These OSHA people would protect us to death if allowed.... <snip>...
Thankfully, the OSHA nubs have nothing to say about our home shops, in the U.S., or anywhere else.
When I started my apprenticeship (pre-OSHA), it was just about a badge of experience to be missing at least part of one finger for every decade worked in the trade. Today, someone missing a finger is a rarity. That is
one of the things that OSHA has done for us. There are many others.
Yes, I have my own OSHA horror stories. Everyone does -- especially from the early years when they were knee-jerk responding to every congress-critter who had an injured constituent. Many of their (early) "fixes" were worse than the "problem" they were trying to solve. They learned -- and so did we.
People like to complain about bureaucrats. Bureaucracy is mere the means (developed under Napoleon Bonaparte's regime) to manage large tasks. Bureaucrats, like everybody else, come in the flavors of: great, good, competent, incompetent, and bad. In 1972 the American government adopted "zero-based budgeting" that rewards those who move a problem from place to place without solving it and punishes those who solve problems. The scary part are how many of our government employees (bureaucrats all) fight that system to do a good and fair job.
I have done work for more than 350 companies and government agencies over the years. If you think American government bureaucrats are bad, try working with the bureaucrats at GM, Ford, or just about any other major corporation! I cannot tell you how many times some corporate bureaucrat has tried to pass off their own lust for power with the canard that it was just "government regulation" -- and 100% of the time it was
not!
The real problem here is that the U.S. destroyed our
National Bureau of Standards in 1984 and replaced it with an industry lobby group known as the
National Institute of Standards Technology. I have done quite a bit of work over the years for NBS -- and a few jobs for NIST. There is
no comparison. NBS developed
standards while NIST funds studies (usually with college students without the necessary background or experience) to promote
private standards (for which you have to pay $15/page each time you use them). This is why today, four decades after we began the effort, we
still do not have a good CAD/CAM interchange standard that can be enforced! (I spent more than a decade working on this before I declared defeat and withdrew from the effort.) We are
about to lose the standard for
fits that was developed over a century of practice and replace it with an
unproven theory about how they should work! Take a look at ASME/ANSI Y14.5-2009 if you do not believe me.
This is an area of more than passing interest to me (in case you could not tell). The document posted at
http://www.scribd.com/Lew%20Merrick,
O-Ring Seal Application, was put together from my notes when, as a college student, I was a member of the team that wrote the o-ring section for the 1976 edition of the
SAE Handbook under the direction of a U.S. Army, 30+ year experienced engineer. It was removed from the 1980 edition (I was told that Parker-Hannifen complained) and has not resurfaced (except in my publication) since. The leakage from the SRB seals on Challenger can be tracked to this (although the actual
cause of the Challenger disaster was actually the weakening of the SRB support beams that allows the LH2 to escape from the External Tank). NBS was making the case for taking over this (and other) application standards when they were turned into NIST.