Unfortunately Rob, that's exactly what ends up causing most of the accidents, people working around the existing safety equipment. Properly used, it's very hard to really hurt yourself on a tablesaw. You've got a blade guard, you've got a splitter/riving knife, you've got anti-kickback pawls, you should know better than to put your hands anywhere remotely near the blade, you should be paying attention and anticipating what might happen, it would take some serious work to really injure yourself. It's the people who bypass the safety features (and I suspect bypassing the SawStop is going to be common) and use their tools carelessly who get hurt.
And of course, you're intimately familiar with SawStop and can say with absolute certainty that their technology is faulty. Why do you think I've been responding to you as I have? You've stated things that you really don't know for sure and made assertions that are impossible to verify. Whether you ever get a SawStop is your business and I couldn't really care less, but however you want to spin it, the technology has considerably value and there's nothing your fantasy statements can do to change that.
You're right there, but the way the patent office works these days, I would not be surprised if someone was able to patent the rising & falling riving knife.
Just imagine if someone like Selden came along 75 or 100 years ago and patented the tablesaw.
Ah-ha! But Doug - you are so precise that it's a guarantee that your patent application will be difinitive to the T. Leaving lots of room of course, for others of us to circumvent your design and patent similar technologies...
Well, as I noted in my post, I have a Shopsmith and don't have room for a SawStop even if I wanted one. However, I am the business manager for a public school district with a couple of shop classes and several (very old) cabinet saws. I deal with the insurance company (both liability and workers compensation - as well as property, auto and all the rest) seemingly every day. Not once has the concept of a Sawstop been mentioned. There has not been any indication whatsoever that there would be so much as a penny drop in our insurance bill should we replace all of those (very old) cabinet saws with SawStops, let alone a threat that our insurance would be outright canceled. This is probably fortunate because if tomorrow some gov't agency mandated that we replace those saws with new $3,000 saws it is likely that the shop classes would simply go away and we would get yet another space for pottery classes. ($3,000 for a kiln, no biggie. $3,000 for a tablesaw and the world is ending).
Be that as it may, if the company fails to establish a viable business model - and to me one high end tablesaw as the entire company's product line is not a viable business model - I would have some concern as to the long term viability of the company and the saw. If the saw was a major factor in the continuing operation of my business that would give me cause for concern.
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