Table saw + clueless user = accident, therefore it must be the saws fault!

[John Rumm]

You have to wonder:

[JimK]

MMM careless carlos...

Sawstop TM (etc) appears to work on conductvity of human flesh being detected - would damp wood not conduct similarly? Strange anecdotes (via John's link) about it triggering after detecting hot dog sausages resting placed on timber being fed into saw...erm...conductivity??

Also a nice USD 69 "single use" replacement parts pack required each time it is activated...

god bless america

JimK

[dennis]

If it doesn't get lots of false trips it is well worth $69 to save a finger or three.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember John Rumm saying something like:

from a subset of Homo Sapiens, known as Homo Wankeris.

[Andrew Gabriel]

New brake, and an elastoplast?

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "dennis@home" saying something like:

I knew a bloke who worked for a large sausage factory and quite deliberately inflicted injuries upon himself for the compensation. Such injuries up to and including loss of fingers. Bloke was a total fool.

[Andy Dingley]

Plus a new blade.

The trouble with these things is twofold:

A $20 guard works just as well for keeping fingers off the blade. A $2 push stick helps too.

They don't protect against the most common injury-causing tablesaw accident, kickback. You can do a lot to avoid that with a splitter or riving knife, which are common in the UK but still rare in the USA.

[stuart noble]

If the workpiece fits under the guard, there's plenty of room for fingers as well. You might as well say food pocessors are dangerous because you could, in theory, shove your fingers in the blades.

Had that on a circ saw the other day. 3 metre worktop supported at 4 points, but the ground obviously wasn't perfectly level. Fine until the last 10mm. Should have known by the sound of the motor beginning to labour, but I was in cavalier mode. Where did I put that riving knife?

[Dave Liquorice]

Good Grief, only in America, I hope.

Surely the instructions supplied by the manufacturer warn against operating the saw without guards and guides? And what about the employer? Did they not pass on those instructions? There must be more to this than we are being told.

[Andy Dingley]

Read the full details, as they're linked from the FWW site.

The operator has a very real claim, but it's against their employer: who removed the guards and fence and caused them to work in an unsafe manner, without appropriate training. However being the USA, it's almost impossible for an employee to sue their employer (as they ought, in such a grievous case) because of their protectionist worker compensation laws.

So the landshark's response was to go after the saw maker instead, despite the fact that the supplied saw had been stripped of the manufacturer supplied safety measures and placed in an unsafe state (especially the lack of fence). A SawStop wouldn't have helped in this case.

An ignorant jury allowed themselves to be hoodwinked.

[Andy Dingley]

Modern guards are self-sdjusting with side shields. So although you can still get a finger under there in one axis, they do still guard against fingers coming in from the side. A production guard should be closely adjusted to that a finger just won't fit, but even if you can't reduce risk by reducing dimension, there's scope to reduce exposure by reducing the accessible angle.

My power tools never labour like that. OK, so they're powerful enough to take my leg off if I slipped, but I'd rather use an over-capable tool and only have to guard against one cause of accidents than have to worry about all the extra failure modes that an undersized machine brings with it.

[John Rumm]

Where did it say it was the employer that removed them? I just say a bit that said they had been removed without saying by who or why/

So it seems...

What is it with people unable to take responsibility for their own actions these days?

[js.b1]

Exactly. This was not a "park in the fast lane & wait for bang n buck".

USA employers have a habit of employing H&S not so much as to prevent injury, but to be given the choice to lie under oath or be the scapegoat. Oil industry in particular from USA to Iraq Halliburton, but not exclusively (eg, construction).

UK relies on job & reference blackmail with no whistleblower law - indeed I think the benefits agency has claimed in more than one instance that someone "deliberately made themself unemployed".

The SawStop does work, but I suspect it may result in "RCD & Airbag & ESC syndrome" where people believe risk has been removed when it hasn't. Laws of physics still apply, but laws of common sense are often not.

A lot of the commercial interest nonsense about HSE would be better off spent giving people an "exit path" out of such companies - not just stopping it, actually getting them out because of retribution which otherwise keeps them silent and at risk. China in Africa in particular knows it can get away with anything.

[Andy Dingley]

Somewhere in the large pile of stuff I've read on this case in the last week there are statements that as a minimum: * Guards & fence were removed by someone other than the injured employee. * The employer gave the employee the saw in this condition.

So, maybe not a case solely against the employer (maybe a retailer or previous employee removed them? - I don't know) However they should still have a case against the employer for instructing them to use a saw in that condition.