I think there are some limited circumstances where Rob's assertion will be true (I just tried it to test my theory). If you're edge jointing a relatively thin (say 4/4) board with the fence all the way retracted, the guard will offer some amount of kickback protection, mainly because the distance between the pivot point and the fence is maximized and there is leverage present. As soon as the guard pivots further away from the fence that leverage is lost.
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If the board is 5" on a 6" jointer, that cam action would indeed need teeth.
I appreciate your semi vote of confidence..LOL I did spend some time looking at a lot of images of cutter guards and it is clear that many won't do a thing to stop kick back. The european guards will not do a thing to stop kick-back. Like Mini Max, for instance.Conversely, many will, and many will at varying thicknesses (widths?) Some of the Powermatic ones look like they'd do a pretty good job at most of their spec'd widths. The General ones, like mine, are more 'iffy' at wider widths.
In summation: Mine works like a cam and stops my being able to pull back a board, certainly up to 2" thick. Yours might not. Steve Turner's does, somewhat, up to a point. So... what izzit? Smooth or Crunchy?
Chocolate. :-)
Robatoy wrote: :>
: If set up properly, the cam action will impede the movement backwards.
If you set the cam spring really tight, it'll bang so hard into the fence you'll knock it out of square.
And you still won't prevent kickback. You'd need something to grip or bite into the board if it started to move backwards.
-- Andy Barss
Me too.
In my first few minutes of introduction to a joiner, it threw a short board across the shop. That board laughed at any effort my pork chop guard put out at stopping the kickback. My fingers (all 4 of them plus the thumb) of my right hand were numb for several minutes, and I am sure I felt an urge to urinate when I realized how close I'd come to serious injury. I had RTFM at least twice, and still screwed up. That was some years ago, but I've never forgotten the lesson.
I'd never cut a rebate on a joiner. My weapon of choice nowadays would be a Stanley #78 (fillister plane, Jeff). Since I don't do woodworking for a living, most of my work is one off. For small jobs, a hand plane is often quicker than setting up a dado for the saw. Certainly quieter.
Need dozens to hundreds of feet of rebate? I'd break out the TS and dado and have at it. I'd even consider using one of those tailed banshee's of a router with that much to cut.
My $0.02.
Regards, Roy
Not buying it. If kickback were an issue, the european machines would have dealt with it. As it stands, they have guards that always cover the cutterhead and the stock slides under the guard. No provision whatsoever for kickback prevention.
Chris
Robatoy wrote: ...
It is beyond incredible the design was intended to have that function and _NO_ manufacturer makes mention of it...
As somebody else noted, the shape has two functions --
a) cover the cutterhead for all positions of the fence for all widths of stock, and
b) allow easy passage of material by it for the same conditions.
The shape comes from "form follows function".
Finis
--
I just tried a few boards on my DJ20 with no power. Every board could be easily pulled back through the safety guard, unlike a featherboard.
That has been my experience with my DJ-20 and the 6" Reliant before that... and the spring tension on the DJ-20 is significantly higher than the Reliant.
John
And my 6" General grabs a board just nicely. . . . We can go on like this for a while, eh?
Guess we could treat it like a social science issue instead of a hard science issue here...
"The empirical evidence suggests that on average we can expect the guard on a jointer to fail to prevent kick back." Which lets outliers like the above mentioned General through while keeping the typical user safe by them not expecting the guard to prevent kick back.
If someone wants to turn it into a hard science experiment and report the results I'm for it...
H1: We can expect the guard on a jointer to fail to prevent kick back.
Got any engineers in the group who can conduct the testing? Hmmm... maybe I'll run this by Chris Schwarz... those guys always need ideas for articles!
John
I think the point is, it was never designed to, nor intended to stop kickback.
Like another guy wrote, how come you don't (and won't, I'd guess) see it in any manuals.
We have one guy who claims his works and everyone else claiming theirs does not.
Yet if everyone in here went out to check their table saw guards (except those foolish enough to remove them), everyone would report back that the teeth held the board. If everyone in here went out to check their fingerboards, everyone would report back that they held the board.
Any idea how many here HAVE removed their TS guards?
Is THAT what that thing was?
Robatoy wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@e18g2000vbe.googlegroups.com:
All serious table saw users have at one time or another removed the guard from their saw. So, the real questions are: How many serious table saw users do we have here, and does removing the guard make you a serious table saw user?
Puckdropper
Yes, it's foolish.
There are obviously techniques for which one has to remove the guard. Not putting it back on is lazy and like I said, foolish. I won't apologize for saying that.
I find it ironic that the guy, who's admonishment of the OP for pulling the guard off his jointer precipitated the bulk of the debate in this thread, now has seemingly* taken offense to me criticizing the same thing.
(*seemingly, because I'm not for certain why it was said, so I can't go any further than to point out the potential irony.) :-)
I didn't remove mine. I never put it on.
THIS is 'seemingly' my taking 'offense'? =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
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How do you reach that conclusion? You have NO idea how I feel about TS guards, on my- or others' saws.
You're making s*it up out of whole cloth. With what purpose did you just do that?
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