Which is why they originally wanted to require all saw manufacturers to license their technology, right? I'm not saying you can't buy a SawStop if you want, it's fine with me if you have that kind of money to throw around and want to feel safer, I just worry that feeling safer makes people less careful and less prone to practice safe techniques.
You should be relying on yourself, not on your tools, to keep yourself from being injured.
No, most people know that standing in front of a loaded gun is stupid, safety or no safety, just like reaching across a running sawblade without a guard is stupid. It isn't any less stupid because you stick a SawStop on it. Nothing is foolproof, it doesn't matter that you've got a riving knife and anti-kickback pawls, you don't go standing in the line of fire because that wood could come shooting back at you. But you know, it isn't the safety equipment that makes you safe, it's the techniquest that you use. Certainly the safety equipment can help but it can never replace just being careful and thinking about what you're doing.
It's funny, just about everyone I know who has had an accident has said "I should have known better". Yes, they should have. Accidents don't just magically happen, they are a failure on some level of the operator or the equipment.
I don't think that follows directly, no. Why they wanted manufacturers to license their product was they had a large investment in a product which they thought marketable and had an (initial) business plan that didn't include making the saw themselves.
Their technology was/is certainly clever, innovative, and successful in addressing a market niche, but that's required of almost any product to be successful.
It's not a zero-sum game, though. Again, to reiterate, Sawstop does nothing to _prevent_ an accident; in fact, an accident has to happen for it to have any effect (neglecting the Type II error). It will almost certainly mitigate the effects of that accident, however.
Safety is dependent on a combination of all the things that goes into the operation from the design and manufacture of the tool to the music blaring in the background. Operator attention and proper usage is surely a major factor but as others have noted, the unexpected is often the culprit.
And, as my final word, again from my experiences w/ accident analysis, I can't number the times I've heard the expression of "I've _always_ done it that way!" or "It seemed safe to me!". And, of course, those stories were told by those that survived to tell their tale... :( It is certainly fortunate that the most severe of woodworking incidents are not likely to be fatal.
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Brian Henderson wrote: ...
There's one nugget w/ which I agree. Of course, I had to take it out of context to _fully_ agree, but, hey, you take what you can get... :)
I said I wasn't going to add more, but hadn't seen this response at the time and this was too good an opportunity to waste... :)
BUT, the above truism said, your emphasis would say the punchpress the previous respondent talked about would be perfectly safe if it were designed originally to be operated as he described the jury-rigged operation -- after all, all it takes is the operator not failing...
Simply for your consideration of the position of safety-related design and equipment in the equation...
People think that they will not get hurt on a TS are stupid. Equil logic used here.
Which just proves that they too ar human and had a lapse in judgement.
Accidents don't just magically happen, they are a failure on some level of the operator or the equipment.
Now you are getting the picture. Call it what you like practicing safety does not prevent all accidents.
No the last sentence I was talking more in general, that the status quo gets maintained until something terrible happens and then everyone wonders why no one did anything about it.
But you can imagine a situation where the latches were removed and an accident happened that had nothing to do with the latches not being there, but the media would get a hold of OSHA citing you for not having them and be all over it but have lost interest in the story by the time anyone actually figured out what really happened.
But my point is just that if the regulation says you gotta have the latch but there are no serious repurcussions for ignoring the regulation then there is no reason for anyone to either fix the regulation or the device.
-Leuf
Yes, raising the floor around the saw is usually a first suggestion, but it comes with it's own set of unique problems.
It virtually eliminates putting any tools so organized on mobile bases. That's a big problem unless one has a large shop to play with. Many cabinet table saws I've looked also have some type of mechanical component like a dust port near the base of the saw. In all fairness, there could be some advantages to a raised floor too, such as running dust collector tubing under a raised floor. Occasionally, I have been on raised wooded floors and truthfully, it's irritating. I feel the vibrations from rolling on such a floor whereas I'm infinitely more comfortable rolling on a flat, solid, hard unforgiving surface. I'm sure I'd feel much different if I was walking on these surfaces, but I'm not and never will be.
However, these things are not my biggest concern and that is the fact that I'd be rolling up and down little ramps depending where I was going and what I was doing. In 1987, I rolled down an 8" ramp with an elevation of 3" and tipped my wheelchair over. I broke both legs. To this day, I can remember the pain and months of aggravation from being in a wheelchair with casts on my legs. Ever since then I've always been terrified of doing the same thing again. Obviously, it's a personal paranoia that I have to deal with, so I intend to mitigate it by lowering a table saw rather than raising myself.
That's my explanation and I'm sticking to it. :)
You do have a good point. If seatbelts and airbags were removed from cars, people would pay more attention to driving and the accident rate would plummet. For the few that do die, that is just "thinning the herd".
Think of the money to be saved by ditching head restraints, ABS, and collapsible steering columns. A section of 1" pip can to the same think, lots cheaper. People have just become to complacent.
I'm surprised that no one hear has realized the solution. The expanded foam tablesaw blade. Easily fitable to any saw and would render it totally safe. What an idea. I could make millions.
Wishful thinking...Your financial windfall and then some would be swallowed up in lawsuits.......Do you realize what kind of "rug burn" you can get from a spinning wheel of expanded foam? Rod
You had to post it... Some politician is probably already drafting a law! They can sell them next to the low flush toilets and V-chips.
Pssssst... wanna' buy a METAL saw blade?
But millions of people do not get hurt on a TS every year, it is only a tiny percentage that ever sustain serious injury.
It prevents the overwhelming majority of them and vastly minimizes the damage if one ever does occur. If you are never standing in the line of fire from a kickback, you will never get hit by one. If you practice good tablesaw safety, it should take extraordinary circumstances to ever get seriously injured by one. That's just a fact of life.
Now try to require that the entire tablesaw industry use your, and only your blades. Heck, they tried it with SawStop.
Get started on the tooling; a four cavity would be nice. I have the machine time to make them.
Nicely put, Edwin...
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Not hardly -- the eye injuries from radial disintegration would have it off the market in a week... :)
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I'll tag onto Brian's comment with a bit of reinforcement. I believe he's right in that look how often we see posts here about accidents happening to folks with all sorts of safety equipment on their tools. Yet, somehow the accidents happen. Brian isn't arguing against safety equipment, he's arguing in favor of the most fundamental of all safety equipment - awareness. Wait long enough and a post will appear about someone who whacked off a couple of fingers on a SawStop saw, just like we read about kickback and fingers in blades with splitters and push sticks and...
If you are never standing in the line
This is simply another example of you not knowing even the more common of situations of what can happen during a kick back.
Kick backs do not always go straight back. They can and do go all directions back from the blade. Standing any where in the correct position is always in the line of possible fire from a possible kick back.
So do I.
That's absolutely true. I've already said that I think the SawStop is a fine machine, at least from what I've heard and read in reviews, but it is expensive, simply because it has a piece of technology on it that doesn't stop accidents (like a blade guard, splitters, etc), it just stops you, in theory, from getting injured in an accident. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, but the way to avoid injury isn't to stick another piece of nanny technology on your saw, it's to be more careful to begin with.
This isn't even like automotive safety equipment. In a car, you can still have some other idiot run into you and cause you damage, but a tablesaw is pretty much a solo piece of equipment. You're not going to get sideswiped by someone else driving their tablesaw through your shop. The cause of just about every tablesaw injury is user error, using it while tired or impaired, not practicing sensible safety precautions, making dangerous cuts, not waiting until the saw blade has stopped, etc. *ALL* of these are completely avoidable. You'll never need the SawStop if you never put your fingers into the blade, as an overwhelming majority of woodworkers manage never to do.
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