I will see your iron gloves and raise you one iron suit:
Uh, maybe that's just a little too much. But maybe not, too.
I'm not knocking PPE. I wear it and I believe in it. My crew wears it...it's a requirement. Over the years I've seen it prevent injuries.
But where do we draw the line? If you wrap up every vulnerable part of your body you probably won't have enough mobility to bend over and pick up your saw, let alone use it.
Too many people figure that if they wear enough PPE they won't get hurt at all and I think they get lazy with their saw handling technique.
Usually when a guy hurts himself with a saw it's because he did something stupid. Period. They get in a hurry or they don't keep a good eye out for hazards or maybe they think "I can get away with this one more time" and they don't.
Look at the hundreds of "I cut my leg with a saw and now I'm going to buy some chaps" threads on AS. PPE might save them from the same thing next time but not unless they examine what they did wrong the first time and correct it.
One of the worst saw injuries I've seen was a kickback while bucking that caught a guy across the side of his face vertically. It knocked his hard hat off and removed part of his scalp, all of his ear, and a good sized piece of his jaw. He survived but he quit working in the woods. A full face motorcycle helmet might have saved him but paying better attention to where his bar tip was would have prevented it altogether.
