I was working on our dining room table a few days ago. The table top is made from a glueup, and the whole design is similar to the coffee table and is designed to match it, except in 5/4 stock, 40″x78″ big. I was tightening the pipe clamps to draw together the glueup and it was sticking a bit, so I grabbed a big crescent wrench to get some more leverage. As I was tightening it, the wrench slipped off and my fingernail slammed into the neighboring pipe clamp.
As if the hellacious pain wasn’t enough, the glue was drying, so I had to finish tightening the other six clamps before I could haul my butt to the doctor’s office. To give you some idea how bad this was, when I asked the doctor if I was going to lose the nail, he laughed at me. So I spent the whole weekend taking Vicodin and playing Baldur’s Gate (fortunately the ring finger isn’t used on the xbox controller). Tomorrow I’m seeing a hand specialist, and the good doctor said something about “drill”, so I’m not expecting it to be a pleasant visit.
So the big moral of the story is that you need to be every bit as careful with hand tools as you do with power tools. I can’t believe I did all this damage to my hand with a crescent wrench!

(my last entry seems to have conclusively demonstrated that nobody reads the extended entries…)

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