Hang 'em high ... oops wrong thread. (shifting gears ...) 😱
Our club has hosted several well-known demonstrators who also use various types of gloves with the fingertips removed. During casual discussions among club members who were present for the program and asked for their thoughts about the idea, the response almost always seemed to be that using gloves is unnecessary and could pose a risk of getting something caught and wrapped around the lathe that you would rather not experience.
I know that this point of view is often based on safety awareness training. I was an engineer for a large manufacturing company and nothing would get a shop employee (or anyone else for that matter) fired faster than violating a safety rule. Foremost amongst those safety rules was wearing anything that could get caught in rotating machinery such as gloves, jewelry, loose clothing, or long hair.
Shortly after I started turning, I received a good education on what it is like to get a finger wrapped around the spindle of a lathe. It was all over before I even knew that anything had happened, but the index finger of my right hand was now pointed in a direction that I did not think was possible. The ER doctor told me that it would have been better if my finger had broken and spared the ligaments from being torn up as they were. After a few months of physical therapy and five years of slowly recovering, my hand is mostly back to normal except for the range of motion of my index finger. I learned from the therapist that the hand is the slowest part of the body to recover from torn ligament injuries.
In my case, it was not a glove, but a piece of sandpaper that I was holding to sand the inside surface of a very shallow dish. The sandpaper latched onto a small bark inclusion and before the sandpaper could harmlessly slip out of my hand, my hand got jerked around for a couple rotations of the dish. Things happen fast and our reaction time, by comparison, is very slow.
