Is A SawStop Table Saw Worth the Money

[dpb]

The cost/risk analysis is certainly weighed heavily in the favor of prevention by the high cost of a single incident...

My thought is if I were buying for a commercial shop and certainly if I either were going to have employee(s) or others besides myself using it I'd consider it almost a given.

For home shop it gets more subjective -- usage typically is way down, time pressure of production, etc., are generally far less, etc., so risks _should_ be lower. OTOH, there's the possibility of less experience/familiarity, may be more likely rather than less to make a poor choice of operation or how to most safely perform a given operation, so risk _might_ be as high or even higher...

All in all, if have the budget, from what I've seen of the saw at a single show and from reviews, seems hard to say you could go wrong with going that way. The only negative I've ever heard (other than the diatribe kind of stuff) was one reviewer a couple of years ago commented that his test machine turned off on its own a couple of times while using it--not a hard-stop false firing, simply the on/off switch dropped out. One would presume this was either an isolated faulty switch or the problem has been resolved by SawStop by now--I've certainly heard no more about it.

IMO, $0.02, ymmv, etc., etc., ...

- dpb

[Lee Michaels]

"Swingman" wrote

Oh the irony, the irony.

I can think of a couple safety phobic folks I knew who would point to this incident as "proof" that safety procedures and devices just don't "work". LOL

[Leuf]

I'd like to see how much the contractor saw version ends up costing, now due out at the end of the year according to their website. Plenty of saw for a home shop so long as it has a good fence on it.

-Leuf

[Mike Berger]

[Mike Berger]

We've all heard this anecdotally. How much direct knowledge do you really have of the inventor's greed and disdain for humanity? Even if he lobbied to have the device made mandatory, maybe it was because of his own blood-draining experience and was completely altruistic.

Meanwhile, manufacturers of everyth> I however can't get over the greedy inventor's attempt to legislate his

[Frank Boettcher]

Sometimes they don't.

In an earlier life I was a welder making offshore oil platforms and deck sections. These things were loaded on barges using two bridge cranes that had two hoists each at 250 tons capacity each so 1000 tons total capacity The hooks were very large as were the cables that attached to them.

Crane hooks are required by OSHA to have spring loaded safty latches, that is they spring out of the way when you push on the cable loop and spring back when you get the cable on. Picture cables as large as your upper arm with a swedged loop that required two men to lift onto the hook. The hook latches were so large the spring back was mashing peoples hands. So we took the latches off. Got cited by OSHA. Asked the OSHA inspector to demonstrate how to get the cables on with the saftey latches without getting hurt. He declined, admitted that logically we were right, but had to cite us anyway "got to go by the book". We also were curious as to how a crane hook loaded to 250 tons could have a cable slip off the hook if there were no latch. Our limited knowledge of physics could not fathom that happening. He declined to explain or to cite any specific statistics.

Overhead blade guards, however, are very good safety devices (provided you can get them on without getting hurt in the first place).

Frank

[Russ]

Well, we could certainly debate this ad nauseam. Please note that I did not say that he had disdain for humanity, and if you choose to believe that his motives for having his device mandated by law were completely altruistic, perhaps you might consider that he did not offer to give it away; he offered to license it. Suffice it to say that I personally am tired of having new laws passed every time some special interest decides something is in their or everyone else's best interest.

Mike Berger wrote:

[dpb]

...top posting repaired...

I have read a summary by a reviewer of what was reported as a summary of an hour-long telephone interview w/ the inventor/principal of SawStop which essentially recounts his/their supreme disappointment w/ the failure to achieve a licensing arrangement w/ any of the existing vendors. Unfortunately, what wasn't revealed was any of the details behind the position or requirements of the licensing to allow for any judgement of greed or any other motive other than to know that no agreement came to fruition. There was, apparently, an agreement w/ one manufacturer that led to a signed a document but something (also undisclosed) caused that agreement to also fall through. It is open record of the petition filed subsequently (still unacted upon but not rejected as I understand it). One can not, of course, unerringly abscribe motive to action, but certainly it appears at least superficially as though a business plan was to try to force accepatance rather than enter into production independently.

As for the red herring of the automakers, it isn't their job to be altruistic--they're a business who's objective is to provide a product attractive enough to find a market and to be able to do so at a profit. That, of course, is SawStop's objective, too.

[Russ]

In April 2003, sawstop filed a petition with the Consumer Product Safety Commission to make SawStop-like technology standard on all table saws. If adopted by the CPSC, this ruling would carry the weight of law, and make illegal the sale or manufacture of any new table saws without this patented technology.

[Brian Henderson]

The quality of the saw is excellent, you won't be sorry having it as a saw. As far as the safety mechanism, there's always a lot of discussion on how necessary and/or worthwhile it is. Someone who practices safety to begin with should never need the SawStop mechanism because their fingers will never be anywhere that they could be harmed. Further, lots of people have reported false trips of the mechanism and at about $200 per trip, that can add up since you have to replace the cartridge and blade. If you don't have an extra on hand, you're out work time as well.

In the end, if it's worth it to you for the peace of mind, then do it, you'll be happy with the quality of the saw and hopefully, you'll never need the SawStop mechanism. Lots of us though have been doing this for decades and still have all our fingers and toes, just because we know what we're doing.

[Leon]

"If" the device works correctly only 1 time, you could have an additional

100 false trips and the extra expense would still be well worth the extra cost. $200 per trip is an assumption. If you are using an inexpensive blade the trip is closer to $100 or less including the new cartridge. A majority of the triggers save thousands of dollars in medical costs. Most all that have reported false triggers have been compensated in some way by SawStop and have been assisted in determining a reason and remedy for the false trip.

Accidents happen whether you practice safety or not. NO ONE is 100% incapable of having an accident. To think otherwise is pretty naive.

[Leon]

It would probably be a sure bet that the inventor had this particular personality in mind when he came up with the idea.

[Upscale]

Define "lots". Instead of expressing your slanted imagination, try presenting a real life figure such as percentage of owners who have experience misfires during *proper* usage and not when someone is screwing around that causes a misfire. Until you do that, your "lots" only adds up to your own faulty preceptions.

And of course, you're one of those people who have never had an accident because you're just to perfect in absolutely everything you do.

The Sawstop is not for people who are prone to accidents, it's for those times when the unexpected happens and it happens to everybody, except Brian Henderson of course. He's just too perfect in everything he does to have some type of accident.

[Nova]

Is the SawStop's safety mechanism is still active when the saw is shut off and the blade is coasting to a stop?

[dpb]

On Jun 5, 3:22 pm, Brian Henderson wrote: ...

Citation/statistics? I've seen nothing about excessively high Type I errors...

[Leon]

Yes, I asked the inventor that several years ago. That's the scenario that I was in when I got cut.

[Maxwell Lol]

And if this happened, the cheapest table saw you could buy might sell for about $2500.

[Leuf]

Load shifts resulting in slack in the line? I'd imagine any siuation with multiple cranes if that is happening you're pretty much screwed regardless. Maybe even better off if it does slip off. One less crane destroyed and able to start picking up the mess.

But in theory if there's no pressure on you to use the thing then there's no pressure going back to the manufacturer from you to make something that actually works.

-Leuf

[russellseaton1]

And I wonder if the recreational woodworker might be better off. In the good old days people love to talk about, there were basically only good tools. No cheap imported junk. If you wanted, needed, a tool to do a job, you paid for it and got a quality tool. The tool had to pay for itself because it was not cheap, like all the imported junk today seems to be. You would end up with fewer, but much higher quality tools. And you might learn to use those fewer tools more. Which is more productive: four $2500 tools that work, or twenty $500 tools that don't work?

I have a range of tools. And for the most part the higher priced, quality tools work well and I am happy to use them. The lower priced, imported from SE Asia tools don't work as well and I am always thinking about replacing them. Maybe if the cheap imported tools did not exist, I would be saved from myself.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Hard to say. Your example of four $2500 versus twenty $500 is a bit extreme perhaps, and somewhere in between lies the truth. If all the tools were the same quality and adjusted price as in the good old days, I wonder how many of us could not afford to be in this hobby at all. I started out with a cheap benchtop saw, later upgraded to a Delta contractor saw If I had to start off with a $2500 saw from the start, there would never have been a start.