children using power tools unsupervised

Was this the bloke?

A plumber came round to fix stuff

At his house He had left a drill out, gone downstairs and when he came back up his kid had drilled a hole in the radiator.

Now I'm a lot more cautious about leaving my tools about

I swear the guy who came round to fix my window can’t have been more than 13 years old

You can't kid me.

Just wait til you find out about Policemen

When I was working at a 6th Form College in Surrey, I was walking past one of the ‘temporary’ art classrooms that housed the sculpture course ( part of A level art ) I saw a student who was probably 16 sitting outside on a stool, cutting out a shape in plywood with a jigsaw. He had the timber balanced across his open legs and was cutting towards himself, and as the board was covering his limbs he couldn’t see them. The art teacher who was in the classroom seemed surprised that I didn’t think this was very safe. The upside was the kid wasn’t hurt, the downside was that I then had to spend a couple of hours in my own time to train the teacher in the safe use of hand held power tools….

Just wait til you find out about Policemen

Dentists too it would seem! Not sure if the stand in one I saw was on work experience, but he did a great job of fixing my cracked tooth 😀

And politicians! Felt very weird to realise i was older than the prime minister when Sunak took office...

I once cut the (fleshy) tip of my finger off using one of those reciprocating hedge trimmers.  I was about 9yrs old.

Didn't dare show my mum & dad so I washed it under the tap & stuck it back on with an elastoplast.  Amazingly it took and nobody found out.  Finger tip looks normal until my hand gets very hot or cold - and the bit in question is also numb

How? you ask - well I'd worked out that if I could hold my finger steady on the upper blade, NOTHING would happen when I pressed the trigger*, and of course that's what I did

*... unless, of course, there was any kind of recoil/kick from the mechanism

3 hours and WCA has not appeared with an anecdote.

Which probably means he can't get WiFi at A&E.

My 80yr old neighbor came out and took the hammer off my OH whilst she was trying to install some lawn edging

I've seen her use kitchen knives so I can imagine how dangerous it probably looked.

My kids got hold of my new Makita impact driver and used it to drill holes in the garden mud. Grr.

Seized the whole thing up, thankfully spare parts were simple but I had to rebuild the chuck.

Also, took my eye off a saw for a few minutes and ended up with deep cuts in the carver chair arms. Grr, again.

My grandson was having his two year assessment and the health visitor asked what he liked doing at Grandma and Grandpa’s- “playing with power tools” was his confident reply!

You should have seen the baby face who was flying my plane back from Belgium this spring...

What's really worried me is that I've two sons same age as when mrs_oab and I met...

My old neighbor had a battery powered pair of secateurs. Jesus h Christ they were the scariest things ever.

For once a thread that makes me feel eminently sensible... feeling a bit giddy now.

You should have seen the baby face who was flying my plane back from Belgium this spring…

The COMBINED age of the youngest EasyJet Captain and first officer to fly together was 47. Yes you read that correctly. 

We've got some lovely indents on our windowsills from one of the Jr Reeksy boys hammering the buggery out of them when he was a toddler. What makes it worse is that it was just a kid's plastic hammer.

I did see an 11-year-old doing some trailcare a few year's back. His Dad had obviously taught him how to handle a chainsaw well though.

And my boss showed me a video of her grandson using a bobcat to build a tiny dirt jump and then riding it... but he was genuinely still a toddler.

I was driving a tractor by the time I was 12.
Would have been younger, but I wasn’t heavy enough to depress the clutch.
Just for balance, I also know how it feels to have a finger nail removed, i was quite a bit more careful after that!!

When I was about eight years old, my Grandad had a joinery workshop next to where he and my Dad had their allotment. On Saturdays when they were growing vegetables, I was allowed in the workshop given free reign over the woodworking machines!!

The only thing I wasn’t allowed to use was the spindle moulder because my Grandad deemed it too dangerous!! For the record, I still have all my digits which is more than can be said of my uncle.

How times have changed.

Just wait til you find out about Policemen

Just wait until you find out about the ones who aren't men...

My nexydoor neighboutr when growing up was a bit of a character - very posh and very open to allowing us to help. At the age of about 11 I was cutting down trees with a chainsaw (no PPE in those days, and these were big trees) and driving tractors.

First time I drove his tractor I crashed it into a ditch, as I couldnt reach the brake pedal enough to stop it (and tractor engines are strong enough to pull rather than stall it turns out). He just shrugged, set off and rented/borrowed another tractor, and he and I pulled the first one out.

My 16 year old daughter spent a week volunteering / being trained on the Ffestiniog mountain railway this summer. She was fine with power tools and ladders, there was a sensible level of supervision but it didn't prevent one of the youngsters badly cutting their hand with a hand saw, cutting their hand holding the piece of wood. Minor injuries visit required.

I'm not sure how they managed to do it - most people would stop when it starts to hurt!