Fudmottin wrote: I doubt that it took as long as two seconds to real him in. With a dead man switch and brake, no reaction time would be required. Once the machine started to grab, the switch would be released and the machine slammed to a halt.



At least that's the way to design it.



Most machines you need to be able to work with both hands at the same time, kind of like the pat your head and rub your stomach so a dead man switch is counter productive, besides I was at a stamp and die shop once and this huge 200 ton press had dead man switches arm lengths apart, both had to be pressed to activate the press and if one was released the press would raise, well the operator by some form of magic still managed to press off a hand even though both hands were required to press buttons to operate it. If lathes had dead man switches someone would tape the down or by pass them, not to mentions you usually can't stand in one spot at all times to hold a button down to make a machine run.



I suppose some sort of lock would be useful if the machine could work unattended.



Very few manual machines will work unattended, especially older machines, you have to engage and disengage feeds, I mean some machines have stops to set where a feed starts and stops but a manual machine is very much that.... very manual and hands on



A safety shield would be nice too.



Most manual machines you need see what is happening in every aspect of the part and tool so guards become cumbersome and in most cases make it more dangerous in my experiences, my small tooling lathe has a guard mounted on the tool post and more than once have I ran into it or something gets caught (mostly by stringers) and pulls the guard into the part.... I took it off after a large stringer grabbed it a pulled it into the chuck



I keep wondering why a chuck that size is only a three jaw instead of a six.