The Technology Department at Appalachian State University runs a metals lab to introduce students to basic metalworking processes. Many of the students have never worked with metal before. The class objectives call for teaching students metal properties, processing, and design problem solving. The average student is a 20-year-old junior whom technology teachers encourage to show a sense of responsibility and self-motivation. To this end, after carefully demonstrating each project, they turn the students loose in an open lab environment. They keep their metals lab open 7 to midnight and sometimes on weekends. Having an open lab situation has lead them to keep projects quite simple--and to make the facility fairly "crash proof." This article describes how they have made metal-cutting lab work convenient and fairly foolproof. (Contains 2 photos.)