If it takes all week I'm going to get this pile of old books off my desk

and back onto the bookshelf where they belong.

Crappy old books which have something to say about tool safety.

This is the 4th-- AND BY GOD, FINAL-- in a series of posts on the Department of Labor's attempts to protect children on the farm.

Here are the previous posts which include the relevant citations and links:

Farm Safety and Government Intrusion

Followup: Farm Safety and Government Intrusion

Safety through the ages

(It isn't as if I have four posts' worth of things to say. Let's just say there were a few challenges to getting to the point, including the sad fact that my new computer isn't speaking to my old printer/scanner.)

Picking up where I left off... .

From Mac M. Jones' Shopwork on the Farm (1945), p. 100-101

I focus on screwdriver safety because under the new DOL rules, kids would be prohibited from using, among other things, cordless screwdrivers. Although I have broken rules 2, 3, 5 (how else would you open a can of paint?), 6, & 7 from time to time, these all seem quite sensible, and not at all hard to follow. In fact, they seem like the sort of rules a parent would explain to a child just learning to use tools. 

The entry on "Safety" in my Popular Science Do-It-Yourself Encyclopedia (copyright 1956 by Arlich Publishing Co., Inc.) repeats these basic rules, and reminds us that

[s]crewdrivers with insulated handles should be used when making electrical repairs of installations and be sure the current is off before attempting such work.

~~

Sometimes, things just don't pan out as I was hoping they would. Lord knows I've tried, but I just can't get beyond this simple point. If you achieve the age of adulthood (18) and can't manage to screw a screw into something using a battery operated screwdriver without seriously injuring yourself, you are stupid, and by reverse genetics, so are your parents. And no Federal Regulations are going to change that.