Adam Savage Explains His Scary Hand Injury!

hey

Adam

Savage

here everybody in my cave day 14 of the coronavirus shelter-in-place order and I wanted to shoot a video here about something I don't want to talk about and that is this by my entry I am talking to you on a Monday Friday three days ago I I did an accident I hurt my finger and I'd like to talk to you about it I I noticed as I was

hand

holding the camera earlier that my

hand

s started to shake as I started to talk about the accident because it's so intense well uh hmm

I've taken two claritin oh but mmm there's a pollen bloom in San Francisco today and so my face is falling apart hmm so I've mounted the camera on a tripod so I won't be holding it on with my

hand

I totally injuries happen it's part of being a maker I wish it wasn't but it is and you should know before I start talking about any of this I am NOT a medical professional I had no medical training I have ways in which I have dealt with my own injuries over the years I have

some 70 odd stitches in my

hand

s other points of my body but please don't take anything I'm about to tell you as informational or any guide as to how you should deal with it if you have any questions or you've injured yourself you should seek the help of a medical professional not anything you have heard from me that's my disclaimer at the start of this now I said I didn't want to talk about this and I don't because when you have a bad

injury

in a shop hold on just a

second oh it's pollen bloom today when you have a bad

injury

at the shop for me at least there is always a resulting feeling of shame and self and because I've hurt I've hurt the most important thing to me myself right I've hurt my

hand

s this is how I interact with the world and frankly this century I almost lost my finger and I want to talk to you about what happened so this is my lathe this is one of my favorite tools at the shop and it's a 15 by 40 tool room laid by

chinois and it's a beautiful machine and it's had this intermittent problem this is the speed dial that selects one of the four major speeds and for the last few years I've been slowly intermittently losing the Y speed that the last one in the line for some reason and I haven't been able to figure out why and I decided to on Friday so I actually removed all the stuff from the machine and I cleared away the cabinets that are around it and I pulled off the top of this and I drained

several gallons of motor oil out of the machines so I could start to see it clearly and I spent about two hours diagnosing the problem that I was having and I finally figured it out I finally figured out that as I moved this speed selector back and forth for some reason it had started to push this seated bearing out of its seat and it created this extra bit of space and that extra bit of space was keeping the gears from meshing the way they should so then I had the problem of having I had this

then I was confronted then it was confronted with solving the problem of how to get that bearing back in and another two hours of work and cutting some pieces of metal and making some wedges so that I could do it without damaging the machine this is a bearing that was put in place well that machine was dry and completely disassembled trying to reseed it without doing that was non-trivial but I did it and now my lathe is back to fully functioning order and it's super exciting and once I did

that I was like yes okay now I'm gonna clean up my lathe so it's just a perfect piece of equipment and I started I took a wire brush to the lead screw and I'm just like oh cleaning the lead screw and I started spraying down everything with wd-40 and using steel wool and it's starting to look really beautiful then I took this Ragan and I started to clean this part while it was spinning I know I know now I know I started to clean this part while it was spinning and this spinning

these two pairs of spinning rods right here these are part of the drive system that allows you to feed the lathe automatically they grabbed the rag and then they grabbed my

hand

and I had this moment where I saw that happening and I know that I'm working on this machine it's a super powerful machine I had this moment where I actually understood that I was plausibly about to lose my finger or my head and the adrenaline rush from that is I'm still like kind of do every every couple of

hours I'm still having a sort of this moment of that memory that adrenaline rush of feeling like I was about to lose this I can't reiterate enough to you how much I don't want to talk about this how much shame I have over the fact that I did something so stupid as to slip a rag between two spinning things where my

hand

was there that was a colossal e stupid thing to do and yet I'm also cognizant that injuries happen to makers they think they occurred there they can't be

avoided you can't you can't eliminate that from the roster of things that are that are plausible and we learn we learned the hard way we learned through experience and if experience is any teacher that's why I am talking about this I hope that my experience could what do you call it run somebody else's

injury

off at the pass so why you shouldn't take any of my advice about how I dealt with this cut as any kind of medical advice from the philosophical standpoint hmm you know

it was in the cleaning of this machine that I let my guard down to be clear when I was repairing it I was cognizant that all these gears were nothing but a meat grinder I went to the main breaker box in my shop and I shut down power to this tool so it could not be turned on under any circumstances I was totally aware of the safety issues of repairing this machine I then after going through that stopped thinking that this machine was dangerous to me and that's when it became super dangerous

to me there's this axiom about helicopter pilots that beginning helicopter pilots never crashed that most crashes are experienced helicopter pilots I have no idea if that's true or not but from a shot practice standpoint it is absolutely a great axiomatic sort of guidance right because it's when you are overly comfortable with something that you let your guard down and somebody on Twitter when I posted this story said yeah all of their injuries happened during reassembly because

that's when their guard was down and that really resonated so deeply with me so in the off chance that my experience can help you be more careful in your shop please know that when you're working with big machinery it is always dangerous I'm never not cognizant that the table saw could harm me significantly at every given second I let my guard down with this thing and I got hurt so after I injured myself I extracted my

hand

I looked at it and I was really really scared about what I

would see I was terrified I was oh my god sorry thing all right so after it happened I saw it happening it happened to pulled my

hand

in I yanked my

hand

out survival to me was moving away from the machine and then I stopped the machine by hitting the foot brake and then I did I for me which is one of the scariest things I've ever done I looked at my

hand

and I wasn't sure what I was gonna see I wasn't sure if I was gonna see part of my middle finger hanging off I like you know at

that point pain isn't even part of it your body shuts that part down it was just like shock and adrenaline and I look and I saw this big gash up the middle of my finger like like about from here to here right like that and it's I mean not a not a clean gash like a cut like a like a raggedy rough yea-ah so I went to the bathroom irrigated it with iodine and medical saline through a little bit of triple antibiotic cream on there and use butterfly closures to hold it shut the butterfly

closures are ideal for me in my experience for this kind of cut exactly because it's on the inside of a bending member which means that as I bend it this way I'm not torquing that cut if it was on the outside or if it was on the side that's a much more difficult wound to heal without stitches and if I went to the ER make no mistake this would have been a 25 or 30 stitch repair I'm so cognizant that I didn't want to go to the ER I didn't want to take up the time of the

doctors and nurses who are dealing with Ovid 19 I did not want to go expose myself to a place where there were people with kovat 19 I was super clear that the last thing I wanted to do was go to an ER so when I went into the bathroom and started to deal with it I was grateful when I assessed that I had no tactile nerve damage and I didn't seem to have hit anything super important in there as my pay receptor started coming back online it wasn't as bad as I had feared it could be and I am

supremely grateful for that the other thing I did was I called my mom this is great my mom is sheltering in place with us here in San Francisco I'm very grateful to have her she's 85 and if she wasn't here she would have been alone in her in her house in New York and I just didn't want her there brought her out a couple weeks ago and I called her and said could you come over to the shop and it was actually really great to have my mom who is her father was a surgeon she was a

terrific help and I think it's kind of funny that I called my mom my mommy right that was very reassuring so now it's Monday when my shop is an ever-loving mess hold on oh yeah let me let me show you this this like I left my job in this all right I'll fix you later I left my shop in this state of like total disarray as I had to write a and this is just like you know I had to take care of business but now as part of the practice of healing I'm going to put my shop back together so

I thought I'd set up a nice high time-lapse shot and we finished this video whether bringing the shop back into working order