First of Three: Finally! (Recovered by Sister for Brother)

The following (non-italicized text) is the missing post that Brother thought was saved somewhere. It was, and I thought he would recover and post it. But, no! I hit refresh at least a million times yesterday expecting the blog to update. I think Brother knows I get impatient and did this to vex me. As children, whenever we would both get money at the same time (xmas, relatives coming to visit, etc.) Brother would oh, so virtuously save his while I couldn't spend mine fast enough on the niceties of child life--LifeSavers, stickers, bubbles, and sparkly things. Well, some things never change:

(These aren't going to be in any sort of order, other than "I felt like doing this one today" order. If you find this confusing, don't even TRY watching the movie "Primer".)

It's an indeterminate day during the spring semester of 2001. I'm out in the university workshop, cutting metal for the human-powered vehicle I'm building under protest. A couple of other guys are also in the shop, working on their own senior projects, but we all pretty much ignore each other -- the machinery is too noisy for casual chatter, and it's best to pay attention to keeping your various body parts away from spinning shafts and such. This sort of thing is nothing new to me, since I was pretty much raised around power tools, and shop manager MacGyver has learned that he can safely leave me unsupervised, so I'm essentially alone.

So, I'm surprised when First of Three wanders in to see what I'm doing. By this time, my reflexive response to the presence of any of my so-called "helpers" is to run a power drill into his temple, douse him with 3-in-1 oil, and light him aflame. (Pause for a wacky "Scrubs"-style daydream sequence.... done.) He watches me run aluminum plate through the bandsaw for a while, then asks if he can try it.

Naturally, I seize the opportunity to maybe, possibly get some useful work out of one of these goobers, so I stop the machine, explain what needs to be done, and let him get in place to do the cutting. Now, this is not a complicated operation -- I have red lines which I've drawn on various plates, and cuts need to be made on the correct sides of the lines. The saw does most of the actual work, and all the human operator needs to do is slowly steer the plate past the moving blade. First of Three hits the green button and begins cutting.

I notice that he has one of his thumbs over the red line. My father taught me a long time ago that you keep your thumbs folded in close to your hands while doing something like this, to reduce the chance of accidentally removing them, but First of Three has admitted to never having used a power tool in his life, so I'm not surprised that he doesn't know this. I'm a believer in letting people figure things out for themselves, because they remember them better that way, so instead of pointing out his unsafe thumb position and possibly causing him to spoil the cut due to the distraction, I just step over to his other side, so as to be close to the cut-off switch on the saw.
He continues cutting -- he's actually doing fairly well. His thumb continues to approach the blade. For those who aren't familiar with industrial bandsaws, you should be aware that the blade is a continuous strip of metal running on wheels inside the housing. The strip has hundreds of little teeth cut into it, which are dragged through the workpiece at high speed.

First of Three continues steering the red line through the blade, showing unusual concentration, for him, anyway. A bandsaw blade moves at rather high speed, depending on the nature of the object to be cut. This one is pulling the teeth through the aluminum plate fast enough that they are just a blur along the leading edge of the blade, and the aluminum shavings would be piling up briskly as they're torn from the plate and carried away, except that the blade is moving fast enough to kick up a breeze that blows them away from the point of cut.

First of Three still has his thumb on the red line as he steadily tracks it past the blade. I have my hand on the cut-off switch now, and I'm thinking "Surely he sees where his thumb is going!" He has about two inches before he gets blood on my plate. While a bandsaw blade can be stopped by sufficient resistance, such as jamming a piece of steel too rapidly into it, the motor that turns the drive wheels is quite powerful -- the strongest man you can find could grab hold of the blade and his fingers would just be pulled into the thin little slot in the housing.

He's about an inch from the blade now. Aluminum shavings are piling up.....

That's where the original Brother post ended as Brother was kicked out of his library's computer lab.
What do you think happens? Does Brother hit the cut-off switch? Does First of Three move his thumb? Will First of Three be known in the next posts as No Thumbs?
This is like one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, and I always hated those.