I believe that theory about pulling you hand in is nonsense unless you have big bulky gloves or something
-It is
not nonsense, but then, it is also not
universal.
Gloves are simply PPE- personal protective equipment. You don't always need a hard hat, but should wear one when you DO need it. You don't always need steel-toe boots, but should wear them when you DO need to. You don't always need ear plugs or muffs, but should wear them when you do. And so on.
A lot of old-timers have the knee-jerk "no gloves, no how, never" mindset, apparently having been told that the moment you put them on, the instant anyone anywhere in the plant turns on so much as a small drill press, you'll be instantly sucked in and crushed into a fine red paste. This is, of course, not even remotely true.
Now, it IS very much true that people HAVE indeed suffered grievous injuries or even death when a gloved hand got snagged and yanked them into the machine.
But here's the key part:
It Wasn't The Gloves' Fault. The fault lies in the operator who stuck his goddam hands where they shouldn't be. He let them get to close to the wheel, or didn't break the spiral swarf coming off the drill bit, or stuck his finger in there to just real quick brush off the chips.
In the majority of the cases, the operator could have been snagged and drawn in whether or not he was wearing gloves.
So what a lot of factories did was simply say "no gloves, no how, never", and to this day a lot of old-timers keep repeating that like a mantra they haven't really stopped to think about.
Gloves are protective equipment, designed to protect your hands. Not all gloves are ideal for all situations, or even necessary for all situations. You don't need to be wearing welding gloves if you're trying to rebuild a carburetor, thin latex gloves don't offer enough protection when welding, elbow-length ball-gown gloves will do you no good when using the solvent tank, and you wouldn't want to use $100 leather driving gloves while changing a transmission.
There's a time and a place for all of them, and a time and a place to NOT use any of them.
Personally, I nearly constantly wear the thin black nitrile gloves- so habitually, I find myself disliking doing nearly anything in the shop without them. That includes using my machine tools, the drill press, hand drills, grinders, you name it.
And yet I still have all of my fingers, and all are complete. I
might use one Band-Aid a year, and even that's usually just an eXacto mishap.
You know why?
I Keep My Goddam Hands Away From The Spinny Bits.
This is very much a "keep your booger hook off the bang switch" thing. If there's swarf on the cutter or piled up on the milling cutter blocking my view, I don't stick a finger in there to "just poke it away real quick", I use a damn chip brush. If the stringy bits are getting too long out of the drilled hole, I let up pressure on the drill for a moment, which breaks them off at a short, manageable, non-grabby length. If I need to grind something small, I use pliers or vise-grips to hold it.
What the gloves HAVE done, is saved me from
countless slivers, sharp edges, burrs and other pokey bits over the last decade. I'm quite busy in my machine shop, and have been doing quite a bit of construction and fabrication on top of that, and right at this exact moment, I have exactly
zero nicks, cuts, scrapes, pokes or slivers on either hand.
Bottom line: Gloves are there to protect your hands. Use them when they're needed, or useful, and use the correct one for the application.
For your table saw use, gloved or not. keep your goddam hands away from the blades! That's why the gods gave us push sticks and featherboards and stuff.
Doc.
) there's generally little reason to wear gloves on a machine tool. I keep my machines fairly clean, so it's not like my hands would wind up covered in dirt and rust if I didn't have gloves. 