I've been following this product for several years and it seems to have developed a fair market share.
The safety part, stopping the blade within a few milliseconds of contacting flesh, seems great, but cutting a piece of too damp pressure treated lumber can also trip the "one use" blade brake and you then have to shell out $69 for a replacement brake assembly to get the safety feature back.
Methinks that could lead to a lot of bypassing of the safety feature to let the user on working.
No, and I never will. It is an expensive solution to a problem that doesn't exist, developed and marketed by an ethically corrupt company.
You also forgot the cost of the $100 blade that is destroyed in the cost of the false activation. At least the false activation isn't likely to kill you like it is with an auto airbag.
All I remember is the obscene price for these touch-light-table-saw mixtures. Regardless of the price of medical treatment for the careless saw operator, the price needs to come down quite a bit.
Yes, it is expensive and the company was started by a lawyer so you can draw your own conclusion about ethics, but, what problem does not exist? Has no one ever been injured by a table saw?
Once tripped the user is not going to bypass the safety as it still needs a cartridge. My deductable for the ER is $150 so I can prevent a trip to the hospital for half that.
They are gaining market share because the have the potential to save a serious injury and the resulting law suites for employers, or school shops, etc. My saw will last me the rest of my life, but if I was buying a new one, I'd consider the Saw Stop.
There is also a video of a real finger going into the blade. I don't remember if it was You Tube or some other source.
Yes... It has a market among those home woodworkers who overpay for their tools because they don't know any better due to a lack of experience...
This safety saw was developed for the educational and woodworking production markets... The sort where a saw would be used all day during the work week by either students in a school or workers in a production carpentry shop...
The medical costs are exponentially larger than the $100 replacement of components required after you actually cut yourself with the saw...
Anyone who would willfully disable safety devices on their power tools to be able to keep working after they have made a mistake isn't someone who should really be using such tools anyway...
No competent table saw user has ever been injured by a properly setup table saw. I don't need some overpriced improper trip prone nanny device, I know perfectly well not to put any body parts where they would contact the spinning blade. The already silly blade guard that came with my saw is still in the factory plastic wrap, has been for years, and all my fingers are still attached exactly where they should be. I also never stand in-line with the blade, so if there is a kickback the piece shoots harmlessly past me.
$150 deductible, or $69 cartridge + $100 blade = $169.
They market to irrational paranoia, rather like Volvo (cars).
It doesn't matter how well the product may work in a controlled test, the fact is that it is prone to false trips, destroying blades and wasting time, and is of no use to competent table saw users.
I'll also note that I do not use the silly consumer anti-kickback "safety" chains on my chain saw, and again, all fingers, toes, etc. are still attached where they should be. I was just out Saturday clearing trees for a friend after an F1 tornado dropped them on his lake house too. I watched someone at the next house over using a consumer saw and taking 4x as long to cut the same sized branch as my saw.
I'm happy for you and I hope you remain fully digitized. OTOH, there are plenty of experienced, competent saw users that had an accident and lost a finger or worse. The statistics are very high; I was amazed when I saw the numbers. 565,000 in the past 17 years according to the Journal of Trauma published last January. .
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Results: An estimated 565,670 (95% confidence interval [CI]:
473,442-657,898) table saw-related injuries were treated in US Emergency Departments from 1990 to 2007. Children (younger than 18 years) were more likely to be injured at school (p < 0.01; relative risk = 68.79; 95% CI:
46.58-101.61), whereas adults were more likely to be injured at home (p <
0.01; relative risk = 2.05; 95% CI: 1.82-2.32). Fingers/thumbs were injured most often (86%; 486,181 of 565,670) and lacerations were the most common type of injury (66%; 373,319 of 565,360). Amputations were associated with
10% (56,848 of 565,360) of the injuries, and most of the amputations involved the finger/thumb (56,817 of 56,848). Eight percent (47,916 of
565,458) of patients were hospitalized.
Two out of three isn't bad, but table saws are, whether you want to admit it or not, dangerous tools. You attitude tells me that you're not long for your fingers.
No, I wouldn't (didn't, in fact) buy a SawStop either, but I'm not so foolish to believe that injuries are only for the incompetent.
That's a small cost. BTW, you need a separate cartridge for dado blades.
Airbags would be a good thing, were it not for design by government.
I did forget the cost of the blade which gets trashed when the safety brake fires, when I made the OP on this thread. That's even more reason why someone might choose to give up on that safety feature the first time it worked, particularly if it happened because of cutting damp wood.
And, I'd expect there are plenty of folks out there who could figure out how to bypass the safety features by rewiring the motor power through a conventional switch and just "fuggedaboutit" from then on.
I was born in '36 and I've made it this far without any serious power tool injuries. The closest I came was back in machine shop class in Junior High school when I was using a flat file to smooth the metal handle of a little shop hammer I was making....while it was spinning in a metal working lathe.
I was wearing a shop coat with long sleeves and it's left sleeve sleeve got snagged by the square head of the lathe dog's setscrew. It scared the shit out of me, but only tore the shop coat, not my flesh. Why the hell our instructor let us wear those shop coats without warning us more I'll never know.
My favorite "Bull of The Woods" cartoon by J.R. Williams is of course this one:
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I've still got that little hammer BTW, though I never found much use for it, so I still looks pretty new:
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Jeff
-- Jeffry Wisnia (W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE) The speed of light is 1.8*10e12 furlongs per fortnight.
I once had my lathe's leadscrew start wrapping up my sweatshirt. Nothing more than a few expletives while hitting the clutch/brake lever, turning off the motor and then manually unwinding things for a minute.
I own one of these sawstop and when the saw is working it's great but the t hing keeps breaking down on me. When I got it I found some of the wire were n't connected. Had to get a mate in to fix that. Then the switch in the doo r went down, causing the saw not to run because of an override system. Next false trigger of the breaking system, still no answers on that one. Sawsto p said it was because of contact with earthed metal. I wasn't cutting anyth ing at the time. The saw was just running as I was picking up another bit o f wood. It looks like the next false trigger was caused by a bolt which hol d the Arbor Assembly in place. This caused the blade to drop into the brake and stop. At the time I didn't know what had happen because once again the saw was just run as I was picking something up. Though all of this never g ot any help much from Sawstop or Gabbett the company I bought the saw from in Australia, they keep telling me that this saw never has any problems. Al l of this in 6 month of owning the saw. Can't say I would buy one again. No w thinking about how to hot wire the machine to keep it running.
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