Reply #9: My gradfather was a "shingle weaver" in the saw mills of Oregon and later in Michigan

[Speck Tater]

back in the late 1800's and early 1900's. They worked with bare, unguarded circular saw blades and when I knew him back the 1940's he was retired and had three fingers missing on one hand and two missing on the other.

From Wikipedia:

The craft of shingle making demanded a high skill level and considerable manual dexterity.<2> It was this nimble motion of the around the hands of the sawyers around the spinning blade of their saws that provided the origin of the term "weaver" for the maker of shingles — the woodworkers being likened to skilled operators of looms.

Sunset magazine described the job of the shingle weavers for its readers:

"The saw on his left sets the pace. If the singing blade rips 50 rough shingles off the block every minute, the sawyer must reach over to its teeth 50 times in 60 seconds; if the automatic carriage feeds the odorous wood 60 times into the hungry teeth, 60 times he must reach over, turn the shingle, trim its edge on the gleaming saw in front of him, cut the narrow strip containing the knot hole with two quick movements of his right hand, and toss the completed board down the chute to the packers, meanwhile keeping eyes and ears open for the sound that asks him to feed a new block into the untiring teeth. Hour after hour the shingle weaver's hands and arms, plain, unarmored flesh and blood, are staked against the screeching steel that cares not what it severs. Hour after hour the steel sings its crescendo note as it bites into the wood, the sawdust cloud thickens, the wet sponge under the sawyer's nose fills with fine particles.

"If 'cedar asthma,' the shingle weaver's occupational disease, does not get him, the steel will. Sooner or later he reaches over a little too far, the whirling blade tosses drops of deep red into the air, and a finger, a hand, or part of an arm comes sliding down the slick chute."