kim191•8d ago

Almost lost two fingers to a hot cut that shot off the anvil last Tuesday

I was in my garage shop in Tulsa around 8pm grinding out a batch of bottle openers when I made a dumb move with a hot cut chisel. I had a piece of 5160 at a bright orange, maybe 1800 degrees, and instead of setting it flat on the anvil face I held it at an angle and gave the chisel one hard whack too close to the near edge. The cutoff piece flipped up and back instead of dropping, came right past my left glove at eye level, and I felt the heat through the leather before I even knew what happened. I dropped everything, killed the forge, and spent the next ten minutes under the sink with cold water on two fingers that were already turning pink. Ended up with a small blister on my middle finger and a burn on my index knuckle, nothing hospital level, but it could have been way worse if I had been standing six inches closer. What I changed that night was putting a scrap wood backstop behind the anvil and getting a pair of those long welding tongs so my hands stay further from the strike zone. Anyone else had a cutoff fly back at them, and did you change your setup or just your technique?