Shop fire safety

Spontaneous combustion is an issue with boiled linseed oil,
Used to use the wood lathe a lot and like many turners applied french polish (boiled linseed oil and shellac) with steel wool. Always took the used steel wool out of the house. Steel wool and a 9-volt battery is a great fire starter when camping

Regarding grinders and cloth polishing wheels: Several times at my grinding station my cloth polishing wheel started to smoulder after using my nearby grinder. I watch that
pretty closely now.

Regarding welding in the shop: If I weld in the shop, I make sure I hang around for at least a half hour after either gas or arc welding.

I had a fire extinguisher in the basement but NOW I have one in my shop also! I guess that this is obvious but it took a small fire to get me to do it. Don

I have a couple of the dry chemical extinguishers in the kitchen and garage. I once saw the fire department re-certify extinguishers in a school. Turned the bottle upside down and hit it a few times with a dead blow hammer. Flipped it upright and hit the valve area with a spray--wd40? I was told that the dry chemical will cake and become a solid mass if you don't loosen it up every year or so. Gotta be careful not to dent disposable extinguishers.

Maybe someone with direct experience can chime in

Yeah, you DO want to take your dry chemical fire extinguisher and turn it upside down and bump it a time or two and do this once a month is what I've been told in one of the fire fighting classes I've been thru. I think the last time I did this was a couple of years ago. Not good!

I have some direct experience. Recently, one of the blacksmiths had to put out a small fire and found out that most of his 5 extinguishers did not work. This was alarming to me, and I did a web search. It seems that there are a bunch of fake extinguishers floating around. I used to work for a safety conscious company and there were a lot of extinguishers around. I ended up with a bunch of old ones around the house, about 7 of them, some of them more than 10 years old. So, I decided to have a party with the neighborhood kids. I got out a bunch of large sheet metal trays and a gallon of camp fuel. The kids all went to town testing the extinguishers. (I heard later on that one of them showed calm and confidence with an extinguisher in a subsequent real incident.) None of the extinguishers had been shaken in years. No dead blow hammers. Every one functioned perfectly and put out the expected sized fire. I intended to repeat the experiment with some cheap Costco new extinguishers, but my lawn died and I am going to have to find an empty lot. A web search said that the contents of the dry chemical is non-toxic to plants. You can't believe everything you see on the web.

I keep a bucket of sand in the shop along with several fire extinguishers. I've never had to use my extinguishers but I have used the sand bucket a few times.

dontrinko said:

I had a fire extinguisher in the basement but NOW I have one in my shop also! I guess that this is obvious but it took a small fire to get me to do it. Don

Click to expand...

I have a fire extinguisher on my work bench, and a 2nd much larger one near the fire rated door between the house and garage.

I have a 10 lb one at the front of the garage and a 5 lb one at the back of the garage. And a water hose around the corner. I have fought small fires with a water hose in the past. They were all outside in dead grass from welding! I do remember a neighbor about three houses down from us when I was around 10 years old fighting a garage fire started from a gas can stored near a water heater. Took the fire department about twenty minutes to get there. He had it out by the time they arrived. Luckily, it didn't burn thru the sheet rock and get into the structure and the garage. To this day, I do not store gas cans or butane tanks in the garage or near the house for that same reason. Ken

It was good for a lot of views, That's all I'm gonna say!