinning my hand for several minutes, could not lift it off too heavy, but luckly managed to reach the jack handle and jam it under the edge of the guard to lift it off, ran cold water for several minutes then off to hospital. will be another couple of weeks before i get my fingers back back but considering it had cut right through almost to the bone, could see the tendons underneath, was very lucky not to have cut them. so now I have a permanet groove across the back of my fingers. and they tell me will have permanent aches.
The thing is I have blocks of wood, steel jacking stands and spare jacks laying around but it was "only" a tyre change so got careless.
won't do that again!
so to all you out there especially the car newbies always use wood or steel jacking stands and keep your hands away from between the car and any hard parts!
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Rank: Member
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Joined: 22/10/2008(UTC)
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great advice .... thank you
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Ouch.
Thanks for the safety message.
Its easy to get careless without even thinking.
Hope you have a quick recovery.
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Rank: Member
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Familiarity can breed contempt, usually the simplest thing will bite you.
I did a Dupont safety course years ago and one of things we were told is the odds of having an accident while taking a risk are 30,000 to 1, the trouble is that the 1 can crop up at any time during the 30,000. Looks like you got lucky and pinged it on try number 1.
Hope it all heals up nicely and hopefully they will be wrong about the severity of the ongoing pain.
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Rank: Veteran
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I always use jack stands but never did when I was younger and was lucky not to have an accident, I heard of a guy tinkering under his caddiliac when the jack gave way, lucky his neighbours heard him yell but he ended up with some permanent brain damage.
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Only a trailer? You were lucky.
I was changing the front tyre on my Toyota Dyna 3.5 tonner and as I reached under the now wheelless front axle to grab the jack handle, the bottle jack sunk into some soft ground and toppled over trapping my hand between the jack and the bottom of the leaf spring. I called out for help as I knew there were a couple of guys playing soccer in the oval and they rushed over and grabbed the big trolley jack(which in hindsight was the one I should have been using) from the garage and got my hand out.
I got away with a couple of broken bones in my hand which have healed fine. How it wasn't much worse with the full weight of a truck on it I'll never know. Suffice to say, I won't crawl under a wheelbarrow now without sliding a couple of extra supports underneath. I keep half a dozen steel wheels with old tyres next to the shed purely for use underneath jacked up vehicles before I'll put any part of my body under there.
Glad you got away with it too John.
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Joined: 2/02/2009(UTC) Posts: 564  ![Australia]( "Australia") Location: On a build over WWII airfield. Got the .50 cal cases from my driveway to prove it Thanks: 31 times
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Austin Kimberly got me, air jack slipped on the wheel aligner ramps.
Trapped my right index finger. I yelled for help and the tyre fitter managed to take enough weight off so get my finger out
Dunno what it did inside, but it was numb for months afterward and 30 years later it's still wider than it's mate on the other hand.
The was an up side. I got so used to starting bolts with my middle finger that I some times find myself doing it without thinking.
Glad the tendons were OK, I once saw mine after a 12 suture cut across the back of my left hand. Just nicked mine. |
Attn camry drivers. The accelerator is the skinny pedal on the right. |
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