We need to talk about Garage safety!

[slimt]

Did someone say BSA Lightning?
View attachment 569750

Yes

 

[skicker]

I tried to address as many issues as I could when building my new shop...
The heating system (LP gas boiler connected to in floor pex) is located on an exterior wall in the basement.
Air Compressor is also located in the basement and will have to be a new larger unit than I currently have.
All lighting is LED with no incandescent anywhere.
All electrical wiring is sized correctly for the breakers being installed.
All 5/8" drywall installed over wood framing at garage area with basement being an all concrete block design.
Metal pan decking with 6" of concrete for the basement ceiling so technically the floor between the basement and garage would have a greater than needed fire-rating.
You just always need to stay vigilant...
Gas cans have always been out in separate shed with the lawn mower.

 

[khryslerkid]

Good advice with one minor correction, if I may:
A CO2 extinguisher has no "powder" - it's just the gas itself.

I stand corrected! I was thinking about the dry chemical ones that most people will buy from a store and have in their garage or home. ABC extinguishers.

 

[Glenwood]

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Here's my F350 after 'falling off' 4 Jack Stands & sitting on my concrete driveway when I was installing new brakes, rotors, calipers & axle bearings. LONG STORY! Smashed my left forearm, wrist & hand. Just finished physical therapy on my wrist, hand & three fingers last week and this all happened back on June 4th. UGH!
I was laying underneath pumping my floor Jack to raise the left rear corner of the truck when all hell broke out! I AM VERY VERY LUCKY, for sure!!!
Interestingly enough, I had the driver's front wheel ready to remount & when the truck fell, two front studs landed on the inside of the wheel & held that corner up. Go figure!
Notice my floor Jack still wedged under the truck!
Good thing that came out of this is I talked my wife (finally!) into getting a 4-Poat lift for my garage! Yahoo! Food for thought! Scott

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Lucky indeed! Lots of stories about those drive on ramps collapsing too.

 

[the mississippi madman]

Here’s another garage fire that happened a month and a half ago.

From this...View attachment 569763

To this...

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This hurts

 

[the mississippi madman]

Put an exhuast fan in your garage to keep fumes cleared

 

[69 GTX]

I have a power strip for all my rechargeable batteries. I always shut it off and remove all batteries from chargers.

 

[khryslerkid]

I saw an article on a garage fire where the homeowners kept all of their dead batteries in a container. All household type batteries like 9 volt, aa batteries, ect. Well they still hold a small charge and being in the container touching one another, they shorted and started a fire. Some don't think of something like that happening until it's too late.

 

[furyus]

And when welding, I get chest pains from inhaling the fumes. I wear a respirator whenever I weld now.

 

[6PKRTSE]

And when welding, I get chest pains from inhaling the fumes. I wear a respirator whenever I weld now.

Also never use brake cleaner to clean your metal before welding. The chemicals in brake clean mixed with the welding gas creates basically a nerve gas & can make you very ill & even kill you if inhaled too much.

 

[khryslerkid]

And when welding, I get chest pains from inhaling the fumes. I wear a respirator whenever I weld now.

Also never use brake cleaner to clean your metal before welding. The chemicals in brake clean mixed with the welding gas creates basically a nerve gas & can make you very ill & even kill you if inhaled too much.

We have a thread on here about this...

http://www.forbbodiesonly.com/moparforum/threads/welders-beware-read-this.100258/#post-910331645

A lot of parts cleaner and brake cleaner contains Tetrachloroethylene. "Tetrachloroethylene is also highly toxic. It is a Group 2A carcinogen, which means that it is probably carcinogenic to humans and also a central nervous system depressant which can enter the body through respiratory or dermal exposure. It is also probably linked to Parkinson’s Disease." (From the article link below)

https://envirofluid.com/info-library/case-studies/how-to/brake-cleaner-chlorinated

Unbelievably, we even found it in a batch of Anti Splatter! It was listed in the ingredients!

As its being burned in the welding arc, there is a distinctive oder. Followed by a sore throat, becoming light headed, and headache. These are just early signs that you are being exposed to it. You can just spray a short burst of parts cleaner into the air, wait one hour and it's still being suspended in the area. You won't smell it until you strike an arc and start burning it.

The key to any welding is proper ventilation and not having any smoke come near you.

 

[8stackhemi]

Lucky indeed! Lots of stories about those drive on ramps collapsing too.

NEVER put an 8000lb TRUCK on 3-Ton Jack stands, even if there's 4 of them!!! BOY, DID I LEARN!
FIRST, they are actually rated by PAIRS, so each one is ONLY REALLY RATED @ 1500LBS each, at least the cheap ones I owned were actually that bad! i now have 4 brand new 12,000LB stands for my truck (6klbs/ea) and 4 new 6,000LB stands (3klbs/ea) for my cars! NOT overkill, just cautious for sure......Nuff said.

 

[Mike67]

I can't find the pic, but back in HVACR school they showed us a pic of a house where a mechanic that repaired a refrigerant leak on a refrigerator decided to test it with compressed air....oil and air do not mix. It blew the whole side of the house open....

 

[moparedtn]

We do monthly visual , annual , 6 year internal and the 12yr hydro test/inspections.... You don't want to be out of bullets when you need them most!

Then you are complying with NFPA, Scooter!

 

[kiwigtx]

And when welding, I get chest pains from inhaling the fumes. I wear a respirator whenever I weld now.

I get chest pains just opening my water bill each month.

Seriously though....I am guilty of what @Glenwood said about adequate ventilation when using a makeshift paint booth. I even had Halogen lights to warm the block up before and after spraying. I also had a small homemade spray booth for my airbrush & model painting. Vented by a 12V fan through an open window...a bit crude, but only used sporadically. I'll have to be more careful now, my new garage door gives a really good airtight seal in the garage now...not like the old one you could put your fist through at the top.

 

[dadsbee]

My negative pressure booth isn't adequate??

 

[moparedtn]

Interestingly enough, I had the driver's front wheel ready to remount & when the truck fell, two front studs landed on the inside of the wheel & held that corner up. Go figure!
Notice my floor Jack still wedged under the truck!
Good thing that came out of this is I talked my wife (finally!) into getting a 4-Poat lift for my garage! Yahoo! Food for thought! Scott
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Good Lord man, that thing almost ATE you!
Can't say I haven't been in your shoes before, mind you. I have, more than once, foolishly every time.
I don't care for "modern" jack stand design (ok, Harbor Freight if I'm being honest). Vehicles tend to slide on them too easily, leaving me to try and wrestle some critter from falling off long enough for my wife or whoever to come reposition the jack or whatever.

Ok, I gotta tell a story here, apologies in advance.
Y'all know me.

I have had my own '04 Ram (4x4, hemi, 20's, etc.) fall on me one time, quite literally.
Again being foolish, I was just replacing rotors and pads on her one corner at a time, like I've done a hundred times before on dozens of vehicles over the years. I wasn't using stands (dumbass), just jacking up one corner at a time as I went along.

Oh, a key part to the story is this was back when my current wife and I were still a new thing and she was still learning about "Ed's ways of doing things".
She'd been warned by friends and family that I tend to be lax on safety....
Got to the drivers' rear and was sitting on the concrete floor of the garage, "indian style" in shorts and barefoot. Jack was under the differential center section.
I dropped a caliper bolt and it rolled right under the diff, of course, so I just sort of laid out under the brake rotor/edge of the truck bed to stretch out under there to fetch the bolt.
The jack chose that exact moment to collapse. All at once, too, no gradual thing.
The truck came down fast on me, the rotor pinning my leg at the shin bone flat against the concrete. The bed was busy doing the same to my shoulders.

By not using jack stands, the irony was not lost on me that I had now become the default jack stand.
Truck had me planted good. There was no movement possible.

My wife, bless her heart, had been hanging out in the garage and witnessed all this. She let out a scream and came running around the back of the truck to see me there, cussing like a sailor and trying to bench press the truck off me to no avail.
She was genuinely shocked to not see me dead, I reckon.
Meanwhile, I can only muster enough breath under there to quietly ask her to jack the thing back up off me.
She doesn't hear, so I do one of those "JACK....THE....F-ING...THING....UP" deals, one breath per word.
She stops screaming long enough to comply and I roll up outta there and stand up, checking for carnage.
My left shin has a perfect, deep imprint of the venting vanes of the rotor embedded in it; my right shoulder had dislocated, having taken the brunt of the weight on it. Had to put it back in real quick (just like Mel Gibson does it in Lethal Weapon I, if you're wondering).
I'm sore but nothing broken.

She's looking at me like she's seeing a ghost. "But...the truck was ON you! How....?"
I just sort of grin at her and shrug my shoulders. Told her the only thing I'd ever come up with in such circumstances is that God has a sense of humor - and I must amuse the hell outta Him."

She made me buy a new jack right after that.
I use jack stands now, too.

 

[WileE]

The subject of chemicals, vapors, materials, cannot be over emphasized. Years ago, while doing a cleaning job, I threw a rag I was using naphtha into the garage garbage can. A little while later, someone noticed the contents starting to smoke. It was self combustion. The rag self heated to start burning.

 

[khryslerkid]

NEVER put an 8000lb TRUCK on 3-Ton Jack stands, even if there's 4 of them!!! BOY, DID I LEARN!
FIRST, they are actually rated by PAIRS, so each one is ONLY REALLY RATED @ 1500LBS each, at least the cheap ones I owned were actually that bad! i now have 4 brand new 12,000LB stands for my truck (6klbs/ea) and 4 new 6,000LB stands (3klbs/ea) for my cars! NOT overkill, just cautious for sure......Nuff said.

Glad that you're still with us!

You can't be safe enough working under a vehicle. I'll even go to the extent to place the wheel that I just took off under the car. Gets it out of your way, if the jack happens to fail or the car slips off somehow you might be spared if you have a part of yourself under there. Also if this happens you'll have a better chance of getting a jack under there to get it back up again.

If you have a big overhang like you had on the back of your truck, do one side at a time with the floor jack snuck in behind the wheel. That way you'll have the handle outside of the vehicle instead of underneath.

My Sebring is low in the front and the frame is way back (like most modern cars). I use a set of solid ramps that I made out of 2x12s to drive the car up on first, then get the floor jack in place to go higher.

Another thing when useing a floor jack is to watch the wheels on the jack and make sure they are rolling while you are jacking. It doesn't take much for those small wheels to hang up on a piece of dirt or whatever and next thing you know the jack slips off the frame. As the jack goes up the location of the jacking point changes, so the jack needs to roll as the vehicle gets higher.

 

[NJRR]

Glad that you're still with us!

You can't be safe enough working under a vehicle. I'll even go to the extent to place the wheel that I just took off under the car. Gets it out of your way, if the jack happens to fail or the car slips off somehow you might be spared if you have a part of yourself under there. Also if this happens you'll have a better chance of getting a jack under there to get it back up again.

If you have a big overhang like you had on the back of your truck, do one side at a time with the floor jack snuck in behind the wheel. That way you'll have the handle outside of the vehicle instead of underneath.

My Sebring is low in the front and the frame is way back (like most modern cars). I use a set of solid ramps that I made out of 2x12s to drive the car up on first, then get the floor jack in place to go higher.

Another thing when useing a floor jack is to watch the wheels on the jack and make sure they are rolling while you are jacking. It doesn't take much for those small wheels to hang up on a piece of dirt or whatever and next thing you know the jack slips off the frame. As the jack goes up the location of the jacking point changes, so the jack needs to roll as the vehicle gets higher.

X2 on placing the wheels under the car. Easy solution, great insurance.