Yesterday, Joel posted his Top 10 Woodworking Tips to WoodworkingSeminars.com. His first tip had to do with fire hazards, so I told him a story from the “good old days” of Woodsmith magazine, and he thought it would be good to share it on WoodworkingOnline. (Okay, as you will see, they weren’t always that “good!”) Anyway, this story took place in the late 1980s. The magazine wasn’t printed in color yet, each issue only had about 32 pages, and there were just a few of us working on it. We did everything from designing and building the projects, working on the drawings, researching and writing the articles, laying all of the artwork and text blocks on a page manually (long before the beginning of computerized page layout programs), and even occasionally boxing up and mailing back issues.
Since everyone did everything, a lot of us worked in the shop and we probably weren’t as careful as we might have been. One morning, Archie, our maintenance and mail guy, was the first person to arrive at work, about 6:30AM. He smelled something in the building that didn’t seem right. His nose followed the smell into the bottom floor, back end of the building: the shop. He was surprised to find that our full-sized plastic garbage can was now a melted puddle on the floor!
Apparently there had been a fire in that can overnight that was hot enough to completely melt the can into a plastic puddle. Hanging on the wall right above the can was a bulletin board loaded with paper and miraculously it didn’t catch fire or the whole building would have been in flames. Can you imagine how hot that fire must have been to melt the garbage can?
The soot from the fire did get into the heating system and the whole building was filled with it. We had to have an industrial cleaning company come in and clean everything.
We talked to the fire marshal and his best guess was that somebody had thrown some oily rags into the can (we had been using a lot of tung oil in those days), and they exploded with spontaneous combustion. After that, we went out and got one of those bright yellow metal cans with a tight, step-to-open lid on it. That was good, but the fire marshal reminded us that a fire could still take place WITHIN the can, but it would probably quickly go out because of lack of oxygen.
What we started doing (and recommend now) is that after using a rag for any kind of oil-based finishing (oils, stains, varnishes, cleaning, etc.) we open up the rags completely and spread them out on the floor or hang them from a clothesline until they dry and get hard (at least overnight). It’s the wadding them up that causes the problem. Just make sure they’re kept away from kids and pets. Once they harden, it’s safe to throw them away.
We’ve been pretty good about following that procedure but still had one other fire. It was late at night in the middle of winter a few years ago and a passing motorist saw our outside dumpster on fire and called the fire department. They quickly responded and put out the fire. It was never determined whether the fire was caused by oily rags combusting spontaneously or some passerby flicking a cigarette into the dumpster.
Anyway, we’ve “dodged the bullet” twice here at August Home Publishing so are pretty aware of the potential dangers from improper disposal of oily rags. Please learn from our lessons from the “good? old days” and open up those oily rags and let them dry out completely.