Comment by ajb
4 days ago
Definitely
Risks to consider in general are (also of the top of my head don't take as exhaustive):
* Electrocution
* Burning yourself
* Setting stuff on fire
* Fumes, both from soldering and overheating/burning plastic
There's a kind of balance between habits and awareness. Rely too much on awareness and you will miss some safety issue during a complicated repair. You need good habits, but rely too much on them and you won't notice when you finally make a mistake.
Those apply during repair processes. It's also possible to render a device unsafe to use, for example by damaging a li-ion battery or by a 'bodge' repair that circumvents a safety feature.
A tip on how to reinforce good safety habits taught to me by my shop class teacher is to refer to any dangerous tool you are using by the kind of injury it is likely to inflict. The lathe is the deglover, the angle grinder is the eye splinter injector, the welder is the retina tanning machine, the soldering station is the IQ diminisher, etc. This helps to put you in the mind of "I need the eye splinter injector for this task, how shall I go about avoiding getting splinters injected into my eyeballs?" instead of getting complacent.
> "I need the eye splinter injector for this task, how shall I go about avoiding getting splinters injected into my eyeballs?"
Reminds me of the comments I read on a video of somebody doing something unsafe - "safety squint".
That's certainly a good way to put you in the right mindset - although many of them can injure you in more than one way.