Professor McCabe is a personal mentor of mine, a great guy, and a really talented engineer and machinist. MachinistBlog.com did an interview with him where he talks about his program, his thoughts on hobbyist machining and making, and its influence on the engineering trade. Nate writes:

Nial got into engineering because of his father, a railroad mechanic born in England. His father would bring home bits of locomotives or other parts for a fascinated Nial to explore.

…

“I always stood around and watched him doing stuff,” Nial said. “And he was a good sport about it, showing me and my brothers how to do it all. Then when I got to high school I decided I liked the idea of working on stuff, and from what I thought teaching looked like a good job for me.”

…

In the last few years he has seen a boom in popularity in the hobby, especially among men who work in professional settings. His theory is that most of these people went to college and got degrees in things like accounting or medicine, and never got to do the hands-on work that their fathers or grandfathers did. So now, with more free time and money to spare, this generation is going to Home Depot for equipment and trying on small projects.

For the moment, that means increases in sales and a suddenly wide-open market for internet companies catering to these hobbyists, Nial said. But in the long-term, it could lay the groundwork for a resurgence in engineering itself.

“A lot of hobbyists realize now that it’s fun and they can get into it, and most of the growth we’ve seen in the last 10 years has been from those hobbyists,” he said. “But now I hope there’s a second tier and as they get involved their children or nephews or nieces will be inspired to work in the field of engineering and innovation.”

Michele Dufault, Yale Undergratuate

Since this article first appeared in the New York Times, I’ve seen it brought up a number of times on blogs, on twitter, and even on Facebook. Most of the remarks made about the situation imply that she was not following proper safety procedures, or that shop safety in general was lax. I can’t say for sure if this was the case, having no knowledge of the situation beyond the Times article. The only thing we can say for certain is that this was a tragic accident. But there is one line in the article which jumped out at me as the most likely overall cause for this tragedy. (emphasis mine, below:)

On Tuesday, just weeks from graduating, she toiled late at night inside a machine shop in a chemistry lab, as she had for weeks while working on her senior thesis: investigating the possible use of liquid helium for detecting dark matter particles. Ms. Dufault, 22, was killed when her hair became caught in the lathe, whose rotating axis is used to hold materials like wood or metal being shaped.

I’m going to assume that because she was there late at night, it means she had other things to do during the day. This means that she had most likely already put in a full day of classes, studying, and labs before she went to work in the shop. Even when I was 22, a full day of school would have left me exhausted — I don’t think I’d have the energy to then go work in a machine shop. A machine shop is not the place you want to be when you’re tired. Fatigue is the single greatest hazard you have to deal with when using tools, particularly machine tools. Even when you’re clear-headed and alert, machine tools can kill you. When you’re fatigued, all your faculties — your reaction time, your senses, your clear thinking and spatial reasoning — are attenuated. You need all of these working at 100% to operate this kind of machinery. There are no exceptions.

A friend of mine is a toolmaker, and he told me a story about the first shop he ever worked in. He said there was a handwritten sign on the wall with the best shop safety advice he’s ever heard:

“If you’re tired, get the hell out!“

That pretty much sums it up. If you’re tired, you’re a danger to yourself and to everyone else in the shop. Even if you’re taking all the proper safety precautions and wearing all the proper equipment, you will make mistakes if you are suffering from fatigue.

The thing to remember is that it’s ok to just walk away. In the case of this young woman, I imagine she was under a lot of pressure — she probably had a project deadline hanging over her head, and she was on a tight schedule. I can understand and sympathize with that, but really, there’s no college degree in the world that is worth your safety or your life.

So please be careful when you’re working with tools. Listen to what your body is telling you. If you feel your mind start to wander, or you start to make little mistakes, just stop. Walk away. Take a break or even call it a day.

Looks like a good show!

Make: Live 06 – Bikes, Basics to Extremes
Wednesday April 13th, 9pm ET/6pm PT
Watch at makezine.com/live or on UStream
Please join us in the UStream chat or mark tweets with #makelive to interact live with the show.

We also give away a fabulous prize from Digi-Key to one chat member who can solve our photo challenge. We can’t wait to share some of the joy of making with you, live each 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, on Make: Live.

Featuring:
Get to Know Your Bike
Our own Becky Stern will be doing a bike primer; she’ll show us basic bike parts and will demonstrate a few bike maintenance and repair tricks. And Nick Normal from World Maker Faire New York will be checking in to show off what he carries in his mobile bike repair kit.

William Thomas Porter – PorterCycles
Brooklyn-based extreme bike maker William Thomas Porter of PorterCycles will be showing us around his workshop, where he builds some rather unique bikes. You’ll get a chance to see his flywheel powered trike and something he calls a The Expert Level, which he classifies as a “french circus bike” and takes quite a bit of practice to ride.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the preview video m4v, or watch clips from the show on YouTube.