leather apron safety goggles leather work gloves hearing protection (some of us don't have God's normal ration and are a bit paranoid about sustained noise levels)

heavy shoes/work boots of some sort dust/particle mask for use while on the belt sander / similiar

and of course, a functioning human brain.

Have I missed anything? No seperate welder at this point so no welding mask.

If you don't wear glasses. If you do, get safety lenses, and ones as large as possible. They don't interfere with your prescription or fog up the way goggles do. And I know they work--my glasses have the pits to prove it! Incidentally, the _only_ eye injury I sustained during the last 27 years of shop work came on a day I was wearing goggles! I'd been doing a lot of grinding, and apparently a steel splinter was caught on my hair. It got into my eye _later_, after the goggles were off and I'd left the shop. Had to have the ER take it out--miserable eye pain for about three days. So now I keep the goggles for guests who don't have glasses, and brush my hair vigorously with my face pointed at the ground after using the post grinder. That way any sharp bits fall away from my face instead of right past my eyeballs.

I occasionally use a rag or glove in special circumstances, but a glove has no feeling; you can't tell if a piece is hot or not. And I've been _burned_ too many times through gloves; the glove soaks up the heat from the hot metal piece, and by the time the wave of heating gets to your skin the glove has soaked up a great deal of heat. Dropping a hot piece of metal is _much_ faster than getting a hot glove off!

Also, many of us go from forge/anvil/vice to power tools in the course of working on a piece. And gloves are a safety _hazard_ around rotary or belted power tools; I personally know two guys who've had fingers torn out by the roots (in one case clear back to the wrist!) because a glove got snagged in machinery. Most shop safety people in my experience flat-out prohibit gloves around machinery, just like loose clothes or hair or finger rings.

The place I find gloves really useful is when working large pieces at high heat; it's not a matter of conducted heat in this case but radiant heating of exposed skin. I find that when making stakes and bicks out of heavy shaft or truck axles, I use a full apron, gloves and long sleeves, and often need to wet them down besides.

Fisher used to advertise itself as "The Quiet Anvil". My main anvil is an
350# Fisher, and I've found no need for ear protection hammering there. (I do use earplugs when power grinding, and routinely with power woodworking tools, and I've learned to take them to workshops because somebody always has one or more of those damn churchbell anvils....

Speaking of workshops and noise, about a year ago I attended a hammer-in where the host ran his power hammer off a big old Fairbanks-Morse farm engine. With no muffler, and the straight exhaust pipe bouncing the noise right back down from the roof. I would never have believed it, but you actually _couldn't hear whether the power hammer was hammering or not_!

This is more important than all the rest put together. Just to put things in perspective, look at some of those Classical Greek vases, the red and black ones with the great scenes of daily life. The blacksmiths are always working _nude and barefoot_. Think about forge welding without your pants sometime.