Close to three years ago, I decided I could hold a piece of oak at the appropriate angle in a compound miter saw, rather than moving the back fence to the angle and letting that hold the wood. I had done this a few hundred times over the years, and had never had a problem. But as they say in the mutual fund fine print, past success is not a predictor of future success. The saw blade encountered a change in the wood's density, the blade caught for a moment, and the wood slammed into the back fence. The wood was uninjured, since it had three fingers of my left hand to break the impact.
I was lucky. I kept the fingers, even if they got pretty crunched. There were some small breaks in the last quarter inch of the middle and ring fingers, and I lost the feeling right on the ends of those fingers, but it could have been much worse. So I spent just over a year not being able to generate the force in two fingers to push a string down behind a fret. Not good for somebody who plays at various fretted instruments. Eventually, the various bone fragments quit moving around and stayed attached in the shape they would retain. The little problem of nerve damage on the fingertips never got any better, but I'm working with it.
Eventually, I started trying to get back to playing. I make psalteries and similar instruments, but my primary instruments have fretted strings. I started out by going through my guitars, figuring they would be the least difficult. An old Applause I picked up just off base when I was at Officer Training School turned out to be the most forgiving, with my nice new Epiphone the least forgiving.
More later, as I made some interesting discoveries along the way.
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