Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today. So many people are certain it won't happen to them. Accidents happen, even to experts.
My dad had a table saw he'd been using for over a decade when he had an accident. Luckily they were able to stitch up the finger and he missed the bone, allowing the finger tip to regrow. But my family friend who's a professional carpenter isn't as lucky and is missing the tips of three fingers from a jointer.
These tools are dangerous and table saws cause upwards of 30k injures a year. Everyone's talking about how this will kill the industry. Are businesses not innovative around costs, new technology, and regulations? Seems like everything from cars to energy have all improved with regulatory pressure
And to all the people saying this will keep hobbyists away. Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?
I think there are lots of people who would like to see this technology expanded. The issues going back more than a decade has been over the licensing of the patents. SawStop spent a lot of years aggressively suing over its IP and/or pushing for this legislation so that they could have regulatory capture. That's the problem, not the concept of safety. Maybe things have changed by now and we'll be able to see greater innovation in this space.
Weren’t the seatbelt and insulin famously given away? The people who own Sawstop IP are greedy people who have the blood, lost appendages, and deaths of a nearly countless number of people on their greedy shoulders. Absolutely shameless behavior.
I won’t sit here and say I have the solution; but this status quo is undeniably bad. Unchecked capitalism like this makes want me to vomit. Think of how many people would be living a better life if every table saw had this technology mandated by law for the past decade. Really think about it.
Most professional cabinetmaker shops are terribly mismanaged and incredibly behind the times. The industry is consolidating as the owners are aging out. Mostly they’re just straight up closing shop because they have no succession plan, terrible workplace habits, and mismanaged finances. The proposed regulation will “harm” this type of shop but any cabinetmaking business that _will_ exist in ~10 years already uses saws with these types of safety features (and equivalently “safe” practices when it comes to things like ventilating their finishing area.)
> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today.
That is not a representative analogy. Imagine if in the 50s there was only one company that manufactured seatbelts and they owned every imaginable patent related to preventing car occupants from hitting surfaces in an accident (so another company couldn't for example invent the airbag because they'd block that too - see Bosch and a completely different implementation that Saw Stop sued out of the market).
Improved safety would be great, but legislation should never mandate a monopoly to a single manufacturer.
SawStop actually granted Bosch a license to their safety patents for Reaxx some time ago. Moreover, they said during the hearing that they'd offer permissive public licensing to their remaining patents should this rule be made effective.
Volvo released it's seatbelt patent to the public, as TTS has vowed to do so if the CPSC mandates AIM. The last 20 years is not the present.
>However, one key patent — the "840" patent — is not set to expire until 2033. To stave off potential competitors, it describes the AIM technology very broadly. In a surprise move at February's CPSC hearing, TTS Tooltechnic Systems North America CEO Matt Howard announced that the company would "dedicate the 840 patent to the public" if a new safety standard were adopted. Howard says that this would free up rivals to pursue their own safety devices or simply copy SawStop's. At the hearing, he challenged them "to get in the game."
Saw Stop initially tried to get other companies to license their patent. They all declined because they didn’t want the extra cost. It was only after Saw Stop started manufacturing their own saws and proved there was a market demand for people not cutting their fingers off that all the other manufacturers suddenly decided they wanted to implement it.
The government is passing a law that says only company x make saws, due to various patents making it unrealistic to make your own design. They’re outlawing competition. Unless every relevant patent is opened up, this is extreme regulatory capture and is going to be a price gouging patent licensing circus after it passes
>due to various patents making it unrealistic to make your own design
Is it unrealistic, or are the companies simply not pursuing that market because it would harm their existing lines of product?
>Unless every relevant patent is opened up, this is extreme regulatory capture and is going to be a price gouging patent licensing circus after it passes
Personally, I'm fine with that.
As per the article, an entry-level SawStop retails for $899.
There's not excuse why this kind of tech isn't in every saw. The low cost of existing saws is a negative externality whose cost (cut off fingers) is borne by the society (insurance companies, healthcare, and government).
Right in the article, it says most patents are now expired and for the final key patent that expires in 2033, the owner -- SawStop's corp parent -- has offered to donate it to the public if this rule passes.
edit: if you believe different, please share. But per this article, patents do not seem to be a reason to avoid this tech. And the SawStop v1 was introduced in 2004, so it stands to reason we can now produce patent-free equivalent tech to the 2004 machine.
Regardless of your stance on whether the government should regulate x or y, it's important to understand that the people driving this law do not care about you or your fingers. This is rent seeking; someone who makes safe saws wants to sell more of their saws, and they compete with people who sell less safe saws. They are using the legal system to benefit their own bottom line.
After the real goal is established, reasons like "think of the children" or "think of the fingers" can be fabricated.
I don't think seatbelts are an honest comparison, nor are you representing the arguments of others fairly here. Seatbelts are a strap you add to a chair. They don't significantly affect the function of a car, don't add much to the maintenance overhead or up-front cost, they are easily removable/replaceable, etc. This is a much more invasive legislation.
I actually love sawstops. In fact I don't use table saws that don't include that functionality. But I would never, ever push for this kind of legislation. I'm not sure if you (or anyone commenting here) have ever used one of these saws personally, but the added expense and ongoing operating cost is not negligible. It's about $150 to fix it every time it triggers. People love to say 'cheaper than a trip to the hospital!' and while that's true it's also pithy and hand-wavy given how often these things trigger.
There are a ton of edge cases that can make these trigger (including mysterious triggers that seemingly have no cause), and there are whole classes of people who don't make enough to deal with that regularly but still operate saws safely for entire careers. Those are the people that are upset, not hypothetical hobbyists, who are the most likely to be able to afford the extra cost and be able to always operate in pristine conditions.
Powertools in a site setting need to operate in all kinds of conditions, and for a jobsite saw the money spent installing sensors and gadgets to meet regulations would be better spent on literally anything else for such a tool. People working in those settings are just going to turn this feature off and will strictly be hurt by this. (There's no way they can force these features to be always-on as that would prevent tons of materials from ever being able to be run through a table saw again.) To make it literally illegal to produce the right tool for site workers is an overreach coming from out of touch people.
Woodworking is an interesting space where people generally accept the risks they take and in return are more or less trusted to make that assessment by regulatory bodies at least in the US. A better comparison than seatbelts would be the european regulations around dado blades, which as I understand are fairly unpopular. Sawstops are great for HN types. That doesn't mean it should be illegal to produce sensorless saws.
FWIW, I supervised in one of the safest industrial environments in the US, and also one with incredibly robust workman comp. The 18-25 year olds I supervised typically just found ever stupider ways to get themselves hurt or accumulate improper- or over-use injuries... Arguably we would just fire them before they got us in trouble, which we didn't, but neither do people in much riskier settings I've heard from ("get these stupid safety railings uninstalled once the inspector is gone, they just waste time and get in the way").
My suspicion is that the better analogy for these things is airbags rather than seatbelts. Because people don't use seatbelts (guards), install something expensive that can't be easily defeated, airbags (sawstops), which are touchy and known to brick the car (saw). Do sawstops, when not engaging, inhibit the function of the saw as badly as airbags inhibit visibility around A pillars?
I grew up as a proud resident of New Hampshire which has no such law on the books despite being one of the safest states to drive in the USA.
Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t driving alone without a seatbelt? Perfect example of government overreach as cars get loaded with nanny state technology. I subscribe to the philosophy of personal responsibility, something that seems to have been lost in the modern litigious, it’s everyone-else’s-fault culture of the 21st century.
>I grew up as a proud resident of New Hampshire which has no such law on the books despite being one of the safest states to drive in the USA.
Last time I checked, you couldn't legally sell a car in New Hampshire which did not have seatbelts.
You're comparing apples to cardboard boxes here.
>Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t driving alone without a seatbelt?
Irrelevant. The question you need to ask for a fair comparison is:
>Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t SELLING A CAR without a seatbelt?
The answer is: because these are different vehicles with different use cases (and adoption levels) that require different kinds of licenses to operate and have different kind of negative externalities.
Same reason motorcycles aren't required to have airbags.
Well written. I don't know why responsibility is so scary.
I've never used a table saw but I rock climb regularly which has plenty of risk. Are table saw accidents purely due to your own actions? Or is it like a motorbike where there are factors out of your control and someone could crash into you.
If losing your fingers on a table saw is 100% due to your own actions and there are no externalities, I would call that negligence not accident.
I agree.
I also wear a seatbelt and do not ride a motorcycle, but I think people should be allowed to take risks with their own life if they want to.
The next natural step from this legislation is government mandated diets and exercise regimens to combat the obesity epidemic — and the resulting mortality — in the United States.
In the jargon of philosophy this a friction point between Deontology (rules-based ethics) and Consequentialism (outcome-based ethics).
Deontologically there is a strong case against seatbelt laws, but the consequentialist perspective is rather compelling.
I’m generally a deontologist but find myself supporting the seatbelt law. It’s just such a small price to pay when stacked up against the consequences. I guess that means I’m not really a deontologist.
Personal responsibility is a hard sell in a world where human beings are not absolutely sovereign agents. Regardless, the law isn't stopping you from driving without a seatbelt. I find it odd that you have such a visceral response to a class of laws that is violated quite regularly.
Mischaracterizing the issue, which is people handing over (or having taken from them) responsibility, to the state, for something they should be taking responsibility for.
No chance your father or your joiner friend hadn't seen those ads of the saws which automatically stop on contact. But they chose not to buy one, because they decided they didn't need one. They had that choice. Or if before those existed, to use a hand saw.
Regulation is nothing more than saying "we're superior to you in making choices for you, so we'll do so". And it's made not by efficient innovative geniuses, but by the same people who run the DMV. And it's not imposed on children by parents, it's on grown adults by other grown adults with no legal accountability. And it ossifies technology by locking in certain measures which will quickly drift out of date. And, as we've seen with the FDA and Opioids, it gives a get out of jail free card to wrongdoers who game the rules, because they can point to their compliance and say "so look, we followed the rules, we shouldn't be liable".
It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.
> which is people handing over (or having taken from them) responsibility, to the state, for something they should be taking responsibility for.
> It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.
In general, there are many cases that most people cannot really take responsibility for. For example, if you hit a person with a car that can mean they’ll lose their income and need specialized care for decades. Such costs can run in the millions.
Now, you can argue people should take insurance against that risk. Problem is: some people won’t, and victims won’t be compensated,. If, then, you think the state should take on those costs, doesn’t the state have a say in what kinds of cars you can drive, for example that they have various safety features?
Also, this doesn’t only apply to cases where you injury others. If people get into an accident that leaves them with health costs they can’t afford to pay, we expect society to, at least partly pay up.
I think that argument applies here, too. Saw accidents can and do make lots of persons lose health and future income. In many cases, it’s the state that will have to pay up to cover that.
> It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.
I dunno man, I kinda like when there’s some sort of enforcement making sure there’s not toxic waste in my food beyond hoping I find out later and a remedy even exists to make me whole. But you do you, anarchy’s worked every other time it’s been tried right?
When Volvo created the three-point safety belt (still in use today), they patented their invention. And then, recognizing the importance of this great improvement in safety, they absolutely gave it away for free.
When SawStop created a meat-detecting brake for table saws, they patented their invention. And then, they refused to give it away, sued the begeezus out of anyone who tried to emulate their patented inventions, and eventually paid lip-service to the concept by offering to license one aspect of it for free.
> Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?
They are able, and they’re choosing not to. So SawStop is wisely spending marketing money on lobbying. If people don’t want to buy your product, nothing better than forcing them to.
> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today. So many people are certain it won't happen to them.
Please don't mix up "being against something" and "being against legislation that forces people into something". You can support the thing, do the thing yourself, advice all of your friends and family to do the thing, and still believe that people should have the freedom not to do the thing, even if you think this decision would be extremely stupid.
While I can agree that tablesaws are quite dangerous, I just don't understand how we get from: "tablesaws are dangerous" to "the government should regulate tablesaws." There are safer saws out there. Sawstop. Buy one. No governmental intervention needed.
I started taking a beginner woodworking class which actually had a bit of a waitlist to it. After the first day (all safety), I decided it wasn't worth it for just a minor hobby. Improved safety gear may have changed my mind.
I would recommend learning only one new tool at a time, rather than a suite of tools. It will be less onerous and scary learning the safety practices, and you will be far less likely to slip up. (Plus, it's more affordable to only buy a new tool as you need it.)
Also, some tools are a whole lot safer than others. Tools that carry a risk of flinging your project (such as table saws and lathes) are risky, but a lot of other tools (such as jig saws and tracks saws) are very unlikely to cause serious injury.
And, of course, you can do without power tools altogether. People have used hand tools exclusively for the vast majority of the history of woodworking, and many people today still primarily use hand tools because they are more precise, safer, and often easier to use (albeit slower).
I am a hobbyist carpenter and woodworker. My current project is probably the last one I will ever do without a table saw with these kinds of safety features. I have already changed over to using other tools like track saws and pull saws as much as I can for safety, but it is still hard to replace a well-calibrated table saw for certain tasks. My table saw is the only power tool I have that truly frightens me. Router tables and jointers can cause some nasty injuries as well, and I treat them with much respect, but total digit and limb loss is rarer with them.
The patent situation and much higher price are unfortunate, but it’s still a cost I am willing to bear. It’s cheap insurance compared to an ER visit and extended amounts of time spent feeling pain.
A seatbelt is a small fraction of the total cost of a car. I wouldn't be surprised if a table saw with this feature is 10x the cost of one without it or more. It adds a ton of complexity to a fairly simple tool.
At scale the cost will come down. The actual tech is remarkably simple (which is a compliment to the design and engineering). The saw blade is wired up in such a way that it becomes a capactive touch sensor. When tripped a sacrifical brake is blasted into the blade that causes it stop and drop into the table.
It's closer to 2x the cost but that's a fairly fat margin since the Sawstop models ate the whole upper end. With a competitor they could probably get down to 1.5x.
I live in a poor, developing country where seat belts aren't mandatory. Also most people get around on scooters going 25-30mph and helmet laws are almost completely unenforced.
I am constantly amazed at the number of foreigners from first world countries who don't wear seatbelts or helmets the moment there is no Big Brother forcing them to.
Road fatality rates are 10x what they are in Germany, Japan, Ireland. 9x what they are in Australia. Until this year drunk driving laws were unenforced and drunk driving was widespread.
> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today
Woodworker here. The equivalent SawStop to my basic table saw is 3X the price.
Your analogy wouldn’t make sense unless seatbelts tripled the price of cars.
SawStop has a huge patent portfolio and they’ve been cagey about actually letting other people use the full system. This is more of a regulatory capture play, not a safety play with consumers in mind.
Seatbelts are a legal requirement because my car insurance would have to pay for your medical bills if not wearing a seatbelt turned my failure to stop from a minor accident into a serious head injury. In other words, your lack of a seatbelt affects my liability. There is no analogy between that and safety devices for uninsured activities carried out alone, in our own homes.
Can't all these many people who want the technology purchase it today? I think for every new hobbyist that comes along only because of this saw there will be five less hobbyists who stay away because of cost.
I don’t think the congress intends on prescribing the particular technology in use to accomplish this. That, would be a bad idea. They should set the goals (what constraints are acceptable in the name of making this technology affordable).
If it is being left up to the manufacturer, then half the arguments being mentioned here are moot. Other manufacturers are free to get creative about it. I can think of a few different ways myself - even something like assisted manoeuvring of the wood piece without direct contact of the hand, a retractable shield, etc.
"Everyone's talking about how this will kill the industry."
Because we know the mechanism behind the thing, and it's essentially unavoidable to trip because the lumber industry continues to sell still-wet wood. Until you put that industry firmly in its place, people are just going to be losing tons of money on 'safer' saws via constantly having to replace blades as the stop mechanism breaks them. And then we break out the handheld circular saw without that bullshit and go back to work.
Ironic how seatbelts aren’t mandated on public forms of transport like trains and buses, yet one is required to wear them in one’s own vehicle. If it truly is based on safety then it should be an all or nothing approach to requiring seat belts on moving vehicles.
Transit has the same advantage as a back seat of private auto: a big non-windshield to crash into in the event of a crash. seatbelts are pretty great. the proliferation of airbags is the correct comparison.
If we're going to do a cost benefit analysis, we need to be pretty certain that the costs do in fact outweigh the benefits. We have hobbled Nuclear power over safety concerns and it's pretty clear we got that one completely wrong with huge negative consequences for society. This is obviously not on the same scale, but it's easy to get these things wrong and never revisit them.
From the federal register notice on this, 70% of the supposed societal cost is pain and suffering, which frankly, individuals can decide on for themselves about the risks.
If you take out the pain and suffering values from these costs, you actually find that the cost benefit analysis doesn't pass at all, coming in at 0.5bn to 3.4bn in the red depending on the cost of the regulation on consumers, per the agency's own analysis.
If you got and read what people think about these regulations about people who use the tools, e.g. on /r/tools, they are unanimously opposed to them. Many people have complaints about the proposed products not working as advertised and generally wanting to bypass the system entirely: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tools/comments/19fmzko/are_you_in_f...
And that gets to the other part of this issue, if the regulation passes, what is the actual behavior change that will happen? Will people buy these saws and use them in the intended manner, or will they switch to alternatives that are just as dangerous, or will they simply turn off the safety features because the false positives are expensive ($100+ in direct costs without counting productivity losses). And note: all the SawStop products have off switches for the safety because they have false positives on wet wood and conductive materials like aluminum.
The headlines for these regulations are always great since nobody likes losing fingers, but there are always trade-offs, and it is extremely easy to make mistakes in these calculations and not foresee the actual knock on effects of them.
Particularly in this case where costs are largely internalized, rather than externalized.
Opposition to a law mandating the use of certain safety equipment is not the same thing as opposition to the safety equipment.
Here in Seattle, there used to be a bicycle helmet law. Helmets reduce the severity of injury in a crash, less severe injuries are obviously better, forcing people to run less risk is therefore justifiable: it seemed to make sense, and it was a popular law.
And yet, it was repealed. Why? Disproportional enforcement, partially - tickets were inevitably handed out primarily to poorer and more marginalized people - but the law actually made things worse for everyone by reducing the total number of riders on the road. There is safety in numbers for bicyclists, who are less likely to be hit by motorists when they are a more common sight - but the health benefit expected from riding a bicycle at all, helmet or no, is actually greater than the health benefit expected by adding a helmet. It is therefore better, both collectively and individually, if we remove every possible barrier to bicycle riding, even though some people will choose not to ride as safely as we wish they might.
Unintended consequences are a real thing, so a person can quite reasonably believe that the SawStop is a great invention which everyone should use, and that a law mandating the use of SawStop would be a bad idea.
my grandfather only lost one finger tip to a joiner. My father had two fingers pretty well mangled by a table saw. I used to do some carpentry but have lost interest in the last couple of decades.
I've been wondering about this kind of thing recently.
I think people struggle all their lives with independence, and it is wonderful when you get the feeling of being "sovereign". Being your own man (or woman), confident in who you are and what you can do.
And then we run into forces bigger than us, and some people continue to defend their sovereignty. They want their freedom and they don't want to be told what to do.
(For me, I hate things like companies that want to LOG IN to my bank account to verify my income/etc and will never give up that fight.
for someone else it might be seatbelts.
I wasn't really aware of the seatbelt fight, but I remember helmet laws. My position was that I would wear a helmet, but I wouldn't want to force someone else to wear one.
... on the other hand, I think it is ok to make kids wear helmets.
There's also the knee-jerk anti-reguation crowd. Consider this comment from the article:
"If it's mandated, you're going to have people hanging on to their old saws forever," Juntunen says. "And, you know, that's when I'd say there will be more injuries on an old saw."
Does the mandate in any way change the functionality of a new saw (other than for cutting flesh)?
It does make ripping pressure treated wood a little dicey. Whenever I have to cut wood that is wet I will disable the flesh detection feature temporarily. That's a minor inconvenience though. I will never go back to a saw without the feature.
"These tools are dangerous and table saws cause upwards of 30k injures a year."
Right. I hate the damn things and they've always scared the shit out of me whenever I use them. I've not been seriously injured yet but I've come damn close.
Fortunately, I don't have one at present as someone stole my one during a factory move. I view this as good fortune for eventually I'll have to replace it and I'll do so with one with SawStop-like safety features.
I cannot understand what all the fuss and objections are about, yes SawStop-type saws are more expensive but their cost simply pales into insignificace the moment one's fingers go walkabout.
People are mad to say one can always use table saws safely. That may be the case for 99.99% of the time but it's the unexpected rare event that bites even the most seasoned professionals.
Table saws and their related brethren table routers are by design intrinsically unsafe, and this ought to be damn obvious to both Blind Freddy and the Village Idiot.
Frankly there's something perverse about those who consider table saws safe to use, alternatively they've misguided bravado and or they lack common sense.
Redesigning them to be intrinsically save just makes common sense, and in the long run will cost society much less (as amputations are enormously expensive per capita and it all adds up).
Edit: to those down-voters, I've a longtime friend who is one of the most meticulous and careful workers that I know (much more so than I am). Moreover, that planned thinking extends to the work he turns out, it's nothing but the finest quality.
He's been around power tools all his life and I first observed him using table saws and routers over 40 years ago. That said, about four years ago he was seriously injured when using a table router. Injuries to his hand were so severe that he has lost almost all of the dexterity in his hand, even now after many operations and ongoing professional physiotherapy, he has only regained partial use of his hand.
Perhaps the skeptics need to meet people like him and just see the negative impact such injuries have had on their lives.
There’s a certain sort of delusional self-identified genius that loves the idea of there being something that most people can’t do safely, that they can, because they simply know to be safe, whereas these other idiots do not. It’s like if you took the “C is safe, humans are not!” crowd and gave them something that caused amputations instead of buffer overflows.
I'm shocked that so many people like yourself are shocked about resistance to safety devices. Regardless of how I feel about it, I can hear the objections the moment I read the article title:
"It's never hurt me"
"I accept the risk"
"It will double the price of a saw"
"I won't see any of these 'society savings', only the sawmakers will see more money"
I genuinely can’t tell if this is satire or not. Like, I know that this is something people will often say as an unoriginal attempt at a humorous reply, but I am…genuinely unsure.
I've always thought seatbelts should be mandatory on motorcycles. Ain't had one in ages, but I still wear my helmet wherever I go. Never can have too many laws. Authority always knows best.
I luv u hackernews. Long live the eggheads!
Future Headline: Man sent to glorious and compassionate American prison for not using riving knife gets shanked to death with one days before parole.
Future Hackernews Post with 10k upvotes and gushing comments: How the judicial system is creating strong Americans and healing millions - and how silicon valley has assisted
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait and otherwise breaking the site guidelines?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
If you had a legitimate point to make you wouldn’t resort to blatantly and intentionally absurd faux-analogies that don’t even pretend to seek to pose a fair comparison. This is childish. Though looking at your profile you seem to wear being unlikeable and hostile as some sort of badge of pride.
It's really simple to use a table saw safely: don't ever get physically close enough (by far!) for the spinning blade to cut you, or stand where it can fling something at you.
Then even if there's no riving knife and blade guard it's not going to ruin your day.
This means that you'll sometimes need to build a small jig to push wood into the saw, but usually you can just use a long stick to push the wood into it.
Every single table saw accident video you'll see is people who've clearly become way too complacent with them, or are trying to save themselves a few minutes of setup time.
It's simple to use a car safely too. Don't ever speed, be aware of your surroundings at all times, and practice defensive driving.
In theory.
As someone who has used a table saw, you simply cannot account for every variable factored in to having a 10" piece of sharpened carbide steel spinning at 5,000 RPMs and shoving a piece of probably inconsistently structured building materials through it, many, many, many times to accomplish a job. Maybe the sawmill left a nail in there for you: shit happens.
In the immortal words of Jean Luc Picard: It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That's why we build things with safety features: to manage those risks.
Just accept it, smile, nod, and deny the existence of the router, lathe, bandsaw, angle grinder with a circular blade on it etc. Chainsaws are probably next up against the wall though since they're pretty well represented in low-effort horror media
While I agree with your premise, mistakes still happen.
I do all of the things you mentioned, plus I use pushers or a crosscut sled whenever possible. It should be impossible for me to make contact, but it only takes a split second of stupidity or inattention to mess up
I am against government mandates in regards to seatbelts.
>Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?
If you think this is a factor in people buying or not buying a table saw, I have a bridge to sell you.
> I am against government mandates in regards to seatbelts.
No one cares, you don't have a good enough reason. It's ok to have some kinds of mandates. I don't want my tax dollars going to pay EMS and police to shovel your remains off the highway because you wanted to drive like an idiot.
Safety has 100% been a factor in many of my tool purchases, mistakes happen, especially to amateurs, and most people would rather not lose fingers to a hobby.
The federal government's responsibilities is literally to collect taxes to maintain a standing army, and to coordinate cross-state issues that the states themselves for some reason aren't able to regulate themselves. That's what its scope is supposed to be. Are states not able to pass the table saw regulations they feel is appropriate for their citizens? I feel like they are. Why does the federal government need to step in and mandate .. table saw laws for our states? For me it's just another small step in the long line of steps towards having one overarching federal government that controls everything, like other countries have, which the US is not supposed to have.
Key point here is the SawStop CEO is promising to open up the patent and make it available for anyone, so it's a bit more complicated than the typical regulatory-capture lawyer success story.
The 3-point seat belt is another time this happened and probably one of the few feel-good "this should be available to everyone" patent stories: Volvo designed it, decided the safety-for-humanity* benefits outweighed patent protections, and made the patent open for anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bohlin (*: at least the segment of humanity that drives cars)
I'd be curious to hear the cynical take here. If I was to wargame it, I would guess something like: SawStop doesn't want to compete with Harbor Freight and cheap chinese tool manufacturers -- that's a race to the bottom, and power tools have turned into ecosystem lock-in plays which makes it difficult for a niche manufacturer to win in. So they'd rather compete on just the safety mechanism since they have a decade head start on it. They're too niche to succeed on SawStop(TM) workbenches, and they forsee bigger profits in a "[DeWalt|Milwaukee|EGo|...], Protected by SawStop(TM)" world.
If you go listen to their CEO's testimony, he clearly states that the one single original patent behind the idea is now open but was expiring anyway. He brags about them spending a lot of money on R&D and needing to recoup that, reiterating that they have many other patents that aren't being opened that cover the exact implementation. He talked about them exploring those other methods, choosing not to patent them, and only patenting the best solution.
All his words. He's trying to explain that sure, the patent is open, but companies are still going to have to work harder than Sawstop because they have many more patents they refuse to open that cover the best and most logical implementation of this idea.
You're asking for a "cynical" take, but it's not really cynical! The CEO is trying to tell everyone, openly, and they're not listening. They are NOT altruistic, otherwise they would have opened the entire suite of patents. They are openly saying this singular patent is open, because it doesn't matter and that they will doggedly defend their other patents. Now, every other manufacturer will now need to navigate a minefield of patent litigation, and follow the path of subpar implementations that Sawstop ruled out during their R&D.
I don't know why everyone is ignoring his testimony and thinking the company is giving anything up, it's wild!
Why not just set the mandate to begin after most of these patents expire? I would really not brush off how serious of a safety problem this is, but honestly I’d rather the government either delay the implementation or buy out the patents because this is a blatant market failure of public interest that the government is well poised to address. Digit amputation incurs a public cost even in America.
If the patent covers something that was already in the first version of the device, it should be either patented before 2004 and thus expired, or patented afterwards and thus invalid due to prior art, no?
The cynical take is more that it's crappy blade guards that nobody uses that really should be improved, and it's not necessary to mandate SawStop-style blade breaking technology.
Bascially, mandating the more expensive blade brakes instead of standards around blade guards will eliminate cheap table saws from the market. And yes, this has happened before with radial arm saws - they are now basically non-existent in the US.
So it definitely benefits SawStop to give away this patent, as their saws will look a hell of a lot "cheaper" than competition.
SawStop often breaks the saw itself, not just the blade. There's alot of energy being put into the saw all at once, and I've seen examples where it fractured the mounts of the saw itself when it engaged.
That's of course great, if you're in the business of selling saws, not so great if you're in the business of buying saws.
I've seen all of the talking points, but a regulation probably is required simply to force liability.
The biggest "excuse" I have seen from the saw manufacturers is that if they put this kind of blade stop on their system that they are now liable for injuries that occur in spite of the blade stop or because of a non-firing blade stop. And that is probably true!
Even if this specific regulation doesn't pass, it's time that the saw manufacturers have to eat the liability from injuries from using these saws to incentivize making them safer.
As for cost, the blade stops are extremely low volume right now, I can easily see the price coming down if the volume is a couple of orders of magnitude larger.
We had one of these in my highschool woodshop - they would demo it once a year on the parents night because of the expense. I'd rather see this regulated in a way that says places like schools or production woodshops would need these from an insurance perspective, but home woodshops wouldn't be required to
Why are radial arm saws so dangerous? I have an old one and other than shooting wood into the shop wall when ripping, or holding the wood with your hand it seems pretty hard to hurt yourself. Circular saws seem way more dangerous, and the only injury I've ever had was from a portaband.
Standard oil invented tanker cars and built pipelines. Everyone else was stuck unloading 55 gallon drums from normal railcars beacuse of patents and relative lack of investment.
Then the government broke standard oil up, rather than revoke the patent or reform the system in away way, and prices got higher for consumers in the end.
This is often brought up as a success story. Patents never have worked as intended.
I’m not utterly opposed to this regulation, but I do think SawStop stands to benefit. Even if the patents are open, it will take competitors a long time to develop new products. Meanwhile, SawStop will get the distribution that they don’t currently have. Just glancing at the HomeDepot website, I see that they sell SawStop but they are not stocked at my local store. I imagine that if this goes through, every Physical store in the country will need to stock their saws, at least until their competitors put out products. in the meantime, they can get much better economies of scale, and then try to compete on price
Bosch already has these table saws ready and available for jobsite-type of saws, they are sold in Canada I think. Techtronic Industries (Milwaukee, Ryobi) and Stanley Black & Decker (DeWalt) are huge enough to just push through and it will filter to all the brands they manufacture. Delta is smaller, but this is their bread and butter so probably they have some technology lying in wait.
The higher end table saws is probably a different story, they are even smaller manufacturers, but a lot of that stuff is different anyway.
Usually these types of laws come with a date in the future that they will actually be implemented giving such competitors time to figure these things out.
One thing I don't see mentioned with any of these discussions is that this massively increases the cost of using different kinds of blades on the saw. If you need to use a specialty blade that's a smaller diameter, it requires a matching special size safety cartridge. Dado stack? Another, even more expensive cartridge. I know most people typically have one blade on the saw and never change it or if they do, it's just another of the same size, but for those of us who do regularly swap out blades that aren't the standard 10" x 1/8", these types of regulations add both significant cost and time/frustration.
I'm all for safety and would love for there to be more options for this kind of tech from other saw makers, but I personally don't think regulation is necessarily the right way to do it. Just like there are legitimate cases for removing the blade guard, there are legitimate cases for running without this safety feature, especially one that would require several hundred dollars more investment even if the safety feature is disabled (On SawStop, you physically can't mount a dado stack unless you buy a special dado stack cartridge).
And if SawStop really wanted to improve safety for everyone... well I find it rather telling that they'll only open their patent if the regulation becomes law. Since they're effectively the only ones with the tech, with the regulation passed, buyers instantly have only one option for however long it takes for competitors to come to market with their own (which they'll be hesitant to do based only on a spoken promise by the patent holder). Instant pseudo-monopoly.
It takes 3 minutes to swap out the normal saw stop cartridge and put the one in for dado blades. Setting up the thickness and putting the dado stack on takes twice as long. If you are doing enough woodworking that you have a dado stack and specialty blades the saw stop cartridge is not that big of a deal.
Cynical take is that the SawStop feature adds enough cost to budget table saws that they will no longer be economically viable and you can only purchase mid-high end tables saws going forward.
Another cynical take would be that SawStop has secretly invested heavily in a saw blade manufacturers to profit from more blades being destroyed when the stop event occurs.
My first cynical reaction is to ask which politicians will benefit handsomely from stock trading with SawStop stock (assuming it's a publicly traded company) or through kickbacks of one kind or another.
I think SawStop table saws are terrific for woodworkers who work in their own shop. Less so for workers who have to bring their tools to the job site. Yes, I know that SawStop makes a portable table saw. When you're working at a job site, you have less control over the materials you're working with (as compared to the cabinet maker in his/her own shop). SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site. A common example mentioned is treated lumber, but I don't recall ever having cut treated lumber on a table saw. When I need to cut treated lumber it's with a hand held circular saw. I'm a part-time handyman (some evenings and weekends).
> SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site
You can turn the tech off to make it work as a regular table saw, but it does require pre-existing knowledge about what may false-trip the saw. Having a job site saw fail on site without cartridges and blades in supply, or a newbie on the saw could be pretty bad.
Not overly prohibitive with training though, and is something that everyone will face if this becomes mandated.
afaik the patent was basically expiring in the next couple years anyway, even the small ancillary ones. They've been making and selling SawStop saws for the last 20 years and already made their bag. So, since SawStop has the experience designing and building the systems they want to wring out some good will and see which Big Saw manufacturer wants to pay them to get ahead of their competition.
Minor tangent- I view patents and especially physical invention as requiring more work yet patents last 20 years while copyright can last up to 120 years!
How about SawStop open their patent up first? They've already sued to prevent other tool manufacturers from making their own solutions to the problem, because they want theirs to be licensed. So even though they claim they will open their patent once the feature is enforced, what have they done in good faith to make us believe they won't move the goalposts to opening it, once they have captured the market?
Presumably there's a reasonable compromise whereby they provide a public license only valid in areas where such safety mechanisms are legally mandated.
Its extremely unlikely they would offer to open up the patent and then say "haha, fooled you!" once the law takes effect. It would do them more harm than good in the long run to lie to lawmakers & everyone else.
The patent[0] is over 20 years old so it should have expired regardless - except it got 11 years of extensions. That's a bit of an odd situation because SawStop was selling "patent-pending" saws since the very early 2000's...I'm not sure the extension guidelines were intended to give companies 30 years of exclusivity and protection - it would make more sense in a situation where they couldn't start profiting on the patent until the patent was finally granted. There's a reason they're supposed to be 20 years from "date of file" instead of "date of approval". The current system could encourage companies to try to get their patent applications tied up in appeals for as many decades as possible.
Regardless, it would have made sense for them to agree to FRAND [1] licensing >5 years ago which might have accelerated standards adoption.
> I am a patent agent and I just took a look at the patent office history of the 9,724,840 patent. It is very interesting because it spent a long time (about 8 years) being appealed in the court system before it was allowed. While patents are provided with a 20 year life from their initial filing date (Mar 13, 2002 for this patent) there are laws that extend the life of the patent to compensate the inventor for delays that took place during prosecution. The patent office initially stated that the patent was entitled to 305 days of Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) and that is what is printed on the face of the patent. But the law also allows for adjustment due to delays in the courts, which the patent office didn’t initially include. So SawStop petitioned to have the delays due to the court appeal added and their petition was granted indicating that it was proper to add those court delays to the PTA. So the PTA was extended to 4044 days, meaning that this patent doesn’t expire until 4/8/2033!
> The other interesting thing about this patent, is that its claims are very broad. Claim 1 basically covers ANY type of saw with a circular blade that stops within 10 ms of detecting contact with a human as long as the stop mechanism is “electronically triggerable.” It would be VERY difficult to work around this patent and meet the CPSC rules. So the fact that SawStop has promised to dedicate this to the public is at least somewhat meaningful.
> BUT, SawStop has many other patents that it has not dedicated to the public. I have not analyzed their overall portfolio, but is is very likely that the other patents create an environment that still makes it difficult to design a saw in compliance with CPSC rules. So it is entirely possible that the dedication of the one broad patent was done to provide PR cover while still not creating a competitive market.
If I had 3 years to implement a safety feature based on a patent to meet new legal requirements I would be concerned about getting sued for edge cases the patent holder worked out.. Injurues are reduced but buyer beware may no longer apply to the remaining injuries especially if even other new implementations avoid edge case largely by accident, I.e. slightly different materials and other factors not considered when only one manufacturer was attempting the feature.
1. Many of SawStop’s patents either expired or about to expire.
2. Bosch already has a similar tech but was prohibited to sell their saws with it in the US. I think soon all the patents that were basis for this ruling going to expire.
3. SawStop already by acquired by TTS(same company that owns Festool). They may have plans to integrate it in their line up somehow and safety tech becomes less of a differentiator.
And my even more cynical take is that FTC only considered requiring safety tech after a nod from the industry leaders.
If the technology is allowed under free-use or a free limited license, that'll change things.
Right now, no one can put it on their saws without having to either risk the patent fight or pay whatever Sawstop wants, with the later probably being so high, there is a reason other brands don't have "Equipped with sawstop technology!" badged on them.
There's some amount of altruism, but no one is cutting their own throats either. At least some corporations are run by humans.
A patent expires, but forcing competitors to adopt a technology you already incorporate raises everyone else's costs, so it's not always bad for business.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies aren't clamoring to buy out SawStops and hand-deliver them to everyone with a table saw, asking them to install them at no cost in exchange for an insurance discount.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies don't pay for gym memberships and reduce your premiums if you deliver them screenshots of your workouts and pictures of making healthy food at home.
That's what a sane insurance company that wants to increase profit margins would do. Get out there in the field and reduce the number of times they need to pay.
Confession: The 3-point seat belt always feels like an eyeroller to me. It's not complicated, and the kind of thing that many others would have come up with soon enough anyway. The real injustice was in classing it as the kind of deep, mind-blowing, hard-won insight that deserves a patent.
> It's not complicated, and the kind of thing that many others would have come up with soon enough anyway.
Counterpoint: a lot of inventions seem obvious in retrospect, especially if you've used them routinely for most of your life. Doesn't mean they were obvious at the time.
He is opposed to this but expects it to pass. His best argument is that it would effectively outlaw affordable low end "contractor" portable job-site style table saws. I have one of those, a cheap $150 Ryobi. It would be more like $450 with the SawStop feature and I would not have been able to afford it.
I'd be using a circular saw instead. Maybe that is a bit safer, and at least it's more affordable until they require the same tech in circular saws. But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?
"He is opposed to this but expects it to pass. His best argument is that it would effectively outlaw affordable low end "contractor" portable job-site style table saws"
"job site saws" account for 18% of the market, just to put this in perspective.
It is also totally wrong. The submitted comments to the CPSC suggest an increase of $50-100 per saw, even with an 8% royalty (which will no longer exist).
That is from PTI, who is the corporate lobbying organization of the tool saw manufacturers and plays games with the numbers.
In the discovery of the numerous lawsuits around design defects in table saws, it turns out most of the manufacturers had already done the R&D and come to a cost of about $40-50 per saw.
Everything else is profit.
We already have riving knives and you name it, and injury cost is still 4x the entire tablesaw market.
It's worse if you weight it by where injuries come from.
For every dollar in job site saws sold, you cause ~$20 in injuries.
The one dollar goes to profit, the $20 is paid by society, for the most part (since they are also statistically uninsured).
Let's make it not regulation - which seems to get people up in arms.
Here's a deal i'd be happy to make (as i'm sure would the CPSC) - nobody has to include any safety technology.
Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible for their weighted share of blade injury costs (whether the user is insured or not).
If the whole thing was profitable, this would not be a problem.
Suddenly you will discover their problem isn't that there is technology being mandated, but they don't want to pay the cost of what they cause.
(In other, like say cars, you will find the yearly profit well outweighs the yearly cost of injuries)
> Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible for their weighted share of blade injury costs (whether the user is insured or not).
But what does this even mean? You don't injure yourself with existing saws if you follow safety protocols. Then people don't and get hurt, which is entirely from not following safety protocols.
The manufacturers can already be sued if they make a product which is dangerous even when used appropriately.
> Suddenly you will discover their problem isn't that there is technology being mandated, but they don't want to pay the cost of what they cause.
Or each manufacturer will file a patent on their own minor variant of the technology such that no one else can make a replacement cartridge for their saws, then sell cartridges for $100+ while using a hair trigger that both reduces their liability and increases their cartridge sales from false positives.
Meanwhile cheap foreign manufacturers will do no such thing, provide cheaper saws and just have their asset-free US distributor file bankruptcy if anybody sues them. Which is probably better than making affordable saws unavailable, but "only US companies are prohibited from making affordable saws" seems like a dumb law.
> Let's make it not regulation - which seems to get people up in arms. [...] Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible
I've long been of the opinion that mandatory underwriting is superior to regulation for most things. At least: housing, medicine, and consumer products. Maybe not airplanes, but then again, maybe.
If a manufacturer of table saws was required to be underwritten for claims of injury, they'd find it in their best interest to make those saws as safe as practical.
This itself requires regulation: no skating out of it by having customers sign bullshit waivers, and of course some department would have to audit businesses to see to it that they're complying. But the sum of that is much less costly to taxpayers, and also avoids all the cost-disease which results from a regulatory regime whose interest is in producing paperwork, and which has no incentive to change, streamline, or remove a regulation, once it's in place.
And the saw frame has to be much stronger to handle the force of stopping that blade. Throwing $50 of new parts on an existing frame just means you throw the whole saw away after it triggers.
Every time this triggers, you need a new cartridge and blade ($40+) and time to swap them in. If I was sure this was saving a finger (as the dramatic stories in the press state), then I wouldn't think twice. But it probably just wet wood or something else conductive causing a false trigger. Show me the false rate data please.
Isn’t that the entire point? Weekend warriors and small operators are going to be those getting injuries. Those with massive operations are likely using high spec gear already.
I live in a country (NZ) with fairly aggressive workplace safety legislation. We also have a single payer for accidental injuries and time off work (The Accident Compensation Corporation). It helps keep the courts clear but also means they have a lot of visibility into injury types and help work to prevent common accident methods.
Don’t delve too deep into the dark side of their work, its grim.
I think that misses an important argument he makes which is that all table saws should be equipped with better (higher quality, more effective) blade guards and riving knives. Much cheaper to implement and nearly as effective as sawstop.
The problem is woodworkers will do dumb things like remove both of these things from their saws to do unsafe cuts. You can even find youtube videos of people confidently asserting they're useless and just get in the way (They are not).
> The problem is woodworkers will do dumb things like remove both of these things from their saws to do unsafe cuts.
I have seen videos without them, with people saying that they have older saws and that is how they are used to work. But not that they are useless. Especially not the riving knives. One interesting argument I have seen from someone: currently the recommended way is to have a blade just a tad bit over the top of the piece, but he was taught to have it much higher. His point was that in such set up there was more vertical pressure down from the blade rather then horizontal and thus lower risk of kickback. Not sure if his idea has merit, but interesting thought.
Blade guards and riving knives are not enough. You would also need a kickback arrestor at the very least (even though the sawstop does not fix that issue).
I think you're on a reasonable path with your thinking there. Something I learned a couple of years ago is that table saws are particularly popular in the US. It varies from country to country, but in some places circular saws on tracks are the norm for the same purposes, especially on job sites.
These aren't very popular in the US so you don't see the dedicated "track saws" in stores here that are common in the UK for example. You can pretty easily buy a Kregg Accu-Cut which is a similar idea that you bolt onto your existing circular saw, but it's a little bit annoying compared to purpose-built track saws that are a tidier design and often plunge cut as well so it's simpler to start the cut. But you can also get proper track saws online, and I'll probably pick one up eventually to replace my Accu-Cut.
I don't think this is a perfect solution, getting cabinetry precision with a track saw might be tricky. But no one's doing that with a portable contractor table saw anyway. And the track saws are even more portable. I think the table saw concept is a better fit for larger, fixed tools, which I would guess probably have a better safety record than portables (larger table, cleaner environment, etc) even without sawstop technology. And I think it's more feasible to have good quality guards that will be less annoying on a fixed tool than a portable one, where they have a tendency to break off.
The US has space and pick up trucks that can fit plenty of table saws. Big tools in general are more accessible and affordable in the US. I have not seen as many people owning large tools like table saws, metal mills and lathes as in the US.
While I understand the name is not meant to be taken literally, I'd be curious to know the opinion of someone like Jamie Perkins who does actually have 'stumpy' fingers because of a woodworking incident:
I've seen jointer near-miss videos and the adult education woodworking class I took is even more terrifying in retrospect. I knew table saws were dangerous and assumed they were the most dangerous. At least with a table saw the fingers can often be reattached. Jointers and router tables just make hamburger.
I'm becoming a much bigger fan of mounting an uneven piece of wood to plywood and running it through the table saw to get that first edge.
I don’t understand how you can hurt yourself with a jointer (presuming you’re using a push stick and pad to push the wood down from the top). There’s no risk of kickback and most jointers these days come with spring loaded blade guards that only expose enough of the blade that the wood makes contact with.
I'm a fan of Stumpy Nubs but I disagree with his economic analysis here. Saw Stop has effectively had a monopoly on this type of saw, so of course they've been pricing it high. When Bosh came out with their own version it only made sense to price it at a comparable level to their only competitor. For them to massively undercut Saw Stop would leave money on the table.
There will be some cost in re-engineering the cheap saws to handle a sensor and brake. But those costs will be amortized over time and the materials themselves will be incredibly cheap. We're talking about a capacitive sensor and a chunk of sacrificial metal.
There will also probably be some cost saving innovation around the tech. Since Saw Stop is a premium brand coasting on patent-enforced monopoly they haven't had to invest in R&D the way Dewalt, Bosh, and Makita will.
Circular saws are not just "a bit" safer. They cause far fewer injuries despite getting more use in construction. Table saws really are a menace.
I'm not in favor of this regulation because I don't like the idea of the government regulating hobbies, and I think it ends with some tools and hobbies getting banned altogether... but we should make this much clear.
There’s only one reason to use a tablesaw- repeatable cuts and nothing else can really do that. It’s also indispensable for any kind of furniture building.
That's a good point. I would think that a circular saw or track saw is more dangerous. You tend to be hunched over the blade in an awkward position. I use a table saw over a circular saw because, for me, it seems safer.
I would love if someone could chime in with actual statistics here, but I've always heard that table saws are the most dangerous common power tool in the US by raw injury count alone. I have a weak assumption that more people have circular saws than have table saws. This seems unsurprising to me, because both track and circular saws are used with the blades faced away from the person. I can't speak to track saws, but I've never had a board launched at me by a circular saw. People also tend to over-extend themselves over tablesaws, and have their hands inches from the blades.
Intuitively, the table saw seems more dangerous to me (and I'm typing this with a finger with three pins in it from a table saw injury) because you're manipulating the circular saw directly, and thus more consciously. With a table saw you're manipulating the workpiece into the blade, which is indirectly a threat--in my case, the wood kicked, knocking my finger into the blade.
A circ saw might not be, but a tracksaw is much safer for breaking down sheet goods. Just not as fast as blasting a sheet of plywood through a job site saw.
Maybe but I presume the Chinese will jump in to subsidize that through mass production and we will all end up with saw stop enabled $250 contractor saws.
I mean, we have effectively outlawed cheaper vehicles that could probably have worked for a lot of needs. And... that largely seems like a fine thing?
I think it is fair that a holistic analysis of the legislation would make a lot of sense. I would be surprised to know that changing a saw from 150 to 450 would be a major change in its use. But, I could be convinced that it is not worth it.
I will note that is also taking at face value the cost of implementing the tech. In ways I don't know that I grant. I remember when adding a camera to a car's license plate was several hundred dollars of added cost. And I greatly regret not having one on my older vehicle. Mandating those was absolutely the correct choice. My hunch is when all saws have the tech, the cost of implementing will surprisingly shrink.
Maybe some power tools that get only occasional use could be fine with a better rental market. Not long ago I bought a ceramic tile cutter because renting one for 3 days was more expensive that buying one outright, but if that market went towards more expensive but safer models I'd reconsider and would do just fine with renting. And then tradespeople who need these tools more than 10 days per lifetime need to buy upscale anyway...
$150 is the cost of a really good table saw blade - a decent one would be half that. If you're using the saw at home, $150 is only 2-3x more than the shop vac you'll need to clean up after anything. At a job site, it's a lot less than the cost of the nailgun you'll use once you've cut something.
This video is a great overview of the history and the recent hearings, came here to link it.
Not sure I agree with his conclusion though - once all manufacturers are required to include the technology, surely they will still compete on price and find ways to get cheaper models to market? They will be unencumbered by the risk of patent violation to innovate on cheaper approaches to the same problem.
He also argues for riving knives and blade guards as an alternative, which are great, but not all cuts can be made with them in place.
As a hobby woodworker that sometimes makes mistakes, I've wanted a SawStop for a long time but have been stymied by the cost, so maybe I'm just being optimistic.
I'll forever remain skeptical of SawStop. I understand their mechanism works quite well and they sell a very high quality saw, but I will never in my life buy it.
It's amazing how the discourse online has shifted. SawStop's original focus after having their patent granted was super-litigious IP-troll type behavior. They were able to win some cases and force other manufactures like Bosch to remove alternative safety they had engineered to compete. SawStop was lobbying heavily for a regulatory requirement to mandate their patented technology be installed on all table saws.
The online opinion of them was ... not good. Look up the old SawStop stuff on Slashdot if you want to see it.
Now that their patent is about to expire, it's "oh look we have changed" -- they haven't. It's just a desperate bid to get themselves insinuated in front of manufacturers who will be suddenly charged with a mandate to ship safety devices -- and of course SawStop will be there with the business shortcut. Sorry, no. Fuck them. Let the patent expire.
Since they actually make a product using their patented technology, they would definitionally not be a patent troll. Even if they’re litigious, that’s exactly how the system is supposed to work when you’ve invented a valuable technology which you sell to recoup the costs of R&D plus the profit of your invention.
At the time they were up to their original shenanigans they did not sell the saw. They did not sell a saw for the first five years of their business being open. It was a pure IP play. God damn do people have short memories.
You hear a lot from long-time woodworkers that this is unnecessary, as they are perfectly capable of using a table saw safely with just the riving knife/splitter and proper technique. Which is anecdotally true, but hard to accept with the actual data of 30k injuries a year. So it's not a question of _if_ there's a cost to society here, it's a question of _where_ we put the cost: up-front on prevention, or in response to injury in the healthcare system. Is the trade-off worth it to force all consumers to spend a few hundred dollars more for a job-site table-saw, if it means the insurance market won't have to bear several thousand for an injury? I'd say yes.
There's a second aspect to the "tradeoff" that's worth emphasizing: it's not an equal trade. A significant percentage of those injured never fully recover regardless of the insurance money spent. Even a 1:1 trade of prevention vs response dollars means we have tens of thousands fewer permanent injuries.
> but hard to accept with the actual data of 30k injuries a year.
Lacerations are the most common form of injury. Counting "bulk injuries" is not a particularly useful way to improve "safety."
> _if_ there's a cost to society here
The question you really want to ask is "is the risk:reward ratio sensible?" People aren't using saws for entertainment, they are using to produce actual physical products, that presumptively have some utility value and should be considered in terms of their _benefit_ to society.
> it's a question of _where_ we put the cost
With the owner of the saw. If you don't want saw injuries, don't buy a saw, most people don't actually need one. I fail to see this as a social problem.
> if it means the insurance market won't have to bear several thousand for an injury?
Shouldn't owners of saws just pay more in premiums? Why should the "market" bear the costs? Isn't "underwriting" precisely designed to solve this exact issue?
> I'd say yes.
With a yearly injury rate of 1:10,000 across the entire population? I'd have to say, obviously not, you're far more likely to do harm than you are to improve outcomes.
The junior apprentice didn’t buy the saw that took his fingers off. His disinterested, profit-seeking boss did.
A defining aspect of developed countries is that their governments don’t allow business owners to lock the factory doors. We used to. Now we don’t. Are you saying we should go back to the good old times when children worked in coal mines?
I'm a member of a local artisan's workshop, where a whole bunch of talented folks share shop space for woodworking, metalworking, and various other stuff. All the saws are SawStop - the difference in price just isn't worth it. When you look at the costs of a table saw installation - space, blades, dust collector, etc. - going with non-SawStop would only save a few percent on the total.
If you look on YouTube, almost all US woodworking channels remove the riving knife and blade guard. That just encourages new woodworkers to do the same. They then demo rabbit blades which are illegal in the EU due to being so dangerous.
I would be surprised if you see a moderately popular woodworker on YouTube that has removed the riving knife. Are you assuming that no blade guard implies that the riving knife is also not present? Yes a lot of people remove the blade guard but they then insert the riving knife. If they would make the safety pawls slightly better I think more people might leave the blade guard on.
First, this would basically grant Sawstop a monopoly. They say they'll release the patent, but I'd like to see that requirement built into the bill
Second, it doesn't seem to allow for alternative safety systems. Bosch has a system that competes with Sawstop, and is arguably better, as it doesn't destroy the saw, blade, or carriage, but is currently unavailable in the US due to Sawstop parents
If the bill were to allow for the Bosch or other systems on us soil then I'd have far fewer qualms over it
SawStop saws don't cost what they do just because of the brake technology. They're just, in general, even if you took away the safety technology, built to a high end standard. Certainly the safety tech will add to the cost, but probably not as much as you'd think.
Ah—like how if you glanced at caster-equipped fridge drawers, you might think they add $1,000 to the price of a fridge, because only higher-end ones have them, but if they were (for some reason) legally mandated they’d only add like $5-$10 to low-end refrigerators. But, without the mandate, no option for a $400 fridge with nice drawers.
Which is a point frequently raised by those not supporting this regulatory action - will this cause the base price of a saw to skyrocket beyond what average individuals can afford?
My guess is probably not. The brake cartridge is roughly a hundred bucks, retail. The sensor system can’t possibly be more than a hundred bucks. And there will have to be some quality improvements to the rest of the saw in order to be better withstand the crazy decceleration forces. The bottom end of saws will proportionally be more expensive, but even this will quickly race to the bottom.
Just to add; they do have a cheaper portable for 1100. I think it's a great idea for hobbyists with properly dried wood.
On a jobsite pretty much all your wood is wet, it'll be standard practice to leave the safety off or 150 CAD for a new stop (and time wasted). Not to mention you don't stop working just because of a little rain.
"It's just one additional requirement; it won't break the bank"....this logic, applied over and over by building construction regulators for the past few decades, is an underappreciated but important contributor to the housing affordability crisis. Everyone talks about zoning, but building codes, etc are a big issue too.
The vast majority of tablesaw users don't lose fingers. How much is avoiding a 1/100000 chance of losing a finger to you? Probably a lot less than $500.
This is a pretty interesting problem. At what point of an ongoing tragedy does a relatively expensive mitigation become a mandate?
I'm grateful that SawStop is releasing their IP. This doesn't address the issue of added implementation cost, but does address the concern about rent-seeking. It would have been a better world if Ryobi and others had licensed the technology 20 years ago.
In a surprise move at February's CPSC hearing, TTS Tooltechnic Systems North America CEO Matt Howard announced that the company would "dedicate the 840 patent to the public" if a new safety standard were adopted. Howard says that this would free up rivals to pursue their own safety devices or simply copy SawStop's.
Steve Gass, a patent attorney and amateur woodworker with a doctorate in physics, came up with the idea for SawStop's braking system in 1999. It took Gass two weeks to complete the design, and a third week to build a prototype based on a "$200 secondhand table saw." After numerous tests using a hot dog as a finger-analog, in spring 2000, Gass conducted the first test with a real human finger: he applied Novocain to his left ring finger, and after two false starts, he placed his finger into the teeth of a whirring saw blade. The blade stopped as designed, and although it "hurt like the dickens and bled a lot," his finger remained intact.
> This doesn't address the issue of added implementation cost,
It does not address that people will likely disable the "feature" and never re-enable it. SawStop saws have a bypass "feature" so they can cut conductive material.
> Gass is a physicist and he designed a saw that could tell the difference between when it was cutting wood and the instant it started cutting a human finger or hand. The technology is beautiful in its simplicity: Wood doesn't conduct electricity, but you do. Humans are made up mostly of salty water — a great conductor.
> Gass induced a very weak electrical current onto the blade of the saw. He put an inexpensive little sensing device inside it. And if the saw nicks a finger, within 3/1000ths of a second, it fires a brake that stops the blade. Gass demonstrates this in an epic video using a hot dog in place of a finger. The blade looks like it just vanishes into the table.
You don't need to disconnect anything, you can start a saw-stop up with safety temporarily disabled using a key that comes with it. A good thing to do any time you're cutting pressure treated wood.
Never having used one of these before, is there anything (ideally conveniently built in) that you can use to know before you cut a particular material whether it'll trigger the stop? Touch it against the blade while it's not running and see whether an LED lights up, or similar?
(I think it's unambiguously a good thing to mandate, but I'd also prefer not to have to memorize a table of materials and their interactions with the stopping device...)
1. Seatbelts are mostly passive, so not a good comparison
2. Same thing with helmets
3. Lawn darts is not a safety mechanism, it's a sport
A closer comparison would be car airbags, but a type of airbag that has false-positives and deploys when the operator drives on a particular type of road surface, in which case the manufacturer calls it "user error" and tells the operator to disable it for that type of road surface. The road surface might appear the same to the operator, so needs to be tested carefully with special equipment before the car is driven on it. And since the active safety system is disabled for this surface, the operator has now paid for a safety system they cannot use, due to manufacturer incompetence
Unfortunately there are lots of materials run through a table saw which can trigger a sawstop. A false positive destroys the blade. Decent blades cost several hundred dollars, and are intended to be resharpened and last for many years.
I belong to a community hobbyist workshop. There are a lot of rules, lockouts and a key in place around the table saw usage, but they won't install a sawstop because they can't afford to keep up with the wasted blades.
Personally, I think I'd rather have one, but I can absolutely see why people would disable them if they were mandatory.
I hope they find a way to bring costs down. It seems like a very hard problem - you seem to need fairly high quality materials for the braking system to not bust up the machine itself, and the circuitry is a non trivial expense.
But if folks can't buy a $100-200 table saw, and they can't afford anything higher, then ideas like affixing a circular saw in an upside-down jig might start to become more common. And then they'd lose the baseline safety features of even a cheap table saw, such as the blade guard and riving knife, which might be even worse for overall injuries.
> But if folks can't buy a $100-200 table saw, and they can't afford anything higher, then ideas like affixing a circular saw in an upside-down jig might start to become more common.
FTFY: then they shouldn't be in business as the business model is unsustainable. Even for purely private usage - if you can't afford to buy a SawStop saw, then rent one. Your fingers should be more than worth it.
Op didn't mention businesses so why are you? Plenty of regular people own them as well, woodworking is a very popular hobby.
>Even for purely private usage - if you can't afford to buy a SawStop saw, then rent one.
Dunno why some people decide they get to nanny everyone else. There's plenty of other dangerous tools (when misused) to come after next if you go down this path.
The op here is right, the most likely path is rigging a circular saw into a table saw from some internet tutorial. People have done worse to save less.
On the other hand, if these become common, will people be more cavalier about letting kids or poorly trained users use them? And will malfunctioning or disabled brakes consequently lead to more accidents instead of less?
You can apply this logic to any safety measure for any product, and campaigns against safety requirements often do. Additional safety measures result in more safety. Good talk.
Related: Woodworking Injuries in Slow Motion [1], including an interview with a person who experienced each type of injury, because these kinds of injuries are just so common. Lots of missing fingers at wood working meetups.
This will kill off the cheap table saw. It will be interesting to see how the hobby and industry adapt to $700 being the bar to entry — and that would be RYOBI grade stuff. The added cost isn’t from the mechanism, the cost is from needing to build a real frame around the blade instead of plastic and thin aluminum. The SawStop trigger is incredibly violent, the braking force will sheer the carbide tips off the saw blade from inertia alone. Cheap saws are almost all plastic and would be horribly deformed after a trigger.
I anticipate a return of something that used to be more common, the upside-down circular saw bolted to a table top.
The “cheap” saws in this scenario are still several hundred dollars. A SawStop is made well enough to withstand multiple activations and costs $100 for a new cartridge plus the cost of a new blade. It’s kind of a situation where it’s “cheap to be rich.”
> The Consumer Product Safety Commission says that when a person is hospitalized, the societal cost per table saw injury exceeds $500,000 when you also factor in loss of income and pain and suffering.
Seems fishy[0][1], so I checked the study:
> Overall, medical costs and work losses account for about 30 percent of these costs, or about $1.2 billion. The intangible costs associated with pain and suffering account for the remaining 70 percent of injury costs.
So the actual cost of each injury which results in hospitalization is (allegedly) $150,000, and they only get to the $500,000 figure by adding $350,000 in intangible "costs" tacked on. Totally legit.
> Because of the substantial societal costs attributable to blade-contact injuries, and the expected high rate of effectiveness of the proposed requirement in preventing blade-contact injuries, the estimated net benefits (i.e. benefits minus costs) for the market as a whole averaged $1,500 to $4,000 per saw.
There is no cost to the regulation, but rather a "net benefit", because the cost (in real dollars) of the saw-stop devices is more than offset by the savings (in intangible pain-and-suffering-dollars)! Based on this obviously, intentionally misleading "math", they include this canard in the summary:
> The Commission estimates that the proposed rule's aggregate net benefits on an annual basis could range from about $625 million to about $2,300 million.
Did you catch that? They didn't include so much as a hint that these dollar savings are, in fact, not dollars, but pain in suffering, measured in dollars!
In this life, only three things are certain: death, taxes, and being lied to by the United States federal government.
There’s nothing misleading in the study, because they very clearly state the methodology for intangibles, and even provide an alternate calculation excluding it:
Finally, net benefits were significantly reduced when benefits were limited to the reduction in economic losses associated with medical costs and work losses, excluding the intangible costs associated with pain and suffering
…although net benefits appear to have remained positive using a 3 percent discount rate, benefits were generally comparable to costs when a 7 percent discount rate was applied.
There's nothing dishonest about it. If you want to measure something, you need to pick a unit. For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
> You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
Choosing to re-define a word (like 'dollar') to mean something other than its actual meaning is perfectly fine, so long as you take care to inform the reader whenever you employ your nonstandard definition.
If you do not take care to make this distinction, then you are putting a false idea in another person's mind, which is, by definition, deception.
If you intentionally use your bespoke definition of 'dollar' to communicate about pain and suffering, refusing to define it (as the author of the paper did in the summary), while knowing full well that the reader will assume you mean actual dollars, then you are lying.
> For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
That's a noble goal. Yet the only clear and honest way to communicate human suffering is in human terms, not in dollars and cents. Laundering that suffering into "per-unit economic benefits" adds zero clarity to the issue of suffering. It adds zero urgency. All it adds is a likelihood of misunderstanding, which is clearly the point.
I've got a table saw. The extent of my training on how to use it was my design tech teacher saying very clearly that none of us were ever to use it and some YouTube video of dubious information content. I bought it from Amazon, nothing approximating a check that I had any idea what to do with it.
I am very frightened of it and thus far only slightly injured. An automated stop thing would make me much less frightened. Possibly more frequently injured as a direct result.
Having the option to buy a more expensive saw which slags itself instead of your finger is a good thing. Making the ones without that feature illegal is less obvious. I think I'd bolt a circular saw under a table if that came to pass.
A gunpowder charge shoving a piece of aluminium into the blade on a handheld circular saw would be pretty lethal in itself. Lots of angular momentum there - jam the blade and the whole thing is going to spin.
It seems dubious that I can buy things like circular saws and angle grinders without anything along the lines of some training course first. That angle grinder definitely tries to kill me on occasion. That might be a better path to decreasing injuries.
the more expensive saw is 4 to 5x as much as a standard issue table saw of similar capabilities (barring the safety part). I don't think this will pan out when Congress critters get the details and tradeoffs.
Here's the first thing I noticed when I just looked up SawStop. They have a reasonable saw for $2k, in the same "class" as my 1970s Sears, based solely on size. And not all that much more expensive than other brands.
Looking at the picture, the saw is safer than mine even without the brake, because of the quality of the fence and other fittings. Unfortunately, a mandate won't get saws like mine out of circulation.
What's keeping me from going right out and getting a new saw is that mine is only used sporadically, and is mainly a "horizontal surface" in my garage. I'm done with the big projects that made my house livable.
My safety rule for now (this is not professional advice) is that I don't attempt tricky cuts at all. The biggest risk I've noticed is trying to hold onto a workpiece that's too small, and I'd rather just scrap it and use longer stock. My hands are never closer than several inches away from the blade. And I have other tools for other jobs, such as a chop saw, so I don't try to do "everything" with the table saw.
Yes SawStop sued Bosch for patent infringement and won. But they also then immediately offered to allow Bosch to have a license for free to continue distributing in the US. In the safety commission meeting,they also annouced they would not puruse any lawsuits for the key technology still under patent if the rule was passed.
Does this fully address the potential cost issues for beginning woodworkers? No but I very much think the video is worth a watch to make a more nuanced judgement.
It is stuff like this that makes people think NPR is a Democratic Party organ:
> Over the years, Republicans on the commission have sided with the power tool industry in opposing further regulations.
Maybe they are siding with poor people that can't afford SawStop or people that see the heath and safety nanny state example in the UK as something to avoid?
I wish people would consider that every new regulation as an additional cost in both money and freedom. I use a table saw (with the blade guard removed) many times a week as a hobby woodworker and DIYer. I understand the risks and I'm not endangering anyone but myself. I'm an adult and fully capable of making that decision.
As much as I would love to see this kind of tech added, our current “greed is good” economic climate that is eviscerating the 99% will mean that this change will disenfranchise most who would have gotten such a saw. Sawstop isn’t going to open up their patents like Volvo did out of the goodness of their heart. Those patents will be monetized to the hilt, to extract maximum possible revenue from the consumer.
The only reason why I even have a table saw is because of a convergence of events: renos on the apartment to make it more saleable, better job with more income, Bosch putting out a new model such that the old model had steep clearance pricing, and so forth.
Had that table saw cost even $100 more, I would have been doing the work with wildly inappropriate tools that likely would have made the work even more dangerous. Or used an old, pre-owned, beat-up tool that could have malfunctioned in dangerous ways, or have had safety features removed by the prior owner.
Yes, let’s implement that law. But let’s also force SawStop to pull a Volvo, especially if they aren’t working in good faith. They have already been compensated by that product many times over, it’s just a cash cow at this point. And the public interest must always come before profit. Not remuneration and RoI -- profit.
I get the opposition, but this is a huge savings in the long run, both in terms of sheer money, and pain and suffering. The math on table saws is staggering (as pointed out in this comment section.) It's hard to stomach allowing several amputations a day to save people $50-100. I know a table saw is as safe as the user; I am so terrified of mine that it's probably commercial air travel level of safe. But stats have consistently shown the average user isn't, and there's no reason to expect that to change.
I think we can expect added costs to come down a lot when every table saw has one. They will be more expensive than they are now, for sure, but I don't think it'll be 3x. And I'm not worried about beginners being unable to afford one. There's a thriving used table saw market that'll still happily amputate your digits, these things live forever. You'll be able to get one of those really cheap when every new table saw also has anti-mangling tech built in, as nobody but the knuckle draggers will want the old ones. In fact I'd expect a flood of people (myself included) selling their crappy old table saw without brakes for the first affordable table saw with them.
And if you just really don't like your limbs, I saw a radial arm saw at Menard's for pretty cheap.
Everything is a balance and you have to decide how much risk you want to take. People hate it when we use money or resources to injury and life but that is reality. How many injuries are we going to prevent? How much does it cost in productivity?
In general I am against government regulation here unless it is really an issue. We spend a lot of time preventing injuries to some things and then not to the most important ones (like our eating habits).
My two bits as a carpenter w/18yrs table saw experience -- there are plenty of safe ways to use a tablesaw, fingers nowhere near the blade. SawStop's trip randomly, and the saw itself just sucks to use, its a bad design top to bottom. And you still have to let the operator disable it at their will.
If they are so dangerous, then make it licensed and mandate training, which is really what makes saws unsafe -- the untrained.
So here's the problem: you can buy an older cast-iron table saw with good precision and a large bed for $50-$150 on craigslist, or you can buy a cheap piece of made-in-china plastic at home depot for $500. The cheap piece of plastic checks off more safety features from a regulatory standpoint, but tiny size and poor tolerances results in more kick-back and accidents.
1) Patents. The article goes into this a bit -- supposedly the folks behind SawStop have said they'd open up a key patent, but I wouldn't want the U.S. government to mandate this without reading all the fine print and making sure that this can't be used by SawStop to crush all their competitors.
2) Materials. I often cut aluminum on my table saw, using a non-ferrous metal cutting blade. (It works fine for wood too.) As I understand it, SawStops are activated when they detect high conductivity materials. How does this work for cutting metals?
3) False positives, repair costs. Replacing the blade periodically due to accidentally cutting wood with slightly-too-high moisture content would get tiresome. (For that matter, so would putting off a project for months if I have to wait for the wood to dry out.)
I'm generally in favor of safer tools, but it seems like there are some significant trade-offs involved here.
I'm all for the Saw Stop, and I wouldn't use a table saw without one. (I prefer not to use table saws at all now!)
However, I'm pretty sure than the vast majority of the pressure to mandate the "Saw Stop" comes from the "Saw Stop" corporation, who hold exclusive rights.
I'm a woodworker, and i've suffered some injuries over the years (but not on a tablesaw). This seems like more of a political issue, those for and against regulation. I'm surprised to see this on HN and there is too much drama in this thread to otherwise comment.
I too am predisposed against regulation. Knowing nothing about the issue, I actually expected to support the regulation.
Reading on, it basically seems to give Saw Stop defacto monopoly over the table saw industry, shifting the value capture entirely to them. And seeing that swings me against it. Unless they commit to releasing their full patent portfolio in favor of this effort, it seems like the legislation vastly favors an economically motivated actor, which rubs me the wrong way.
The irony here is that the same government wonders why manufacturing doesn't come back to the United States and this case is a microcosm of something the issue of a whole.
If I'm understanding this correctly, the problem here is other saw companies aren't implementing a safety feature because SawStop has a patent on the relevant technology. Now the US federal government wants to make that safety feature a requirement and SawStop pinky swears to release the patent.
Why don't they just strike down SawStop's patent on the technology instead? Bosch apparently already tried to implement the tech but was scared away by SawStop's lawyers. There's a proven interest in the tech from other industry players. Is there any evidence that the proposed regulation is even necessary?
Seems ridiculous to me that they'd even allow a company to prevent other companies from implementing safety features in the first place.
Everything about this is awful. There must be some kind of personality distribution to opinions on this kind of thing. Government paternalism instantly causes visceral negative thought processes for me, but there are plenty of people that seem (?) to be all for it.
SS wants this to become a requirement because it elevates the cost of all table saws up towards their entry level gear. Their cheapest saw is $899, when you can get a comparable saw (sans flesh sensing tech) for around $499. If their competition now has to sell a saw at $899 (less licensing fee to SS), then they'll be at a competitive disadvantage since now the pricing floor has been lifted up to SS's level. And you know SS will be advertising that they invented this tech, blah blah blah.
SS is acting in their own interests, or they never would have used the patent system to prohibit this technology.
We had a hole in the cinderblock in school where someone let the wood get away from them and the table saw kicked it back. This was in shop class, not a random wall in the school.
Most amputations on a table saw are because of kickback pulling the worker's hand into the blade. Riving knife, a well adjusted fence, and knowing which cuts have potential for kickback can mitigate this.
I survived a childhood regularly using a radial arm saw. My dad was very clear I was not old enough to use it until I was 12, and then we did a full afternoon of what the proper way to use it and how to get hurt using it.
These are literal power tools with spinning blades of death. You shouldn't use these without training and you should understand how you get hurt on one of these. I see this as government overreach yet again. I'd only be ok with this if the requirement has an expiration date so that way it doesn't block future innovation.
When sawstop engages it destroys the blade and ruins the stop cartridge. So you need a new cartridge and a new blade, which is better than a finger but not cost free. Wet (damp) wood, aluminum, and any other material that is a bit conductive can trigger the sawstop. However sawstop has a bypass mode, which allows you to cut conductive items (and your finger).
This article is pretty aggressive with this statement “ Woodworking has been a nearly lifelong passion for Noffsinger, and he was no stranger to power tools. Back before his accident, he'd seen a demonstration of a new and much safer type of table saw at a local woodworking store. Marketed under the name SawStop, it was designed to stop and retract the spinning blade within a few milliseconds of making contact with flesh — fast enough to turn a potentially life-changing injury into little more than a scratch. Noffsinger's table saw wasn't equipped with the high-tech safety feature because manufacturers aren't required to include it.”
Actually his saw wasn’t equipped with sawstop because he chose not to equip it. He knew of its existence, it’s readily available (online and also at Lee valley tools), but he chose not to get the safety device and somehow that’s the manufacturers fault? Cmon man.
This same jerk will be the guy who buys the thing, turns on bypass mode, cuts his finger off and sues the manufacturer.
We don’t need safety devices mandated on personal table saws. Maybe osha should require saws on jobsites to be retrofitted with saw stop to protect workers, but it is most certainly not the manufacturers fault if you cut off your thumb. I suppose chain saws and motorcycles should just be straight illegal then ?
I take it that simply dropping the saw (and then braking it afterward) is not fast enough to reduce injury?
I saw a demo of another safety saw, which was using very sophisticated monitoring systems. It was essentially dropping the saw if it detected the hand getting too close to the blade.
Saw Stop waits for contact. So the detector system has more time to move the saw out of the way, than the Saw Stop does.
I guess having to move the blade and the motor is too much energy, even or particularly, if its spring loaded, compared to springing the jamming piece that Saw Stop uses.
EU always had stricter safety standards for table saws. I moved to the US in the late 90s, sold my table saw in the UK and got a new one in the US. It lacked the quick stop feature that my UK saw had.
That makes this whole SawStop thing so confusing to me. I'm sure some fingers are lost in Europe by table saws, but that doesn't seem to be anywhere near the 'must mandate auto-breaking saw tech' level.
Don't like it. There are systemic problems with nanny-state thinking - you either solve all cases of danger at once, or you make the problem worse.
I was close to a story recently about a kid in a climbing gym who mistied their harness. Competent climber, but got careless and no one caught the faulty safety loop and they fell 40 feet on descent. Nothing broken, in a turn of miracle, but could have been fatal for them and others had there been someone underneath at the time.
Now, I'm sure that this will garner some conversation, but IMO this is an example of the Safe Playground Effect; that is, because we put soft corners on everything we deem to be risky, we implicitly teach people that the world has been made safe for them. Without the risk of mild harm (on the playground) we don't develop the sense to be cautious with major harm (like at the climbing gym). The unconscious, innate instinct is "it can't be that bad, I've existed for X years sort of carelessly and I've never gotten hurt".
Problematically, this is the sort of effect that is nearly impossible to analyze with any reliability. Too many connected, confounding factors even in the most controlled environments. I think it's fairly intuitive, but there's a lot of room for me to be wrong and I'd be the first to admit it.
IF this is the case, however, then what we are effectively doing by adding these mandated safety measures piecemeal, is lowering the personal shelf of responsibility whilst leaving other risks at the same level of probability and effect, making them that much worse because now people as a whole are less vigilant re: their own safety.
One actual example I can think of to back this stuff up is the Burning Man festival. It's a city of 75,000 with precious little in the way of medical resources in an extreme climate peppered with dangerous art made of metal and splintered wood and fire, and yet the injury rate is far lower than that of a normal municipality of the same size (in the past decade, there have been 2 fatalities IIRC, which is way lower than the national average per pop.) My (admittedly hand-wavy) guess about the why is this: people who go there know that there are risks, and despite being largely chemically altered this awareness translates to a lower risk of injury even considering the added risk factors.
You got me, it isn’t. There are other confounding factors; no driving, for instance.
An actual comparison would be pretty difficult for all kinds of reasons. But that’s part of what’s difficult about assessing something as vague as “whether people are being careful or not”, which is part of my point - this is something that’s incredibly hard to turn into a metric and (partially) due to this gets summarily ignored.
I must confess to spending quite a bit of time thinking about these sorts of things - the stuff that’s invisible to our current modalities of analysis. There’s probably something a little pathological about it.
I think it was 'DannyBee who pointed out years ago that the total cost of treating table saw injuries in the US exceeds the entire market for table saws themselves.
I'm surprised to read so much controversy, this feels like a textbook example of desirable regulation to me. If the societal cost (injuries, lost wages due to loss of function) meaningfully exceed the implementation cost then it should be done as it will make society/the economy safer and more efficient. Both sides of which should be easy enough to measure. That sawstop would benefit shouldn't enter into the equation.
My dad has three "pointy" (meaning the corners got cut off) fingers on his right hand, and at least on his left, courtesy of tablesaws. At the very least this technology should be mandated for the large non-portable saws like you find in most commercial wood shops. I'm glad to see action being taken on this finally.
I see so many videos of (predominantly USA) carpenters using table saws without even the bare minimum of safety features (even just a riving knife, for example). Is there no way to just enforce basic low-cost low-effort safety features rather than just jumping all the way to a very costly commercial saw-stop-like solution?
I've been tracking this closely, I don't know if I should wait to buy one in a year or so when the technology is available or buy one now so I get a cheap saw. I am not a cabinet maker so it would be for various building projects (like finish work).
If I buy one now, I pay $150 for a cheap saw without the tech.
I can of course buy a saw-stop for $1000 right now.
If I wait a year or so, this legislation would probably allow me to get a saw-stop capable saw for $450ish, but it's a gamble, because they COULD be over $1000. We don't know.
Looking at this from the UK : it's always astounding that US has an such a ligitious culture, and, at the same time, such a backwards health-and-safety culture. At least that's the impression I get from watching American tradespeople on Youtube.
I hear this a lot but it’s a myth. Germany is the most litigious county in the world. We are very close to the UK per capita 75 vs 65 per 1,000 people. The UK is #5 and the US #4.
I just bought a job site table saw for some home improvement projects. I’m so friggin wary of it. Bought all the safety upgrades I could find. Nice push sticks. Micro jig gripper blocks, feather boards. Try to run the guard at all times as well.
I'm in the UK, I used a tablesaw professionally for some years, often in very basic circumstances. I have never ever come close to an accident with a tablesaw. The reason:
1) UK tablesaws all come with a top-guard and a riving-knife fitted. The riving knife stops the timber from closing on the back of the blade, causing a kick back. In many designs it also holds the top guard up.
2) During my apprenticeship training there was a mandatory table saw course. We were taught how to set the guards and safely use the machine.
3) a riving knife based guard gets in the way of cutting grooves and rebates. If you take it off to do this then you replace it with a guard or jig to keep it safe. Then you put it straight back on.
4) I sometimes watch American 'makers' on YouTube and they terrify me with their working practice. My hands never went closer than the edge of the saw table. I used push sticks and jigs to handle everything close to the blade
5) I have never seen a sawstop over here, and it looks like a stupid hitech solution to a problem better solved by guards.
Are there other good examples where laws have mandated the use of a new patented technology for an industry with mature incumbents that turned out well?
I can't support any business that tries to make their product mandatory. Someone says here he's not scum, he is absolutely delusional scum. Does anyone else think having the government mandate what you can buy is a good idea?
Another company designed a saw which did the same thing and which didn't destroy a $200 cartridge and the blade. He said he'd sue them into oblivion. He's a greedy prick who would see people maimed before he'd give up the profits on his half-assed, shitty, Chinese made trash.
Use a blade guard, ffs. Don't support this asshole.
They are forcing these guardrails because the safety culture is being obliterated in the pursuit of cheap immigrant lavor.
Since the businesses won't implement it due to extra cost and the person harmed will be on Medicare and not any company health care plan. They will hide behind subcontractors etc like they do now.
So to avoid the govt being on the hook for medical care and permanent disability...
I'm sure amazon and aliexpress is still going to be flooded with non-compliant tools. Hell, it's easy enough to buy a chainsaw conversion kit for your drill
In a world where "safe if you use it right," and "centrifugal killing machine" are equally non-compliant, aliexpress is going to sell the killing machines because they're cheaper and the expertise required to tell the difference is rare.
An acquaintance of mine was a professional carpenter for a theater company. Thoughtful, careful guy. Never in a rush. He of course used a table saw all the time. I asked if he had Sawstop. They were too cheap.
He still has no idea what happened, he simply came to holding the bleeding stumps of his fingers. Surgeons managed to reassemble some functioning digits out of the chunks.
It is my opinion that the government should purchase and "open source" safety patents as they come up, then manufacture replaceable safety parts to sell at cost.
Why not just tax table saws and drills and put the money in a pool that doctors and hospitals can claim from when uninsured people cut their hands off?
Damn SawStop. You create a product that you can not only lobby the government into forcing people to use, but activating it destroys not only the SawStop but also the saw blade, necessitating replacing two products. What a perfect grift.
No, given the amount of injuries caused by table saws and their importance to carpentry and job sites, this is quite literally one of the more important things for them to be doing.
Education on existing safety features and measures just isn't enough to improve safety here.
Much like seatbelts and air bags, we all benefit if the baseline technology can be transparently improved to prevent entire classes of injuries.
Enjoy your dado stacks while you can. I for one think countries outside of USA have gone way overboard regulating an inherently dangerous tool, and the productivity dive is real.
The US Government doesn't give a damn about safety, the individuals who pass these laws have money at stake. Hence the financial windfalls that come to all the Reps in the House that just happen to sit on specific committees that oversee certain agencies which promulgate rules which have no real basis in law, but sure help them make money off building barriers to entry and functional mono/duopolies.
Another example of making it harder to produce one unit of economic output (a saw, in this case). When we make it harder to produce things, we will have less of them, or less of something else if we re-direct our efforts from something else.
It's death by a thousand cuts this way, as our overall economic productivity slows.
In the current world, people have a choice to purchase a saw that took more effort to produce, if they think that it's worth it for the additional safety it provides. This new law would eliminate that choice, and those who don't think it's worth it will have to purchase the high-effort saw or go without.
Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today. So many people are certain it won't happen to them. Accidents happen, even to experts.
My dad had a table saw he'd been using for over a decade when he had an accident. Luckily they were able to stitch up the finger and he missed the bone, allowing the finger tip to regrow. But my family friend who's a professional carpenter isn't as lucky and is missing the tips of three fingers from a jointer.
These tools are dangerous and table saws cause upwards of 30k injures a year. Everyone's talking about how this will kill the industry. Are businesses not innovative around costs, new technology, and regulations? Seems like everything from cars to energy have all improved with regulatory pressure
And to all the people saying this will keep hobbyists away. Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?
I think there are lots of people who would like to see this technology expanded. The issues going back more than a decade has been over the licensing of the patents. SawStop spent a lot of years aggressively suing over its IP and/or pushing for this legislation so that they could have regulatory capture. That's the problem, not the concept of safety. Maybe things have changed by now and we'll be able to see greater innovation in this space.
Sawstop already offered their key patent for free to get this technology adopted.
https://www.sawstop.com/news/sawstop-to-dedicate-key-u-s-pat...
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According to a recent Stumpy Nubs video, Saw Stop isn't the villain they've been made out to be (or at least has changed their tune substantially).
TLDR; They've offered not to defend their patent (or whatever the patent mumbo jumbo is) if the legislation goes through.
Stumpy Nubs on the subject: https://youtu.be/nxKkuDduYLk?si=c0GchB2hc3g0OtG4
The recent CPSC hearing where many of the revelations came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyJGE2Vyid0&t=0s
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> That's the problem, not the concept of safety.
Per the article, SawStop offered to 'open source' (as we'd say) the patent. Also, in TFA, end users objected to the regulation.
Weren’t the seatbelt and insulin famously given away? The people who own Sawstop IP are greedy people who have the blood, lost appendages, and deaths of a nearly countless number of people on their greedy shoulders. Absolutely shameless behavior.
I won’t sit here and say I have the solution; but this status quo is undeniably bad. Unchecked capitalism like this makes want me to vomit. Think of how many people would be living a better life if every table saw had this technology mandated by law for the past decade. Really think about it.
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Most professional cabinetmaker shops are terribly mismanaged and incredibly behind the times. The industry is consolidating as the owners are aging out. Mostly they’re just straight up closing shop because they have no succession plan, terrible workplace habits, and mismanaged finances. The proposed regulation will “harm” this type of shop but any cabinetmaking business that _will_ exist in ~10 years already uses saws with these types of safety features (and equivalently “safe” practices when it comes to things like ventilating their finishing area.)
> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today.
That is not a representative analogy. Imagine if in the 50s there was only one company that manufactured seatbelts and they owned every imaginable patent related to preventing car occupants from hitting surfaces in an accident (so another company couldn't for example invent the airbag because they'd block that too - see Bosch and a completely different implementation that Saw Stop sued out of the market).
Improved safety would be great, but legislation should never mandate a monopoly to a single manufacturer.
SawStop actually granted Bosch a license to their safety patents for Reaxx some time ago. Moreover, they said during the hearing that they'd offer permissive public licensing to their remaining patents should this rule be made effective.
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Volvo released it's seatbelt patent to the public, as TTS has vowed to do so if the CPSC mandates AIM. The last 20 years is not the present.
>However, one key patent — the "840" patent — is not set to expire until 2033. To stave off potential competitors, it describes the AIM technology very broadly. In a surprise move at February's CPSC hearing, TTS Tooltechnic Systems North America CEO Matt Howard announced that the company would "dedicate the 840 patent to the public" if a new safety standard were adopted. Howard says that this would free up rivals to pursue their own safety devices or simply copy SawStop's. At the hearing, he challenged them "to get in the game."
Saw Stop initially tried to get other companies to license their patent. They all declined because they didn’t want the extra cost. It was only after Saw Stop started manufacturing their own saws and proved there was a market demand for people not cutting their fingers off that all the other manufacturers suddenly decided they wanted to implement it.
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Ok, take away seat belt analogy.
How about air bags. Those are a better one.
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Also the seat belt lock ruins the seat belt and if you ever have to slam on brakes you have replace both the seat belt and the lock.
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The government is passing a law that says only company x make saws, due to various patents making it unrealistic to make your own design. They’re outlawing competition. Unless every relevant patent is opened up, this is extreme regulatory capture and is going to be a price gouging patent licensing circus after it passes
>due to various patents making it unrealistic to make your own design
Is it unrealistic, or are the companies simply not pursuing that market because it would harm their existing lines of product?
>Unless every relevant patent is opened up, this is extreme regulatory capture and is going to be a price gouging patent licensing circus after it passes
Personally, I'm fine with that.
As per the article, an entry-level SawStop retails for $899.
There's not excuse why this kind of tech isn't in every saw. The low cost of existing saws is a negative externality whose cost (cut off fingers) is borne by the society (insurance companies, healthcare, and government).
Right in the article, it says most patents are now expired and for the final key patent that expires in 2033, the owner -- SawStop's corp parent -- has offered to donate it to the public if this rule passes.
edit: if you believe different, please share. But per this article, patents do not seem to be a reason to avoid this tech. And the SawStop v1 was introduced in 2004, so it stands to reason we can now produce patent-free equivalent tech to the 2004 machine.
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Yeah this needs to be met with invalidation of patents. If the government mandates something, it has to be possible without patent infringement.
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They have offered to give away the key patent... I get the sense people aren't reading the story here.
Yeah this guy gets it.
Regardless of your stance on whether the government should regulate x or y, it's important to understand that the people driving this law do not care about you or your fingers. This is rent seeking; someone who makes safe saws wants to sell more of their saws, and they compete with people who sell less safe saws. They are using the legal system to benefit their own bottom line.
After the real goal is established, reasons like "think of the children" or "think of the fingers" can be fabricated.
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I don't think seatbelts are an honest comparison, nor are you representing the arguments of others fairly here. Seatbelts are a strap you add to a chair. They don't significantly affect the function of a car, don't add much to the maintenance overhead or up-front cost, they are easily removable/replaceable, etc. This is a much more invasive legislation.
I actually love sawstops. In fact I don't use table saws that don't include that functionality. But I would never, ever push for this kind of legislation. I'm not sure if you (or anyone commenting here) have ever used one of these saws personally, but the added expense and ongoing operating cost is not negligible. It's about $150 to fix it every time it triggers. People love to say 'cheaper than a trip to the hospital!' and while that's true it's also pithy and hand-wavy given how often these things trigger.
There are a ton of edge cases that can make these trigger (including mysterious triggers that seemingly have no cause), and there are whole classes of people who don't make enough to deal with that regularly but still operate saws safely for entire careers. Those are the people that are upset, not hypothetical hobbyists, who are the most likely to be able to afford the extra cost and be able to always operate in pristine conditions.
Powertools in a site setting need to operate in all kinds of conditions, and for a jobsite saw the money spent installing sensors and gadgets to meet regulations would be better spent on literally anything else for such a tool. People working in those settings are just going to turn this feature off and will strictly be hurt by this. (There's no way they can force these features to be always-on as that would prevent tons of materials from ever being able to be run through a table saw again.) To make it literally illegal to produce the right tool for site workers is an overreach coming from out of touch people.
Woodworking is an interesting space where people generally accept the risks they take and in return are more or less trusted to make that assessment by regulatory bodies at least in the US. A better comparison than seatbelts would be the european regulations around dado blades, which as I understand are fairly unpopular. Sawstops are great for HN types. That doesn't mean it should be illegal to produce sensorless saws.
FWIW, I supervised in one of the safest industrial environments in the US, and also one with incredibly robust workman comp. The 18-25 year olds I supervised typically just found ever stupider ways to get themselves hurt or accumulate improper- or over-use injuries... Arguably we would just fire them before they got us in trouble, which we didn't, but neither do people in much riskier settings I've heard from ("get these stupid safety railings uninstalled once the inspector is gone, they just waste time and get in the way").
My suspicion is that the better analogy for these things is airbags rather than seatbelts. Because people don't use seatbelts (guards), install something expensive that can't be easily defeated, airbags (sawstops), which are touchy and known to brick the car (saw). Do sawstops, when not engaging, inhibit the function of the saw as badly as airbags inhibit visibility around A pillars?
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I am against seatbelt laws, so you got me there.
I grew up as a proud resident of New Hampshire which has no such law on the books despite being one of the safest states to drive in the USA.
Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t driving alone without a seatbelt? Perfect example of government overreach as cars get loaded with nanny state technology. I subscribe to the philosophy of personal responsibility, something that seems to have been lost in the modern litigious, it’s everyone-else’s-fault culture of the 21st century.
>I grew up as a proud resident of New Hampshire which has no such law on the books despite being one of the safest states to drive in the USA.
Last time I checked, you couldn't legally sell a car in New Hampshire which did not have seatbelts.
You're comparing apples to cardboard boxes here.
>Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t driving alone without a seatbelt?
Irrelevant. The question you need to ask for a fair comparison is:
>Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t SELLING A CAR without a seatbelt?
The answer is: because these are different vehicles with different use cases (and adoption levels) that require different kinds of licenses to operate and have different kind of negative externalities.
Same reason motorcycles aren't required to have airbags.
Well written. I don't know why responsibility is so scary.
I've never used a table saw but I rock climb regularly which has plenty of risk. Are table saw accidents purely due to your own actions? Or is it like a motorbike where there are factors out of your control and someone could crash into you.
If losing your fingers on a table saw is 100% due to your own actions and there are no externalities, I would call that negligence not accident.
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I agree. I also wear a seatbelt and do not ride a motorcycle, but I think people should be allowed to take risks with their own life if they want to. The next natural step from this legislation is government mandated diets and exercise regimens to combat the obesity epidemic — and the resulting mortality — in the United States.
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In the jargon of philosophy this a friction point between Deontology (rules-based ethics) and Consequentialism (outcome-based ethics).
Deontologically there is a strong case against seatbelt laws, but the consequentialist perspective is rather compelling.
I’m generally a deontologist but find myself supporting the seatbelt law. It’s just such a small price to pay when stacked up against the consequences. I guess that means I’m not really a deontologist.
Personal responsibility is a hard sell in a world where human beings are not absolutely sovereign agents. Regardless, the law isn't stopping you from driving without a seatbelt. I find it odd that you have such a visceral response to a class of laws that is violated quite regularly.
Mischaracterizing the issue, which is people handing over (or having taken from them) responsibility, to the state, for something they should be taking responsibility for.
No chance your father or your joiner friend hadn't seen those ads of the saws which automatically stop on contact. But they chose not to buy one, because they decided they didn't need one. They had that choice. Or if before those existed, to use a hand saw.
Regulation is nothing more than saying "we're superior to you in making choices for you, so we'll do so". And it's made not by efficient innovative geniuses, but by the same people who run the DMV. And it's not imposed on children by parents, it's on grown adults by other grown adults with no legal accountability. And it ossifies technology by locking in certain measures which will quickly drift out of date. And, as we've seen with the FDA and Opioids, it gives a get out of jail free card to wrongdoers who game the rules, because they can point to their compliance and say "so look, we followed the rules, we shouldn't be liable".
It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.
> which is people handing over (or having taken from them) responsibility, to the state, for something they should be taking responsibility for.
> It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.
In general, there are many cases that most people cannot really take responsibility for. For example, if you hit a person with a car that can mean they’ll lose their income and need specialized care for decades. Such costs can run in the millions.
Now, you can argue people should take insurance against that risk. Problem is: some people won’t, and victims won’t be compensated,. If, then, you think the state should take on those costs, doesn’t the state have a say in what kinds of cars you can drive, for example that they have various safety features?
Also, this doesn’t only apply to cases where you injury others. If people get into an accident that leaves them with health costs they can’t afford to pay, we expect society to, at least partly pay up.
I think that argument applies here, too. Saw accidents can and do make lots of persons lose health and future income. In many cases, it’s the state that will have to pay up to cover that.
>but by the same people who run the DMV
I wish people would stop digging on the DMV. I have had multiple positive experiences with the DMV
> It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.
I dunno man, I kinda like when there’s some sort of enforcement making sure there’s not toxic waste in my food beyond hoping I find out later and a remedy even exists to make me whole. But you do you, anarchy’s worked every other time it’s been tried right?
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Ah yes a reply that is in no way doing any mischaracterizing itself. Great job!
When Volvo created the three-point safety belt (still in use today), they patented their invention. And then, recognizing the importance of this great improvement in safety, they absolutely gave it away for free.
When SawStop created a meat-detecting brake for table saws, they patented their invention. And then, they refused to give it away, sued the begeezus out of anyone who tried to emulate their patented inventions, and eventually paid lip-service to the concept by offering to license one aspect of it for free.
Can you spot the difference?
> Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?
They are able, and they’re choosing not to. So SawStop is wisely spending marketing money on lobbying. If people don’t want to buy your product, nothing better than forcing them to.
> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today. So many people are certain it won't happen to them.
Please don't mix up "being against something" and "being against legislation that forces people into something". You can support the thing, do the thing yourself, advice all of your friends and family to do the thing, and still believe that people should have the freedom not to do the thing, even if you think this decision would be extremely stupid.
While I can agree that tablesaws are quite dangerous, I just don't understand how we get from: "tablesaws are dangerous" to "the government should regulate tablesaws." There are safer saws out there. Sawstop. Buy one. No governmental intervention needed.
I started taking a beginner woodworking class which actually had a bit of a waitlist to it. After the first day (all safety), I decided it wasn't worth it for just a minor hobby. Improved safety gear may have changed my mind.
I would recommend learning only one new tool at a time, rather than a suite of tools. It will be less onerous and scary learning the safety practices, and you will be far less likely to slip up. (Plus, it's more affordable to only buy a new tool as you need it.)
Also, some tools are a whole lot safer than others. Tools that carry a risk of flinging your project (such as table saws and lathes) are risky, but a lot of other tools (such as jig saws and tracks saws) are very unlikely to cause serious injury.
And, of course, you can do without power tools altogether. People have used hand tools exclusively for the vast majority of the history of woodworking, and many people today still primarily use hand tools because they are more precise, safer, and often easier to use (albeit slower).
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I would recommend getting started with hand (non-power) tools. You can still make amazing things (see Paul Sellers) at a much lower risk profile.
I am a hobbyist carpenter and woodworker. My current project is probably the last one I will ever do without a table saw with these kinds of safety features. I have already changed over to using other tools like track saws and pull saws as much as I can for safety, but it is still hard to replace a well-calibrated table saw for certain tasks. My table saw is the only power tool I have that truly frightens me. Router tables and jointers can cause some nasty injuries as well, and I treat them with much respect, but total digit and limb loss is rarer with them.
The patent situation and much higher price are unfortunate, but it’s still a cost I am willing to bear. It’s cheap insurance compared to an ER visit and extended amounts of time spent feeling pain.
A seatbelt is a small fraction of the total cost of a car. I wouldn't be surprised if a table saw with this feature is 10x the cost of one without it or more. It adds a ton of complexity to a fairly simple tool.
At scale the cost will come down. The actual tech is remarkably simple (which is a compliment to the design and engineering). The saw blade is wired up in such a way that it becomes a capactive touch sensor. When tripped a sacrifical brake is blasted into the blade that causes it stop and drop into the table.
It isn't going to cost 10x.
https://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/the-technology/
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I have good news for you and your fingers. This will not increase the price of your next table saw by 10x.
It's closer to 2x the cost but that's a fairly fat margin since the Sawstop models ate the whole upper end. With a competitor they could probably get down to 1.5x.
I live in a poor, developing country where seat belts aren't mandatory. Also most people get around on scooters going 25-30mph and helmet laws are almost completely unenforced.
I am constantly amazed at the number of foreigners from first world countries who don't wear seatbelts or helmets the moment there is no Big Brother forcing them to.
Road fatality rates are 10x what they are in Germany, Japan, Ireland. 9x what they are in Australia. Until this year drunk driving laws were unenforced and drunk driving was widespread.
> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today
Woodworker here. The equivalent SawStop to my basic table saw is 3X the price.
Your analogy wouldn’t make sense unless seatbelts tripled the price of cars.
SawStop has a huge patent portfolio and they’ve been cagey about actually letting other people use the full system. This is more of a regulatory capture play, not a safety play with consumers in mind.
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Seatbelts are a legal requirement because my car insurance would have to pay for your medical bills if not wearing a seatbelt turned my failure to stop from a minor accident into a serious head injury. In other words, your lack of a seatbelt affects my liability. There is no analogy between that and safety devices for uninsured activities carried out alone, in our own homes.
This isn't the case in most countries, seatbelts did become a legal requirement though.
Thanks for this logic. It makes sense to me.
Can't all these many people who want the technology purchase it today? I think for every new hobbyist that comes along only because of this saw there will be five less hobbyists who stay away because of cost.
I don’t think the congress intends on prescribing the particular technology in use to accomplish this. That, would be a bad idea. They should set the goals (what constraints are acceptable in the name of making this technology affordable).
If it is being left up to the manufacturer, then half the arguments being mentioned here are moot. Other manufacturers are free to get creative about it. I can think of a few different ways myself - even something like assisted manoeuvring of the wood piece without direct contact of the hand, a retractable shield, etc.
"Everyone's talking about how this will kill the industry."
Because we know the mechanism behind the thing, and it's essentially unavoidable to trip because the lumber industry continues to sell still-wet wood. Until you put that industry firmly in its place, people are just going to be losing tons of money on 'safer' saws via constantly having to replace blades as the stop mechanism breaks them. And then we break out the handheld circular saw without that bullshit and go back to work.
"Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today. "
Those of us who ride motorcycles?
> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today.
Where have you been for the past 4 years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain_Award
Ironic how seatbelts aren’t mandated on public forms of transport like trains and buses, yet one is required to wear them in one’s own vehicle. If it truly is based on safety then it should be an all or nothing approach to requiring seat belts on moving vehicles.
Transit has the same advantage as a back seat of private auto: a big non-windshield to crash into in the event of a crash. seatbelts are pretty great. the proliferation of airbags is the correct comparison.
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>> Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?
There is literally nothing stopping those people from buying the saw that prevents that right now.
I recommend the movie "Walk the Line" for folks on the fence. Entertaining and might learn a thing or two.
You know, I recently bought a table saw. Reading this makes me terrified to use it.
If we're going to do a cost benefit analysis, we need to be pretty certain that the costs do in fact outweigh the benefits. We have hobbled Nuclear power over safety concerns and it's pretty clear we got that one completely wrong with huge negative consequences for society. This is obviously not on the same scale, but it's easy to get these things wrong and never revisit them. From the federal register notice on this, 70% of the supposed societal cost is pain and suffering, which frankly, individuals can decide on for themselves about the risks.
If you take out the pain and suffering values from these costs, you actually find that the cost benefit analysis doesn't pass at all, coming in at 0.5bn to 3.4bn in the red depending on the cost of the regulation on consumers, per the agency's own analysis.
If you got and read what people think about these regulations about people who use the tools, e.g. on /r/tools, they are unanimously opposed to them. Many people have complaints about the proposed products not working as advertised and generally wanting to bypass the system entirely: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tools/comments/19fmzko/are_you_in_f...
And that gets to the other part of this issue, if the regulation passes, what is the actual behavior change that will happen? Will people buy these saws and use them in the intended manner, or will they switch to alternatives that are just as dangerous, or will they simply turn off the safety features because the false positives are expensive ($100+ in direct costs without counting productivity losses). And note: all the SawStop products have off switches for the safety because they have false positives on wet wood and conductive materials like aluminum.
The headlines for these regulations are always great since nobody likes losing fingers, but there are always trade-offs, and it is extremely easy to make mistakes in these calculations and not foresee the actual knock on effects of them.
Particularly in this case where costs are largely internalized, rather than externalized.
Opposition to a law mandating the use of certain safety equipment is not the same thing as opposition to the safety equipment.
Here in Seattle, there used to be a bicycle helmet law. Helmets reduce the severity of injury in a crash, less severe injuries are obviously better, forcing people to run less risk is therefore justifiable: it seemed to make sense, and it was a popular law.
And yet, it was repealed. Why? Disproportional enforcement, partially - tickets were inevitably handed out primarily to poorer and more marginalized people - but the law actually made things worse for everyone by reducing the total number of riders on the road. There is safety in numbers for bicyclists, who are less likely to be hit by motorists when they are a more common sight - but the health benefit expected from riding a bicycle at all, helmet or no, is actually greater than the health benefit expected by adding a helmet. It is therefore better, both collectively and individually, if we remove every possible barrier to bicycle riding, even though some people will choose not to ride as safely as we wish they might.
Unintended consequences are a real thing, so a person can quite reasonably believe that the SawStop is a great invention which everyone should use, and that a law mandating the use of SawStop would be a bad idea.
Hah either we have know the same carpenter or a lot of pros have lost the top half of three fingers via jointers.
my grandfather only lost one finger tip to a joiner. My father had two fingers pretty well mangled by a table saw. I used to do some carpentry but have lost interest in the last couple of decades.
What really scares me are band saws!
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> against seatbelts
I've been wondering about this kind of thing recently.
I think people struggle all their lives with independence, and it is wonderful when you get the feeling of being "sovereign". Being your own man (or woman), confident in who you are and what you can do.
And then we run into forces bigger than us, and some people continue to defend their sovereignty. They want their freedom and they don't want to be told what to do.
(For me, I hate things like companies that want to LOG IN to my bank account to verify my income/etc and will never give up that fight.
for someone else it might be seatbelts.
I wasn't really aware of the seatbelt fight, but I remember helmet laws. My position was that I would wear a helmet, but I wouldn't want to force someone else to wear one.
... on the other hand, I think it is ok to make kids wear helmets.
There's also the knee-jerk anti-reguation crowd. Consider this comment from the article:
"If it's mandated, you're going to have people hanging on to their old saws forever," Juntunen says. "And, you know, that's when I'd say there will be more injuries on an old saw."
Does the mandate in any way change the functionality of a new saw (other than for cutting flesh)?
It does make ripping pressure treated wood a little dicey. Whenever I have to cut wood that is wet I will disable the flesh detection feature temporarily. That's a minor inconvenience though. I will never go back to a saw without the feature.
"These tools are dangerous and table saws cause upwards of 30k injures a year."
Right. I hate the damn things and they've always scared the shit out of me whenever I use them. I've not been seriously injured yet but I've come damn close.
Fortunately, I don't have one at present as someone stole my one during a factory move. I view this as good fortune for eventually I'll have to replace it and I'll do so with one with SawStop-like safety features.
I cannot understand what all the fuss and objections are about, yes SawStop-type saws are more expensive but their cost simply pales into insignificace the moment one's fingers go walkabout.
People are mad to say one can always use table saws safely. That may be the case for 99.99% of the time but it's the unexpected rare event that bites even the most seasoned professionals.
Table saws and their related brethren table routers are by design intrinsically unsafe, and this ought to be damn obvious to both Blind Freddy and the Village Idiot.
Frankly there's something perverse about those who consider table saws safe to use, alternatively they've misguided bravado and or they lack common sense.
Redesigning them to be intrinsically save just makes common sense, and in the long run will cost society much less (as amputations are enormously expensive per capita and it all adds up).
Edit: to those down-voters, I've a longtime friend who is one of the most meticulous and careful workers that I know (much more so than I am). Moreover, that planned thinking extends to the work he turns out, it's nothing but the finest quality.
He's been around power tools all his life and I first observed him using table saws and routers over 40 years ago. That said, about four years ago he was seriously injured when using a table router. Injuries to his hand were so severe that he has lost almost all of the dexterity in his hand, even now after many operations and ongoing professional physiotherapy, he has only regained partial use of his hand.
Perhaps the skeptics need to meet people like him and just see the negative impact such injuries have had on their lives.
There’s a certain sort of delusional self-identified genius that loves the idea of there being something that most people can’t do safely, that they can, because they simply know to be safe, whereas these other idiots do not. It’s like if you took the “C is safe, humans are not!” crowd and gave them something that caused amputations instead of buffer overflows.
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After two close calls I went ahead and bought a SawStop knowing it would be cheaper than an emergency room visit.
I'm shocked that so many people like yourself are shocked about resistance to safety devices. Regardless of how I feel about it, I can hear the objections the moment I read the article title:
"It's never hurt me"
"I accept the risk"
"It will double the price of a saw"
"I won't see any of these 'society savings', only the sawmakers will see more money"
Yeah, maybe a public ad campaign would help.
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I genuinely can’t tell if this is satire or not. Like, I know that this is something people will often say as an unoriginal attempt at a humorous reply, but I am…genuinely unsure.
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[dupe]
You're a young apprentice working at a shop who is too cheap to purchase those safety devices for their employees. What do they do?
I've always thought seatbelts should be mandatory on motorcycles. Ain't had one in ages, but I still wear my helmet wherever I go. Never can have too many laws. Authority always knows best.
I luv u hackernews. Long live the eggheads!
Future Headline: Man sent to glorious and compassionate American prison for not using riving knife gets shanked to death with one days before parole.
Future Hackernews Post with 10k upvotes and gushing comments: How the judicial system is creating strong Americans and healing millions - and how silicon valley has assisted
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait and otherwise breaking the site guidelines?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
If you had a legitimate point to make you wouldn’t resort to blatantly and intentionally absurd faux-analogies that don’t even pretend to seek to pose a fair comparison. This is childish. Though looking at your profile you seem to wear being unlikeable and hostile as some sort of badge of pride.
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It's really not analogous to seatbelts.
It's really simple to use a table saw safely: don't ever get physically close enough (by far!) for the spinning blade to cut you, or stand where it can fling something at you.
Then even if there's no riving knife and blade guard it's not going to ruin your day.
This means that you'll sometimes need to build a small jig to push wood into the saw, but usually you can just use a long stick to push the wood into it.
Every single table saw accident video you'll see is people who've clearly become way too complacent with them, or are trying to save themselves a few minutes of setup time.
It's simple to use a car safely too. Don't ever speed, be aware of your surroundings at all times, and practice defensive driving.
In theory.
As someone who has used a table saw, you simply cannot account for every variable factored in to having a 10" piece of sharpened carbide steel spinning at 5,000 RPMs and shoving a piece of probably inconsistently structured building materials through it, many, many, many times to accomplish a job. Maybe the sawmill left a nail in there for you: shit happens.
In the immortal words of Jean Luc Picard: It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That's why we build things with safety features: to manage those risks.
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Just accept it, smile, nod, and deny the existence of the router, lathe, bandsaw, angle grinder with a circular blade on it etc. Chainsaws are probably next up against the wall though since they're pretty well represented in low-effort horror media
While I agree with your premise, mistakes still happen.
I do all of the things you mentioned, plus I use pushers or a crosscut sled whenever possible. It should be impossible for me to make contact, but it only takes a split second of stupidity or inattention to mess up
They're holding it wrong?
I am not against seatbelts.
I am against government mandates in regards to seatbelts.
>Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off? If you think this is a factor in people buying or not buying a table saw, I have a bridge to sell you.
People are driving on public roads, using public first responders, being taken to the emergency room, etc.
Not wearing a seatbelt costs society time and money.
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> I am against government mandates in regards to seatbelts.
No one cares, you don't have a good enough reason. It's ok to have some kinds of mandates. I don't want my tax dollars going to pay EMS and police to shovel your remains off the highway because you wanted to drive like an idiot.
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Safety has 100% been a factor in many of my tool purchases, mistakes happen, especially to amateurs, and most people would rather not lose fingers to a hobby.
But why?
I remember a time before seatbelts were compulsory and very few people wore them.
> I am against government mandates in regards to seatbelts.
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Are you against public health measures in general?
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What is the point of society if not to look out for one another? Protecting you in the end makes me safer too
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The federal government's responsibilities is literally to collect taxes to maintain a standing army, and to coordinate cross-state issues that the states themselves for some reason aren't able to regulate themselves. That's what its scope is supposed to be. Are states not able to pass the table saw regulations they feel is appropriate for their citizens? I feel like they are. Why does the federal government need to step in and mandate .. table saw laws for our states? For me it's just another small step in the long line of steps towards having one overarching federal government that controls everything, like other countries have, which the US is not supposed to have.
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Key point here is the SawStop CEO is promising to open up the patent and make it available for anyone, so it's a bit more complicated than the typical regulatory-capture lawyer success story.
The 3-point seat belt is another time this happened and probably one of the few feel-good "this should be available to everyone" patent stories: Volvo designed it, decided the safety-for-humanity* benefits outweighed patent protections, and made the patent open for anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bohlin (*: at least the segment of humanity that drives cars)
I'd be curious to hear the cynical take here. If I was to wargame it, I would guess something like: SawStop doesn't want to compete with Harbor Freight and cheap chinese tool manufacturers -- that's a race to the bottom, and power tools have turned into ecosystem lock-in plays which makes it difficult for a niche manufacturer to win in. So they'd rather compete on just the safety mechanism since they have a decade head start on it. They're too niche to succeed on SawStop(TM) workbenches, and they forsee bigger profits in a "[DeWalt|Milwaukee|EGo|...], Protected by SawStop(TM)" world.
If you go listen to their CEO's testimony, he clearly states that the one single original patent behind the idea is now open but was expiring anyway. He brags about them spending a lot of money on R&D and needing to recoup that, reiterating that they have many other patents that aren't being opened that cover the exact implementation. He talked about them exploring those other methods, choosing not to patent them, and only patenting the best solution.
All his words. He's trying to explain that sure, the patent is open, but companies are still going to have to work harder than Sawstop because they have many more patents they refuse to open that cover the best and most logical implementation of this idea.
You're asking for a "cynical" take, but it's not really cynical! The CEO is trying to tell everyone, openly, and they're not listening. They are NOT altruistic, otherwise they would have opened the entire suite of patents. They are openly saying this singular patent is open, because it doesn't matter and that they will doggedly defend their other patents. Now, every other manufacturer will now need to navigate a minefield of patent litigation, and follow the path of subpar implementations that Sawstop ruled out during their R&D.
I don't know why everyone is ignoring his testimony and thinking the company is giving anything up, it's wild!
If there is a mandate, then they have to license the patents under FRAND terms.
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Why not just set the mandate to begin after most of these patents expire? I would really not brush off how serious of a safety problem this is, but honestly I’d rather the government either delay the implementation or buy out the patents because this is a blatant market failure of public interest that the government is well poised to address. Digit amputation incurs a public cost even in America.
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> they have many more patents
How does that work though?
If the patent covers something that was already in the first version of the device, it should be either patented before 2004 and thus expired, or patented afterwards and thus invalid due to prior art, no?
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The cynical take is more that it's crappy blade guards that nobody uses that really should be improved, and it's not necessary to mandate SawStop-style blade breaking technology.
I tend to agree with Jim Hamilton, Stumpy Nubs on youtube, who was quoted in this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk
Bascially, mandating the more expensive blade brakes instead of standards around blade guards will eliminate cheap table saws from the market. And yes, this has happened before with radial arm saws - they are now basically non-existent in the US.
So it definitely benefits SawStop to give away this patent, as their saws will look a hell of a lot "cheaper" than competition.
SawStop often breaks the saw itself, not just the blade. There's alot of energy being put into the saw all at once, and I've seen examples where it fractured the mounts of the saw itself when it engaged.
That's of course great, if you're in the business of selling saws, not so great if you're in the business of buying saws.
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I've seen all of the talking points, but a regulation probably is required simply to force liability.
The biggest "excuse" I have seen from the saw manufacturers is that if they put this kind of blade stop on their system that they are now liable for injuries that occur in spite of the blade stop or because of a non-firing blade stop. And that is probably true!
Even if this specific regulation doesn't pass, it's time that the saw manufacturers have to eat the liability from injuries from using these saws to incentivize making them safer.
As for cost, the blade stops are extremely low volume right now, I can easily see the price coming down if the volume is a couple of orders of magnitude larger.
We had one of these in my highschool woodshop - they would demo it once a year on the parents night because of the expense. I'd rather see this regulated in a way that says places like schools or production woodshops would need these from an insurance perspective, but home woodshops wouldn't be required to
Why are radial arm saws so dangerous? I have an old one and other than shooting wood into the shop wall when ripping, or holding the wood with your hand it seems pretty hard to hurt yourself. Circular saws seem way more dangerous, and the only injury I've ever had was from a portaband.
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https://www.grainger.com/product/DAYTON-Radial-Arm-Saw-120V-... here you go
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Elimination of competitors through safety standards has happened before.
Heinz was the first company to make shelf stable ketchup without any of the chemical stabilizers that had been in use before, and then successfully lobbied against preservatives. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketch...
It's the same with efficiency standards, happened with lightbulbs, is currently happening with the "technically not an EV mandate."
I wish we had a way to enact this kind of legislation without massively distorting markets.
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Standard oil invented tanker cars and built pipelines. Everyone else was stuck unloading 55 gallon drums from normal railcars beacuse of patents and relative lack of investment.
Then the government broke standard oil up, rather than revoke the patent or reform the system in away way, and prices got higher for consumers in the end.
This is often brought up as a success story. Patents never have worked as intended.
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Great read - didn't expect to learn that today!
I’m not utterly opposed to this regulation, but I do think SawStop stands to benefit. Even if the patents are open, it will take competitors a long time to develop new products. Meanwhile, SawStop will get the distribution that they don’t currently have. Just glancing at the HomeDepot website, I see that they sell SawStop but they are not stocked at my local store. I imagine that if this goes through, every Physical store in the country will need to stock their saws, at least until their competitors put out products. in the meantime, they can get much better economies of scale, and then try to compete on price
Bosch already has these table saws ready and available for jobsite-type of saws, they are sold in Canada I think. Techtronic Industries (Milwaukee, Ryobi) and Stanley Black & Decker (DeWalt) are huge enough to just push through and it will filter to all the brands they manufacture. Delta is smaller, but this is their bread and butter so probably they have some technology lying in wait.
The higher end table saws is probably a different story, they are even smaller manufacturers, but a lot of that stuff is different anyway.
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Usually these types of laws come with a date in the future that they will actually be implemented giving such competitors time to figure these things out.
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There are competing systems both international and domestic that have been forced off the shelves by sawstop.
It's not outrageous that a business's investors are rewarded for an innovation that benefits humanity.
One thing I don't see mentioned with any of these discussions is that this massively increases the cost of using different kinds of blades on the saw. If you need to use a specialty blade that's a smaller diameter, it requires a matching special size safety cartridge. Dado stack? Another, even more expensive cartridge. I know most people typically have one blade on the saw and never change it or if they do, it's just another of the same size, but for those of us who do regularly swap out blades that aren't the standard 10" x 1/8", these types of regulations add both significant cost and time/frustration.
I'm all for safety and would love for there to be more options for this kind of tech from other saw makers, but I personally don't think regulation is necessarily the right way to do it. Just like there are legitimate cases for removing the blade guard, there are legitimate cases for running without this safety feature, especially one that would require several hundred dollars more investment even if the safety feature is disabled (On SawStop, you physically can't mount a dado stack unless you buy a special dado stack cartridge).
And if SawStop really wanted to improve safety for everyone... well I find it rather telling that they'll only open their patent if the regulation becomes law. Since they're effectively the only ones with the tech, with the regulation passed, buyers instantly have only one option for however long it takes for competitors to come to market with their own (which they'll be hesitant to do based only on a spoken promise by the patent holder). Instant pseudo-monopoly.
It takes 3 minutes to swap out the normal saw stop cartridge and put the one in for dado blades. Setting up the thickness and putting the dado stack on takes twice as long. If you are doing enough woodworking that you have a dado stack and specialty blades the saw stop cartridge is not that big of a deal.
Cynical take is that the SawStop feature adds enough cost to budget table saws that they will no longer be economically viable and you can only purchase mid-high end tables saws going forward.
This is pretty true. Sawstop adds more to the cost of a low end table saw than a low end table saw is worth.
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Another cynical take would be that SawStop has secretly invested heavily in a saw blade manufacturers to profit from more blades being destroyed when the stop event occurs.
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"curious to hear the cynical take here"
My first cynical reaction is to ask which politicians will benefit handsomely from stock trading with SawStop stock (assuming it's a publicly traded company) or through kickbacks of one kind or another.
I think SawStop table saws are terrific for woodworkers who work in their own shop. Less so for workers who have to bring their tools to the job site. Yes, I know that SawStop makes a portable table saw. When you're working at a job site, you have less control over the materials you're working with (as compared to the cabinet maker in his/her own shop). SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site. A common example mentioned is treated lumber, but I don't recall ever having cut treated lumber on a table saw. When I need to cut treated lumber it's with a hand held circular saw. I'm a part-time handyman (some evenings and weekends).
> SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site
You can turn the tech off to make it work as a regular table saw, but it does require pre-existing knowledge about what may false-trip the saw. Having a job site saw fail on site without cartridges and blades in supply, or a newbie on the saw could be pretty bad.
Not overly prohibitive with training though, and is something that everyone will face if this becomes mandated.
> I'd be curious to hear the cynical take here.
afaik the patent was basically expiring in the next couple years anyway, even the small ancillary ones. They've been making and selling SawStop saws for the last 20 years and already made their bag. So, since SawStop has the experience designing and building the systems they want to wring out some good will and see which Big Saw manufacturer wants to pay them to get ahead of their competition.
Minor tangent- I view patents and especially physical invention as requiring more work yet patents last 20 years while copyright can last up to 120 years!
https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
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How about SawStop open their patent up first? They've already sued to prevent other tool manufacturers from making their own solutions to the problem, because they want theirs to be licensed. So even though they claim they will open their patent once the feature is enforced, what have they done in good faith to make us believe they won't move the goalposts to opening it, once they have captured the market?
Presumably there's a reasonable compromise whereby they provide a public license only valid in areas where such safety mechanisms are legally mandated.
They would be forced to license it under FRAND
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Its extremely unlikely they would offer to open up the patent and then say "haha, fooled you!" once the law takes effect. It would do them more harm than good in the long run to lie to lawmakers & everyone else.
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The patent[0] is over 20 years old so it should have expired regardless - except it got 11 years of extensions. That's a bit of an odd situation because SawStop was selling "patent-pending" saws since the very early 2000's...I'm not sure the extension guidelines were intended to give companies 30 years of exclusivity and protection - it would make more sense in a situation where they couldn't start profiting on the patent until the patent was finally granted. There's a reason they're supposed to be 20 years from "date of file" instead of "date of approval". The current system could encourage companies to try to get their patent applications tied up in appeals for as many decades as possible.
Regardless, it would have made sense for them to agree to FRAND [1] licensing >5 years ago which might have accelerated standards adoption.
From https://toolguyd.com/sawstop-patent-promise/ :
> I am a patent agent and I just took a look at the patent office history of the 9,724,840 patent. It is very interesting because it spent a long time (about 8 years) being appealed in the court system before it was allowed. While patents are provided with a 20 year life from their initial filing date (Mar 13, 2002 for this patent) there are laws that extend the life of the patent to compensate the inventor for delays that took place during prosecution. The patent office initially stated that the patent was entitled to 305 days of Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) and that is what is printed on the face of the patent. But the law also allows for adjustment due to delays in the courts, which the patent office didn’t initially include. So SawStop petitioned to have the delays due to the court appeal added and their petition was granted indicating that it was proper to add those court delays to the PTA. So the PTA was extended to 4044 days, meaning that this patent doesn’t expire until 4/8/2033!
> The other interesting thing about this patent, is that its claims are very broad. Claim 1 basically covers ANY type of saw with a circular blade that stops within 10 ms of detecting contact with a human as long as the stop mechanism is “electronically triggerable.” It would be VERY difficult to work around this patent and meet the CPSC rules. So the fact that SawStop has promised to dedicate this to the public is at least somewhat meaningful.
> BUT, SawStop has many other patents that it has not dedicated to the public. I have not analyzed their overall portfolio, but is is very likely that the other patents create an environment that still makes it difficult to design a saw in compliance with CPSC rules. So it is entirely possible that the dedication of the one broad patent was done to provide PR cover while still not creating a competitive market.
0: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9724840B2/en
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
This should be the top comment
If I had 3 years to implement a safety feature based on a patent to meet new legal requirements I would be concerned about getting sued for edge cases the patent holder worked out.. Injurues are reduced but buyer beware may no longer apply to the remaining injuries especially if even other new implementations avoid edge case largely by accident, I.e. slightly different materials and other factors not considered when only one manufacturer was attempting the feature.
My cynical take is:
1. Many of SawStop’s patents either expired or about to expire.
2. Bosch already has a similar tech but was prohibited to sell their saws with it in the US. I think soon all the patents that were basis for this ruling going to expire.
3. SawStop already by acquired by TTS(same company that owns Festool). They may have plans to integrate it in their line up somehow and safety tech becomes less of a differentiator.
And my even more cynical take is that FTC only considered requiring safety tech after a nod from the industry leaders.
I saw an alternative to sawstop that would not destroy the blade when it deployes and does not require a replacement gas cartrige.
It appeared to work just as well but I believe it pulls the blade away instead of stopping it.
Sadly I currently can't find it.
Edit: I think it was this one https://www.felder-group.com/en-us/pcs
That really is the crux here.
If the technology is allowed under free-use or a free limited license, that'll change things.
Right now, no one can put it on their saws without having to either risk the patent fight or pay whatever Sawstop wants, with the later probably being so high, there is a reason other brands don't have "Equipped with sawstop technology!" badged on them.
There's some amount of altruism, but no one is cutting their own throats either. At least some corporations are run by humans.
A patent expires, but forcing competitors to adopt a technology you already incorporate raises everyone else's costs, so it's not always bad for business.
I'm amazed that the patent hasn't expired yet. I was sure I heard of this more than 20 years ago.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies aren't clamoring to buy out SawStops and hand-deliver them to everyone with a table saw, asking them to install them at no cost in exchange for an insurance discount.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies don't pay for gym memberships and reduce your premiums if you deliver them screenshots of your workouts and pictures of making healthy food at home.
That's what a sane insurance company that wants to increase profit margins would do. Get out there in the field and reduce the number of times they need to pay.
Insurance profits are capped at a percentage of what they spend, and they sell to a captive market, there's no incentive for them to minimize costs.
Confession: The 3-point seat belt always feels like an eyeroller to me. It's not complicated, and the kind of thing that many others would have come up with soon enough anyway. The real injustice was in classing it as the kind of deep, mind-blowing, hard-won insight that deserves a patent.
> It's not complicated, and the kind of thing that many others would have come up with soon enough anyway.
Counterpoint: a lot of inventions seem obvious in retrospect, especially if you've used them routinely for most of your life. Doesn't mean they were obvious at the time.
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Why must there be a cynical take? Sometimes things really are as great as they seem.
I agree with Stumpy Nubs on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk
He is opposed to this but expects it to pass. His best argument is that it would effectively outlaw affordable low end "contractor" portable job-site style table saws. I have one of those, a cheap $150 Ryobi. It would be more like $450 with the SawStop feature and I would not have been able to afford it.
I'd be using a circular saw instead. Maybe that is a bit safer, and at least it's more affordable until they require the same tech in circular saws. But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?
"He is opposed to this but expects it to pass. His best argument is that it would effectively outlaw affordable low end "contractor" portable job-site style table saws"
"job site saws" account for 18% of the market, just to put this in perspective.
It is also totally wrong. The submitted comments to the CPSC suggest an increase of $50-100 per saw, even with an 8% royalty (which will no longer exist).
That is from PTI, who is the corporate lobbying organization of the tool saw manufacturers and plays games with the numbers.
In the discovery of the numerous lawsuits around design defects in table saws, it turns out most of the manufacturers had already done the R&D and come to a cost of about $40-50 per saw.
Everything else is profit.
We already have riving knives and you name it, and injury cost is still 4x the entire tablesaw market.
It's worse if you weight it by where injuries come from.
For every dollar in job site saws sold, you cause ~$20 in injuries.
The one dollar goes to profit, the $20 is paid by society, for the most part (since they are also statistically uninsured).
Let's make it not regulation - which seems to get people up in arms.
Here's a deal i'd be happy to make (as i'm sure would the CPSC) - nobody has to include any safety technology.
Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible for their weighted share of blade injury costs (whether the user is insured or not).
If the whole thing was profitable, this would not be a problem.
Suddenly you will discover their problem isn't that there is technology being mandated, but they don't want to pay the cost of what they cause.
(In other, like say cars, you will find the yearly profit well outweighs the yearly cost of injuries)
> Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible for their weighted share of blade injury costs (whether the user is insured or not).
But what does this even mean? You don't injure yourself with existing saws if you follow safety protocols. Then people don't and get hurt, which is entirely from not following safety protocols.
The manufacturers can already be sued if they make a product which is dangerous even when used appropriately.
> Suddenly you will discover their problem isn't that there is technology being mandated, but they don't want to pay the cost of what they cause.
Or each manufacturer will file a patent on their own minor variant of the technology such that no one else can make a replacement cartridge for their saws, then sell cartridges for $100+ while using a hair trigger that both reduces their liability and increases their cartridge sales from false positives.
Meanwhile cheap foreign manufacturers will do no such thing, provide cheaper saws and just have their asset-free US distributor file bankruptcy if anybody sues them. Which is probably better than making affordable saws unavailable, but "only US companies are prohibited from making affordable saws" seems like a dumb law.
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> Let's make it not regulation - which seems to get people up in arms. [...] Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible
I've long been of the opinion that mandatory underwriting is superior to regulation for most things. At least: housing, medicine, and consumer products. Maybe not airplanes, but then again, maybe.
If a manufacturer of table saws was required to be underwritten for claims of injury, they'd find it in their best interest to make those saws as safe as practical.
This itself requires regulation: no skating out of it by having customers sign bullshit waivers, and of course some department would have to audit businesses to see to it that they're complying. But the sum of that is much less costly to taxpayers, and also avoids all the cost-disease which results from a regulatory regime whose interest is in producing paperwork, and which has no incentive to change, streamline, or remove a regulation, once it's in place.
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> For every dollar in job site saws sold, you cause ~$20 in injuries.
Fine.. but for every dollar in job site saws sold how much useful output do they produce? My suspicion is it's something like:
$1 for the saw. $20 for the injuries. $500 of added project value.
In which case, it's not at all clear that sawstop is a useful addition.
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> The one dollar goes to profit, the $20 is paid by society, for the most part (since they are also statistically uninsured).
This is why socialized medicine is a bad idea. You get "free" medicine in exchange for society dictating what you're allowed to do.
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What's a riving/ryving knife? I searched but still unclear.
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That $50 number seems incredibly optimistic. Just the rebuild cartridge is selling for $99 right now: https://www.sawstop.com/product/standard-brake-cartridge-tsb...
And the saw frame has to be much stronger to handle the force of stopping that blade. Throwing $50 of new parts on an existing frame just means you throw the whole saw away after it triggers.
Every time this triggers, you need a new cartridge and blade ($40+) and time to swap them in. If I was sure this was saving a finger (as the dramatic stories in the press state), then I wouldn't think twice. But it probably just wet wood or something else conductive causing a false trigger. Show me the false rate data please.
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> Maybe that is a bit safer
Isn’t that the entire point? Weekend warriors and small operators are going to be those getting injuries. Those with massive operations are likely using high spec gear already.
I live in a country (NZ) with fairly aggressive workplace safety legislation. We also have a single payer for accidental injuries and time off work (The Accident Compensation Corporation). It helps keep the courts clear but also means they have a lot of visibility into injury types and help work to prevent common accident methods.
Don’t delve too deep into the dark side of their work, its grim.
I think that misses an important argument he makes which is that all table saws should be equipped with better (higher quality, more effective) blade guards and riving knives. Much cheaper to implement and nearly as effective as sawstop.
The problem is woodworkers will do dumb things like remove both of these things from their saws to do unsafe cuts. You can even find youtube videos of people confidently asserting they're useless and just get in the way (They are not).
> The problem is woodworkers will do dumb things like remove both of these things from their saws to do unsafe cuts.
And they'll disable these new gadgets as well. The ones which work through conductivity have to have a bypass to be able to cut conductive material.
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> The problem is woodworkers will do dumb things like remove both of these things from their saws to do unsafe cuts.
I have seen videos without them, with people saying that they have older saws and that is how they are used to work. But not that they are useless. Especially not the riving knives. One interesting argument I have seen from someone: currently the recommended way is to have a blade just a tad bit over the top of the piece, but he was taught to have it much higher. His point was that in such set up there was more vertical pressure down from the blade rather then horizontal and thus lower risk of kickback. Not sure if his idea has merit, but interesting thought.
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Blade guards and riving knives are not enough. You would also need a kickback arrestor at the very least (even though the sawstop does not fix that issue).
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I think you're on a reasonable path with your thinking there. Something I learned a couple of years ago is that table saws are particularly popular in the US. It varies from country to country, but in some places circular saws on tracks are the norm for the same purposes, especially on job sites.
These aren't very popular in the US so you don't see the dedicated "track saws" in stores here that are common in the UK for example. You can pretty easily buy a Kregg Accu-Cut which is a similar idea that you bolt onto your existing circular saw, but it's a little bit annoying compared to purpose-built track saws that are a tidier design and often plunge cut as well so it's simpler to start the cut. But you can also get proper track saws online, and I'll probably pick one up eventually to replace my Accu-Cut.
I don't think this is a perfect solution, getting cabinetry precision with a track saw might be tricky. But no one's doing that with a portable contractor table saw anyway. And the track saws are even more portable. I think the table saw concept is a better fit for larger, fixed tools, which I would guess probably have a better safety record than portables (larger table, cleaner environment, etc) even without sawstop technology. And I think it's more feasible to have good quality guards that will be less annoying on a fixed tool than a portable one, where they have a tendency to break off.
The US has space and pick up trucks that can fit plenty of table saws. Big tools in general are more accessible and affordable in the US. I have not seen as many people owning large tools like table saws, metal mills and lathes as in the US.
You also lose a lot of potential for 'repeatable cuts'
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> I agree with Stumpy Nubs on this.
While I understand the name is not meant to be taken literally, I'd be curious to know the opinion of someone like Jamie Perkins who does actually have 'stumpy' fingers because of a woodworking incident:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZMe0QIET6g
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8XEQ1XKYNDXTUhEZWcHA...
It wasn't with a table saw though, but rather a jointer:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jointer
He now has a prosthetic hand:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu52UOeJAj8
I've seen jointer near-miss videos and the adult education woodworking class I took is even more terrifying in retrospect. I knew table saws were dangerous and assumed they were the most dangerous. At least with a table saw the fingers can often be reattached. Jointers and router tables just make hamburger.
I'm becoming a much bigger fan of mounting an uneven piece of wood to plywood and running it through the table saw to get that first edge.
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I don’t understand how you can hurt yourself with a jointer (presuming you’re using a push stick and pad to push the wood down from the top). There’s no risk of kickback and most jointers these days come with spring loaded blade guards that only expose enough of the blade that the wood makes contact with.
Stumpy Nubs absolutely did once run his hand through a saw; by your ridiculous definition he is absolutely qualified to have an opinion.
I'm a fan of Stumpy Nubs but I disagree with his economic analysis here. Saw Stop has effectively had a monopoly on this type of saw, so of course they've been pricing it high. When Bosh came out with their own version it only made sense to price it at a comparable level to their only competitor. For them to massively undercut Saw Stop would leave money on the table.
There will be some cost in re-engineering the cheap saws to handle a sensor and brake. But those costs will be amortized over time and the materials themselves will be incredibly cheap. We're talking about a capacitive sensor and a chunk of sacrificial metal.
There will also probably be some cost saving innovation around the tech. Since Saw Stop is a premium brand coasting on patent-enforced monopoly they haven't had to invest in R&D the way Dewalt, Bosh, and Makita will.
> But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?
What about employees? They don't get to decide.
It'd be very trivial to attach a "business of X size" or even just a business at all requirement to the law.
> But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?
I agree, at least until we get free universal health care, then the government has an argument for making these decisions.
> a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?
If you amputate your fingers, the rest of us bear the cost of your reconstructive surgery through higher health insurance premiums.
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Circular saws are not just "a bit" safer. They cause far fewer injuries despite getting more use in construction. Table saws really are a menace.
I'm not in favor of this regulation because I don't like the idea of the government regulating hobbies, and I think it ends with some tools and hobbies getting banned altogether... but we should make this much clear.
There’s only one reason to use a tablesaw- repeatable cuts and nothing else can really do that. It’s also indispensable for any kind of furniture building.
Do you think the government should regulate workplace safety?
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That's a good point. I would think that a circular saw or track saw is more dangerous. You tend to be hunched over the blade in an awkward position. I use a table saw over a circular saw because, for me, it seems safer.
I would love if someone could chime in with actual statistics here, but I've always heard that table saws are the most dangerous common power tool in the US by raw injury count alone. I have a weak assumption that more people have circular saws than have table saws. This seems unsurprising to me, because both track and circular saws are used with the blades faced away from the person. I can't speak to track saws, but I've never had a board launched at me by a circular saw. People also tend to over-extend themselves over tablesaws, and have their hands inches from the blades.
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Intuitively, the table saw seems more dangerous to me (and I'm typing this with a finger with three pins in it from a table saw injury) because you're manipulating the circular saw directly, and thus more consciously. With a table saw you're manipulating the workpiece into the blade, which is indirectly a threat--in my case, the wood kicked, knocking my finger into the blade.
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A circ saw is definitely not safer if you're ripping boards!
A circ saw might not be, but a tracksaw is much safer for breaking down sheet goods. Just not as fast as blasting a sheet of plywood through a job site saw.
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Why? If kickback happens the blade guard just closes up.
Maybe but I presume the Chinese will jump in to subsidize that through mass production and we will all end up with saw stop enabled $250 contractor saws.
I mean, we have effectively outlawed cheaper vehicles that could probably have worked for a lot of needs. And... that largely seems like a fine thing?
I think it is fair that a holistic analysis of the legislation would make a lot of sense. I would be surprised to know that changing a saw from 150 to 450 would be a major change in its use. But, I could be convinced that it is not worth it.
I will note that is also taking at face value the cost of implementing the tech. In ways I don't know that I grant. I remember when adding a camera to a car's license plate was several hundred dollars of added cost. And I greatly regret not having one on my older vehicle. Mandating those was absolutely the correct choice. My hunch is when all saws have the tech, the cost of implementing will surprisingly shrink.
Maybe some power tools that get only occasional use could be fine with a better rental market. Not long ago I bought a ceramic tile cutter because renting one for 3 days was more expensive that buying one outright, but if that market went towards more expensive but safer models I'd reconsider and would do just fine with renting. And then tradespeople who need these tools more than 10 days per lifetime need to buy upscale anyway...
> we have effectively outlawed cheaper vehicles that could probably have worked for a lot of needs. And... that largely seems like a fine thing?
Odd conclusion given the highest rate of pedestrian deaths in the US in history correlated strongly with a work truck tax deduction passed in 2017.
Or when scooters and ebikes have changed both high density traffic and recreation significantly over the last decade.
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$150 is the cost of a really good table saw blade - a decent one would be half that. If you're using the saw at home, $150 is only 2-3x more than the shop vac you'll need to clean up after anything. At a job site, it's a lot less than the cost of the nailgun you'll use once you've cut something.
> we have effectively outlawed cheaper vehicles that could probably have worked for a lot of needs.
Some states have done that but many states have not. This would be fine as a state law but it is infringing as a federal law.
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This video is a great overview of the history and the recent hearings, came here to link it.
Not sure I agree with his conclusion though - once all manufacturers are required to include the technology, surely they will still compete on price and find ways to get cheaper models to market? They will be unencumbered by the risk of patent violation to innovate on cheaper approaches to the same problem.
He also argues for riving knives and blade guards as an alternative, which are great, but not all cuts can be made with them in place.
As a hobby woodworker that sometimes makes mistakes, I've wanted a SawStop for a long time but have been stymied by the cost, so maybe I'm just being optimistic.
[dead]
I'll forever remain skeptical of SawStop. I understand their mechanism works quite well and they sell a very high quality saw, but I will never in my life buy it.
It's amazing how the discourse online has shifted. SawStop's original focus after having their patent granted was super-litigious IP-troll type behavior. They were able to win some cases and force other manufactures like Bosch to remove alternative safety they had engineered to compete. SawStop was lobbying heavily for a regulatory requirement to mandate their patented technology be installed on all table saws.
The online opinion of them was ... not good. Look up the old SawStop stuff on Slashdot if you want to see it.
Now that their patent is about to expire, it's "oh look we have changed" -- they haven't. It's just a desperate bid to get themselves insinuated in front of manufacturers who will be suddenly charged with a mandate to ship safety devices -- and of course SawStop will be there with the business shortcut. Sorry, no. Fuck them. Let the patent expire.
Since they actually make a product using their patented technology, they would definitionally not be a patent troll. Even if they’re litigious, that’s exactly how the system is supposed to work when you’ve invented a valuable technology which you sell to recoup the costs of R&D plus the profit of your invention.
> Since they actually make a product
At the time they were up to their original shenanigans they did not sell the saw. They did not sell a saw for the first five years of their business being open. It was a pure IP play. God damn do people have short memories.
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Color me jaded, but isn't this just business as usual in the U.S?
Color me jaded, but isn't this just a typical dig on the US that also applies to businesses acting predictably in their best interests the world over?
You hear a lot from long-time woodworkers that this is unnecessary, as they are perfectly capable of using a table saw safely with just the riving knife/splitter and proper technique. Which is anecdotally true, but hard to accept with the actual data of 30k injuries a year. So it's not a question of _if_ there's a cost to society here, it's a question of _where_ we put the cost: up-front on prevention, or in response to injury in the healthcare system. Is the trade-off worth it to force all consumers to spend a few hundred dollars more for a job-site table-saw, if it means the insurance market won't have to bear several thousand for an injury? I'd say yes.
There's a second aspect to the "tradeoff" that's worth emphasizing: it's not an equal trade. A significant percentage of those injured never fully recover regardless of the insurance money spent. Even a 1:1 trade of prevention vs response dollars means we have tens of thousands fewer permanent injuries.
> but hard to accept with the actual data of 30k injuries a year.
Lacerations are the most common form of injury. Counting "bulk injuries" is not a particularly useful way to improve "safety."
> _if_ there's a cost to society here
The question you really want to ask is "is the risk:reward ratio sensible?" People aren't using saws for entertainment, they are using to produce actual physical products, that presumptively have some utility value and should be considered in terms of their _benefit_ to society.
> it's a question of _where_ we put the cost
With the owner of the saw. If you don't want saw injuries, don't buy a saw, most people don't actually need one. I fail to see this as a social problem.
> if it means the insurance market won't have to bear several thousand for an injury?
Shouldn't owners of saws just pay more in premiums? Why should the "market" bear the costs? Isn't "underwriting" precisely designed to solve this exact issue?
> I'd say yes.
With a yearly injury rate of 1:10,000 across the entire population? I'd have to say, obviously not, you're far more likely to do harm than you are to improve outcomes.
The junior apprentice didn’t buy the saw that took his fingers off. His disinterested, profit-seeking boss did.
A defining aspect of developed countries is that their governments don’t allow business owners to lock the factory doors. We used to. Now we don’t. Are you saying we should go back to the good old times when children worked in coal mines?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_boy
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I'm a member of a local artisan's workshop, where a whole bunch of talented folks share shop space for woodworking, metalworking, and various other stuff. All the saws are SawStop - the difference in price just isn't worth it. When you look at the costs of a table saw installation - space, blades, dust collector, etc. - going with non-SawStop would only save a few percent on the total.
If you look on YouTube, almost all US woodworking channels remove the riving knife and blade guard. That just encourages new woodworkers to do the same. They then demo rabbit blades which are illegal in the EU due to being so dangerous.
I would be surprised if you see a moderately popular woodworker on YouTube that has removed the riving knife. Are you assuming that no blade guard implies that the riving knife is also not present? Yes a lot of people remove the blade guard but they then insert the riving knife. If they would make the safety pawls slightly better I think more people might leave the blade guard on.
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"Rabbit" (dado) blades aren't illegal in the EU.
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A good idea on paper, marred by reality
First, this would basically grant Sawstop a monopoly. They say they'll release the patent, but I'd like to see that requirement built into the bill
Second, it doesn't seem to allow for alternative safety systems. Bosch has a system that competes with Sawstop, and is arguably better, as it doesn't destroy the saw, blade, or carriage, but is currently unavailable in the US due to Sawstop parents
If the bill were to allow for the Bosch or other systems on us soil then I'd have far fewer qualms over it
I do like the idea of the sawstop, but in Canada at least. They're quite a bit more then a few hundred dollars: 700 CAD vs 2200 CAD.
https://www.amazon.ca/BOSCH-GTS15-10-Jobsite-Gravity-Rise-Wh...
https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/power-tools/saws/...
SawStop saws don't cost what they do just because of the brake technology. They're just, in general, even if you took away the safety technology, built to a high end standard. Certainly the safety tech will add to the cost, but probably not as much as you'd think.
Ah—like how if you glanced at caster-equipped fridge drawers, you might think they add $1,000 to the price of a fridge, because only higher-end ones have them, but if they were (for some reason) legally mandated they’d only add like $5-$10 to low-end refrigerators. But, without the mandate, no option for a $400 fridge with nice drawers.
Maybe not that extreme, but similar dynamic.
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Which is a point frequently raised by those not supporting this regulatory action - will this cause the base price of a saw to skyrocket beyond what average individuals can afford?
My guess is probably not. The brake cartridge is roughly a hundred bucks, retail. The sensor system can’t possibly be more than a hundred bucks. And there will have to be some quality improvements to the rest of the saw in order to be better withstand the crazy decceleration forces. The bottom end of saws will proportionally be more expensive, but even this will quickly race to the bottom.
You're assuming that's how pricing works. If I make a product and my COG goes up $100, I don't increase my MSRP by $100, I increase it by $200.
Just to add; they do have a cheaper portable for 1100. I think it's a great idea for hobbyists with properly dried wood.
On a jobsite pretty much all your wood is wet, it'll be standard practice to leave the safety off or 150 CAD for a new stop (and time wasted). Not to mention you don't stop working just because of a little rain.
question is how much are your fingers worth
"It's just one additional requirement; it won't break the bank"....this logic, applied over and over by building construction regulators for the past few decades, is an underappreciated but important contributor to the housing affordability crisis. Everyone talks about zoning, but building codes, etc are a big issue too.
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I think it's more like "how much is a 0.03% risk of losing a finger worth?"
The vast majority of tablesaw users don't lose fingers. How much is avoiding a 1/100000 chance of losing a finger to you? Probably a lot less than $500.
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Almost 20 years of never coming close to losing a finger, I pay attention when I'm doing anything dangerous.
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This is a pretty interesting problem. At what point of an ongoing tragedy does a relatively expensive mitigation become a mandate?
I'm grateful that SawStop is releasing their IP. This doesn't address the issue of added implementation cost, but does address the concern about rent-seeking. It would have been a better world if Ryobi and others had licensed the technology 20 years ago.
In a surprise move at February's CPSC hearing, TTS Tooltechnic Systems North America CEO Matt Howard announced that the company would "dedicate the 840 patent to the public" if a new safety standard were adopted. Howard says that this would free up rivals to pursue their own safety devices or simply copy SawStop's.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/02/1241148577/table-saw-injuries...
Steve Gass, a patent attorney and amateur woodworker with a doctorate in physics, came up with the idea for SawStop's braking system in 1999. It took Gass two weeks to complete the design, and a third week to build a prototype based on a "$200 secondhand table saw." After numerous tests using a hot dog as a finger-analog, in spring 2000, Gass conducted the first test with a real human finger: he applied Novocain to his left ring finger, and after two false starts, he placed his finger into the teeth of a whirring saw blade. The blade stopped as designed, and although it "hurt like the dickens and bled a lot," his finger remained intact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SawStop
> This doesn't address the issue of added implementation cost,
It does not address that people will likely disable the "feature" and never re-enable it. SawStop saws have a bypass "feature" so they can cut conductive material.
NPR article from 2017 on this, "Despite Proven Technology, Attempts To Make Table Saws Safer Drag On":
* https://www.npr.org/2017/08/10/542474093/despite-proven-tech...
Per above, the way SawStop® works:
> Gass is a physicist and he designed a saw that could tell the difference between when it was cutting wood and the instant it started cutting a human finger or hand. The technology is beautiful in its simplicity: Wood doesn't conduct electricity, but you do. Humans are made up mostly of salty water — a great conductor.
> Gass induced a very weak electrical current onto the blade of the saw. He put an inexpensive little sensing device inside it. And if the saw nicks a finger, within 3/1000ths of a second, it fires a brake that stops the blade. Gass demonstrates this in an epic video using a hot dog in place of a finger. The blade looks like it just vanishes into the table.
It usually works too! Usually.
People will disconnect the safety system, and we'll have a 500$ saw with a 300$ piece of useless gear
There are lots of things you can't saw with a sawstop, and if triggered, it is very expensive to replace
You don't need to disconnect anything, you can start a saw-stop up with safety temporarily disabled using a key that comes with it. A good thing to do any time you're cutting pressure treated wood.
Never having used one of these before, is there anything (ideally conveniently built in) that you can use to know before you cut a particular material whether it'll trigger the stop? Touch it against the blade while it's not running and see whether an LED lights up, or similar?
(I think it's unambiguously a good thing to mandate, but I'd also prefer not to have to memorize a table of materials and their interactions with the stopping device...)
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Does the pressure treated wood trigger the safety device?
And is the safety device "destructive" to the saw (requires expensive parts/repair/etc to reset)?
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You can also not wear your seatbelt, not wear a helmet, play lawn darts, etc.
If every table had a sawstop mechanism, most people would use it.
1. Seatbelts are mostly passive, so not a good comparison 2. Same thing with helmets 3. Lawn darts is not a safety mechanism, it's a sport
A closer comparison would be car airbags, but a type of airbag that has false-positives and deploys when the operator drives on a particular type of road surface, in which case the manufacturer calls it "user error" and tells the operator to disable it for that type of road surface. The road surface might appear the same to the operator, so needs to be tested carefully with special equipment before the car is driven on it. And since the active safety system is disabled for this surface, the operator has now paid for a safety system they cannot use, due to manufacturer incompetence
> if triggered, it is very expensive to replace
What a silly argument!
It will be more expensive if it isn't triggered.
Unfortunately there are lots of materials run through a table saw which can trigger a sawstop. A false positive destroys the blade. Decent blades cost several hundred dollars, and are intended to be resharpened and last for many years.
I belong to a community hobbyist workshop. There are a lot of rules, lockouts and a key in place around the table saw usage, but they won't install a sawstop because they can't afford to keep up with the wasted blades.
Personally, I think I'd rather have one, but I can absolutely see why people would disable them if they were mandatory.
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I can only imagine the medical fees for rebuilding a shredded arm in the US
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It's not expensive to replace, the brake is like 100$ and it sure beats a 10,000$ hospital bill and a couple digit amputations.
I hope they find a way to bring costs down. It seems like a very hard problem - you seem to need fairly high quality materials for the braking system to not bust up the machine itself, and the circuitry is a non trivial expense.
But if folks can't buy a $100-200 table saw, and they can't afford anything higher, then ideas like affixing a circular saw in an upside-down jig might start to become more common. And then they'd lose the baseline safety features of even a cheap table saw, such as the blade guard and riving knife, which might be even worse for overall injuries.
Indeed... "Build A Table Saw In 10 Minutes"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhORUN6oCUc
> But if folks can't buy a $100-200 table saw, and they can't afford anything higher, then ideas like affixing a circular saw in an upside-down jig might start to become more common.
FTFY: then they shouldn't be in business as the business model is unsustainable. Even for purely private usage - if you can't afford to buy a SawStop saw, then rent one. Your fingers should be more than worth it.
Op didn't mention businesses so why are you? Plenty of regular people own them as well, woodworking is a very popular hobby.
>Even for purely private usage - if you can't afford to buy a SawStop saw, then rent one.
Dunno why some people decide they get to nanny everyone else. There's plenty of other dangerous tools (when misused) to come after next if you go down this path.
The op here is right, the most likely path is rigging a circular saw into a table saw from some internet tutorial. People have done worse to save less.
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On the other hand, if these become common, will people be more cavalier about letting kids or poorly trained users use them? And will malfunctioning or disabled brakes consequently lead to more accidents instead of less?
You can apply this logic to any safety measure for any product, and campaigns against safety requirements often do. Additional safety measures result in more safety. Good talk.
Related: Woodworking Injuries in Slow Motion [1], including an interview with a person who experienced each type of injury, because these kinds of injuries are just so common. Lots of missing fingers at wood working meetups.
[1] https://youtu.be/Xc-lIs8VNIc
This will kill off the cheap table saw. It will be interesting to see how the hobby and industry adapt to $700 being the bar to entry — and that would be RYOBI grade stuff. The added cost isn’t from the mechanism, the cost is from needing to build a real frame around the blade instead of plastic and thin aluminum. The SawStop trigger is incredibly violent, the braking force will sheer the carbide tips off the saw blade from inertia alone. Cheap saws are almost all plastic and would be horribly deformed after a trigger.
I anticipate a return of something that used to be more common, the upside-down circular saw bolted to a table top.
> It will be interesting to see how the hobby and industry adapt to $700 being the bar to entry
We'll probably see more DIY "table saws" using circular saws. I'm sure that'll be great.
Do you think it would be legal for Kreg to sell you an adapter to put a circ upside down ;)
> Cheap saws are almost all plastic and would be horribly deformed after a trigger
Isn’t this fine? Buy an expensive saw and only lose the blade. Either way, keep your fingers.
The “cheap” saws in this scenario are still several hundred dollars. A SawStop is made well enough to withstand multiple activations and costs $100 for a new cartridge plus the cost of a new blade. It’s kind of a situation where it’s “cheap to be rich.”
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There are many ways to trigger it that don't involve your fingers, and many people don't have unlimited incomes. So no, not fine, in many cases
I think if the patent is getting ready to expire that maybe the market can fix the issues?
> The Consumer Product Safety Commission says that when a person is hospitalized, the societal cost per table saw injury exceeds $500,000 when you also factor in loss of income and pain and suffering.
Seems fishy[0][1], so I checked the study:
> Overall, medical costs and work losses account for about 30 percent of these costs, or about $1.2 billion. The intangible costs associated with pain and suffering account for the remaining 70 percent of injury costs.
So the actual cost of each injury which results in hospitalization is (allegedly) $150,000, and they only get to the $500,000 figure by adding $350,000 in intangible "costs" tacked on. Totally legit.
> Because of the substantial societal costs attributable to blade-contact injuries, and the expected high rate of effectiveness of the proposed requirement in preventing blade-contact injuries, the estimated net benefits (i.e. benefits minus costs) for the market as a whole averaged $1,500 to $4,000 per saw.
There is no cost to the regulation, but rather a "net benefit", because the cost (in real dollars) of the saw-stop devices is more than offset by the savings (in intangible pain-and-suffering-dollars)! Based on this obviously, intentionally misleading "math", they include this canard in the summary:
> The Commission estimates that the proposed rule's aggregate net benefits on an annual basis could range from about $625 million to about $2,300 million.
Did you catch that? They didn't include so much as a hint that these dollar savings are, in fact, not dollars, but pain in suffering, measured in dollars!
In this life, only three things are certain: death, taxes, and being lied to by the United States federal government.
[0] https://hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb261-Most-Expen... [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Day-Laborer-Salary
How much money would it take for you to get your index finger chopped off? Would you do it for $350,000? I personally wouldn't.
How about a nasty nick that mostly heals in a couple months?
There’s nothing misleading in the study, because they very clearly state the methodology for intangibles, and even provide an alternate calculation excluding it:
Finally, net benefits were significantly reduced when benefits were limited to the reduction in economic losses associated with medical costs and work losses, excluding the intangible costs associated with pain and suffering
…although net benefits appear to have remained positive using a 3 percent discount rate, benefits were generally comparable to costs when a 7 percent discount rate was applied.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2017-05-12/pdf/2017-0...
There's nothing dishonest about it. If you want to measure something, you need to pick a unit. For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
> You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
Choosing to re-define a word (like 'dollar') to mean something other than its actual meaning is perfectly fine, so long as you take care to inform the reader whenever you employ your nonstandard definition.
If you do not take care to make this distinction, then you are putting a false idea in another person's mind, which is, by definition, deception.
If you intentionally use your bespoke definition of 'dollar' to communicate about pain and suffering, refusing to define it (as the author of the paper did in the summary), while knowing full well that the reader will assume you mean actual dollars, then you are lying.
> For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
That's a noble goal. Yet the only clear and honest way to communicate human suffering is in human terms, not in dollars and cents. Laundering that suffering into "per-unit economic benefits" adds zero clarity to the issue of suffering. It adds zero urgency. All it adds is a likelihood of misunderstanding, which is clearly the point.
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I don't know where to stand on this one.
I've got a table saw. The extent of my training on how to use it was my design tech teacher saying very clearly that none of us were ever to use it and some YouTube video of dubious information content. I bought it from Amazon, nothing approximating a check that I had any idea what to do with it.
I am very frightened of it and thus far only slightly injured. An automated stop thing would make me much less frightened. Possibly more frequently injured as a direct result.
Having the option to buy a more expensive saw which slags itself instead of your finger is a good thing. Making the ones without that feature illegal is less obvious. I think I'd bolt a circular saw under a table if that came to pass.
A gunpowder charge shoving a piece of aluminium into the blade on a handheld circular saw would be pretty lethal in itself. Lots of angular momentum there - jam the blade and the whole thing is going to spin.
It seems dubious that I can buy things like circular saws and angle grinders without anything along the lines of some training course first. That angle grinder definitely tries to kill me on occasion. That might be a better path to decreasing injuries.
the more expensive saw is 4 to 5x as much as a standard issue table saw of similar capabilities (barring the safety part). I don't think this will pan out when Congress critters get the details and tradeoffs.
Here's the first thing I noticed when I just looked up SawStop. They have a reasonable saw for $2k, in the same "class" as my 1970s Sears, based solely on size. And not all that much more expensive than other brands.
Looking at the picture, the saw is safer than mine even without the brake, because of the quality of the fence and other fittings. Unfortunately, a mandate won't get saws like mine out of circulation.
What's keeping me from going right out and getting a new saw is that mine is only used sporadically, and is mainly a "horizontal surface" in my garage. I'm done with the big projects that made my house livable.
My safety rule for now (this is not professional advice) is that I don't attempt tricky cuts at all. The biggest risk I've noticed is trying to hold onto a workpiece that's too small, and I'd rather just scrap it and use longer stock. My hands are never closer than several inches away from the blade. And I have other tools for other jobs, such as a chop saw, so I don't try to do "everything" with the table saw.
I slipped when using a table saw when I was around 15, I remember catching myself with my face in front of the saw blade.
I still don’t use that machine alone, almost 20 years later.
I’m going to guess you were putting a lot of pressure on the wood, pushing it through the blade ?
I’m not sure what happened to be honest. I’m just glad I caught myself…
Mom would have been pissed.
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This will be lost now in the conversation, but this video by woodworker Stumpy Nubs is worth watching for key context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk
Yes SawStop sued Bosch for patent infringement and won. But they also then immediately offered to allow Bosch to have a license for free to continue distributing in the US. In the safety commission meeting,they also annouced they would not puruse any lawsuits for the key technology still under patent if the rule was passed.
Does this fully address the potential cost issues for beginning woodworkers? No but I very much think the video is worth a watch to make a more nuanced judgement.
It is stuff like this that makes people think NPR is a Democratic Party organ:
> Over the years, Republicans on the commission have sided with the power tool industry in opposing further regulations.
Maybe they are siding with poor people that can't afford SawStop or people that see the heath and safety nanny state example in the UK as something to avoid?
I wish people would consider that every new regulation as an additional cost in both money and freedom. I use a table saw (with the blade guard removed) many times a week as a hobby woodworker and DIYer. I understand the risks and I'm not endangering anyone but myself. I'm an adult and fully capable of making that decision.
When you make decisions that favor an industry while also take money from them, it's safe to assume they're 'siding' with that industry.
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As much as I would love to see this kind of tech added, our current “greed is good” economic climate that is eviscerating the 99% will mean that this change will disenfranchise most who would have gotten such a saw. Sawstop isn’t going to open up their patents like Volvo did out of the goodness of their heart. Those patents will be monetized to the hilt, to extract maximum possible revenue from the consumer.
The only reason why I even have a table saw is because of a convergence of events: renos on the apartment to make it more saleable, better job with more income, Bosch putting out a new model such that the old model had steep clearance pricing, and so forth.
Had that table saw cost even $100 more, I would have been doing the work with wildly inappropriate tools that likely would have made the work even more dangerous. Or used an old, pre-owned, beat-up tool that could have malfunctioned in dangerous ways, or have had safety features removed by the prior owner.
Yes, let’s implement that law. But let’s also force SawStop to pull a Volvo, especially if they aren’t working in good faith. They have already been compensated by that product many times over, it’s just a cash cow at this point. And the public interest must always come before profit. Not remuneration and RoI -- profit.
I get the opposition, but this is a huge savings in the long run, both in terms of sheer money, and pain and suffering. The math on table saws is staggering (as pointed out in this comment section.) It's hard to stomach allowing several amputations a day to save people $50-100. I know a table saw is as safe as the user; I am so terrified of mine that it's probably commercial air travel level of safe. But stats have consistently shown the average user isn't, and there's no reason to expect that to change.
I think we can expect added costs to come down a lot when every table saw has one. They will be more expensive than they are now, for sure, but I don't think it'll be 3x. And I'm not worried about beginners being unable to afford one. There's a thriving used table saw market that'll still happily amputate your digits, these things live forever. You'll be able to get one of those really cheap when every new table saw also has anti-mangling tech built in, as nobody but the knuckle draggers will want the old ones. In fact I'd expect a flood of people (myself included) selling their crappy old table saw without brakes for the first affordable table saw with them.
And if you just really don't like your limbs, I saw a radial arm saw at Menard's for pretty cheap.
Everything is a balance and you have to decide how much risk you want to take. People hate it when we use money or resources to injury and life but that is reality. How many injuries are we going to prevent? How much does it cost in productivity?
In general I am against government regulation here unless it is really an issue. We spend a lot of time preventing injuries to some things and then not to the most important ones (like our eating habits).
30,000 people are injured by table saws a year. That’s a material issue.
My two bits as a carpenter w/18yrs table saw experience -- there are plenty of safe ways to use a tablesaw, fingers nowhere near the blade. SawStop's trip randomly, and the saw itself just sucks to use, its a bad design top to bottom. And you still have to let the operator disable it at their will.
If they are so dangerous, then make it licensed and mandate training, which is really what makes saws unsafe -- the untrained.
So here's the problem: you can buy an older cast-iron table saw with good precision and a large bed for $50-$150 on craigslist, or you can buy a cheap piece of made-in-china plastic at home depot for $500. The cheap piece of plastic checks off more safety features from a regulatory standpoint, but tiny size and poor tolerances results in more kick-back and accidents.
I can see some potential issues with this:
1) Patents. The article goes into this a bit -- supposedly the folks behind SawStop have said they'd open up a key patent, but I wouldn't want the U.S. government to mandate this without reading all the fine print and making sure that this can't be used by SawStop to crush all their competitors.
2) Materials. I often cut aluminum on my table saw, using a non-ferrous metal cutting blade. (It works fine for wood too.) As I understand it, SawStops are activated when they detect high conductivity materials. How does this work for cutting metals?
3) False positives, repair costs. Replacing the blade periodically due to accidentally cutting wood with slightly-too-high moisture content would get tiresome. (For that matter, so would putting off a project for months if I have to wait for the wood to dry out.)
I'm generally in favor of safer tools, but it seems like there are some significant trade-offs involved here.
For (2), I believe SawStops do have an override switch to disable the protection just for this reason.
I'm all for the Saw Stop, and I wouldn't use a table saw without one. (I prefer not to use table saws at all now!)
However, I'm pretty sure than the vast majority of the pressure to mandate the "Saw Stop" comes from the "Saw Stop" corporation, who hold exclusive rights.
I'm a woodworker, and i've suffered some injuries over the years (but not on a tablesaw). This seems like more of a political issue, those for and against regulation. I'm surprised to see this on HN and there is too much drama in this thread to otherwise comment.
I too am predisposed against regulation. Knowing nothing about the issue, I actually expected to support the regulation.
Reading on, it basically seems to give Saw Stop defacto monopoly over the table saw industry, shifting the value capture entirely to them. And seeing that swings me against it. Unless they commit to releasing their full patent portfolio in favor of this effort, it seems like the legislation vastly favors an economically motivated actor, which rubs me the wrong way.
The irony here is that the same government wonders why manufacturing doesn't come back to the United States and this case is a microcosm of something the issue of a whole.
If I'm understanding this correctly, the problem here is other saw companies aren't implementing a safety feature because SawStop has a patent on the relevant technology. Now the US federal government wants to make that safety feature a requirement and SawStop pinky swears to release the patent.
Why don't they just strike down SawStop's patent on the technology instead? Bosch apparently already tried to implement the tech but was scared away by SawStop's lawyers. There's a proven interest in the tech from other industry players. Is there any evidence that the proposed regulation is even necessary?
Seems ridiculous to me that they'd even allow a company to prevent other companies from implementing safety features in the first place.
Everything about this is awful. There must be some kind of personality distribution to opinions on this kind of thing. Government paternalism instantly causes visceral negative thought processes for me, but there are plenty of people that seem (?) to be all for it.
SS wants this to become a requirement because it elevates the cost of all table saws up towards their entry level gear. Their cheapest saw is $899, when you can get a comparable saw (sans flesh sensing tech) for around $499. If their competition now has to sell a saw at $899 (less licensing fee to SS), then they'll be at a competitive disadvantage since now the pricing floor has been lifted up to SS's level. And you know SS will be advertising that they invented this tech, blah blah blah.
SS is acting in their own interests, or they never would have used the patent system to prohibit this technology.
We had a hole in the cinderblock in school where someone let the wood get away from them and the table saw kicked it back. This was in shop class, not a random wall in the school.
The sharp blade isn't the only thing dangerous.
Most amputations on a table saw are because of kickback pulling the worker's hand into the blade. Riving knife, a well adjusted fence, and knowing which cuts have potential for kickback can mitigate this.
I survived a childhood regularly using a radial arm saw. My dad was very clear I was not old enough to use it until I was 12, and then we did a full afternoon of what the proper way to use it and how to get hurt using it.
These are literal power tools with spinning blades of death. You shouldn't use these without training and you should understand how you get hurt on one of these. I see this as government overreach yet again. I'd only be ok with this if the requirement has an expiration date so that way it doesn't block future innovation.
When sawstop engages it destroys the blade and ruins the stop cartridge. So you need a new cartridge and a new blade, which is better than a finger but not cost free. Wet (damp) wood, aluminum, and any other material that is a bit conductive can trigger the sawstop. However sawstop has a bypass mode, which allows you to cut conductive items (and your finger).
This article is pretty aggressive with this statement “ Woodworking has been a nearly lifelong passion for Noffsinger, and he was no stranger to power tools. Back before his accident, he'd seen a demonstration of a new and much safer type of table saw at a local woodworking store. Marketed under the name SawStop, it was designed to stop and retract the spinning blade within a few milliseconds of making contact with flesh — fast enough to turn a potentially life-changing injury into little more than a scratch. Noffsinger's table saw wasn't equipped with the high-tech safety feature because manufacturers aren't required to include it.”
Actually his saw wasn’t equipped with sawstop because he chose not to equip it. He knew of its existence, it’s readily available (online and also at Lee valley tools), but he chose not to get the safety device and somehow that’s the manufacturers fault? Cmon man. This same jerk will be the guy who buys the thing, turns on bypass mode, cuts his finger off and sues the manufacturer.
We don’t need safety devices mandated on personal table saws. Maybe osha should require saws on jobsites to be retrofitted with saw stop to protect workers, but it is most certainly not the manufacturers fault if you cut off your thumb. I suppose chain saws and motorcycles should just be straight illegal then ?
I take it that simply dropping the saw (and then braking it afterward) is not fast enough to reduce injury?
I saw a demo of another safety saw, which was using very sophisticated monitoring systems. It was essentially dropping the saw if it detected the hand getting too close to the blade.
Saw Stop waits for contact. So the detector system has more time to move the saw out of the way, than the Saw Stop does.
I guess having to move the blade and the motor is too much energy, even or particularly, if its spring loaded, compared to springing the jamming piece that Saw Stop uses.
Does anyone know why SawStop never bothered to enter the EU market?
EU always had stricter safety standards for table saws. I moved to the US in the late 90s, sold my table saw in the UK and got a new one in the US. It lacked the quick stop feature that my UK saw had.
That makes this whole SawStop thing so confusing to me. I'm sure some fingers are lost in Europe by table saws, but that doesn't seem to be anywhere near the 'must mandate auto-breaking saw tech' level.
Don't like it. There are systemic problems with nanny-state thinking - you either solve all cases of danger at once, or you make the problem worse.
I was close to a story recently about a kid in a climbing gym who mistied their harness. Competent climber, but got careless and no one caught the faulty safety loop and they fell 40 feet on descent. Nothing broken, in a turn of miracle, but could have been fatal for them and others had there been someone underneath at the time.
Now, I'm sure that this will garner some conversation, but IMO this is an example of the Safe Playground Effect; that is, because we put soft corners on everything we deem to be risky, we implicitly teach people that the world has been made safe for them. Without the risk of mild harm (on the playground) we don't develop the sense to be cautious with major harm (like at the climbing gym). The unconscious, innate instinct is "it can't be that bad, I've existed for X years sort of carelessly and I've never gotten hurt".
Problematically, this is the sort of effect that is nearly impossible to analyze with any reliability. Too many connected, confounding factors even in the most controlled environments. I think it's fairly intuitive, but there's a lot of room for me to be wrong and I'd be the first to admit it.
IF this is the case, however, then what we are effectively doing by adding these mandated safety measures piecemeal, is lowering the personal shelf of responsibility whilst leaving other risks at the same level of probability and effect, making them that much worse because now people as a whole are less vigilant re: their own safety.
One actual example I can think of to back this stuff up is the Burning Man festival. It's a city of 75,000 with precious little in the way of medical resources in an extreme climate peppered with dangerous art made of metal and splintered wood and fire, and yet the injury rate is far lower than that of a normal municipality of the same size (in the past decade, there have been 2 fatalities IIRC, which is way lower than the national average per pop.) My (admittedly hand-wavy) guess about the why is this: people who go there know that there are risks, and despite being largely chemically altered this awareness translates to a lower risk of injury even considering the added risk factors.
But, you know, that's just like, my opinion, man.
Good comment but,
>in the past decade, there have been 2 fatalities IIRC, which is way lower than the national average per pop
Is this controlled for age? And other obvious confounders like SES, race, etc?
You got me, it isn’t. There are other confounding factors; no driving, for instance.
An actual comparison would be pretty difficult for all kinds of reasons. But that’s part of what’s difficult about assessing something as vague as “whether people are being careful or not”, which is part of my point - this is something that’s incredibly hard to turn into a metric and (partially) due to this gets summarily ignored.
I must confess to spending quite a bit of time thinking about these sorts of things - the stuff that’s invisible to our current modalities of analysis. There’s probably something a little pathological about it.
I think it was 'DannyBee who pointed out years ago that the total cost of treating table saw injuries in the US exceeds the entire market for table saws themselves.
I'm surprised to read so much controversy, this feels like a textbook example of desirable regulation to me. If the societal cost (injuries, lost wages due to loss of function) meaningfully exceed the implementation cost then it should be done as it will make society/the economy safer and more efficient. Both sides of which should be easy enough to measure. That sawstop would benefit shouldn't enter into the equation.
My dad has three "pointy" (meaning the corners got cut off) fingers on his right hand, and at least on his left, courtesy of tablesaws. At the very least this technology should be mandated for the large non-portable saws like you find in most commercial wood shops. I'm glad to see action being taken on this finally.
I see so many videos of (predominantly USA) carpenters using table saws without even the bare minimum of safety features (even just a riving knife, for example). Is there no way to just enforce basic low-cost low-effort safety features rather than just jumping all the way to a very costly commercial saw-stop-like solution?
Here's a good in-depth video from a woodworker YouTuber that explains all the drama and pros/cons of the law.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk
I've been tracking this closely, I don't know if I should wait to buy one in a year or so when the technology is available or buy one now so I get a cheap saw. I am not a cabinet maker so it would be for various building projects (like finish work).
this tech has been on the market for decades
Sorry should have been more concise.
If I buy one now, I pay $150 for a cheap saw without the tech.
I can of course buy a saw-stop for $1000 right now.
If I wait a year or so, this legislation would probably allow me to get a saw-stop capable saw for $450ish, but it's a gamble, because they COULD be over $1000. We don't know.
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Looking at this from the UK : it's always astounding that US has an such a ligitious culture, and, at the same time, such a backwards health-and-safety culture. At least that's the impression I get from watching American tradespeople on Youtube.
I hear this a lot but it’s a myth. Germany is the most litigious county in the world. We are very close to the UK per capita 75 vs 65 per 1,000 people. The UK is #5 and the US #4.
Here is one of many Google sources: https://eaccny.com/news/member-news/dont-let-these-10-legal-...
The UK and other commonwealth states are more nanny states than the US is. I’m not surprised it’s taken this long.
I just bought a job site table saw for some home improvement projects. I’m so friggin wary of it. Bought all the safety upgrades I could find. Nice push sticks. Micro jig gripper blocks, feather boards. Try to run the guard at all times as well.
I'm in the UK, I used a tablesaw professionally for some years, often in very basic circumstances. I have never ever come close to an accident with a tablesaw. The reason:
1) UK tablesaws all come with a top-guard and a riving-knife fitted. The riving knife stops the timber from closing on the back of the blade, causing a kick back. In many designs it also holds the top guard up.
2) During my apprenticeship training there was a mandatory table saw course. We were taught how to set the guards and safely use the machine.
3) a riving knife based guard gets in the way of cutting grooves and rebates. If you take it off to do this then you replace it with a guard or jig to keep it safe. Then you put it straight back on.
4) I sometimes watch American 'makers' on YouTube and they terrify me with their working practice. My hands never went closer than the edge of the saw table. I used push sticks and jigs to handle everything close to the blade
5) I have never seen a sawstop over here, and it looks like a stupid hitech solution to a problem better solved by guards.
Are there other good examples where laws have mandated the use of a new patented technology for an industry with mature incumbents that turned out well?
Well that's a lame video.
Watch this: https://youtu.be/SYLAi4jwXcs?t=139
All my garage would be illegal. Tools have risks, you cant idiot proof everything without making an objectively worse world.
It's crazy how many people experience these injuries. I have a great uncle and know a friends dad who have both lost fingers to table saws.
> SawStop came onto the market in 2004
Which means it probably makes sense to mandate it now (and not earlier), because the patent should be expired by now.
That's funny, I was just thinking about how affordable things are nowadays; we should really make them pricier.
I can't support any business that tries to make their product mandatory. Someone says here he's not scum, he is absolutely delusional scum. Does anyone else think having the government mandate what you can buy is a good idea? Another company designed a saw which did the same thing and which didn't destroy a $200 cartridge and the blade. He said he'd sue them into oblivion. He's a greedy prick who would see people maimed before he'd give up the profits on his half-assed, shitty, Chinese made trash. Use a blade guard, ffs. Don't support this asshole.
They are forcing these guardrails because the safety culture is being obliterated in the pursuit of cheap immigrant lavor.
Since the businesses won't implement it due to extra cost and the person harmed will be on Medicare and not any company health care plan. They will hide behind subcontractors etc like they do now.
So to avoid the govt being on the hook for medical care and permanent disability...
This is gonna put so many hand surgeons near high schools with shop classes out of work.
I'm glad I got a $100 "Harbor Freight" table saw while they were legal.
I'm sure amazon and aliexpress is still going to be flooded with non-compliant tools. Hell, it's easy enough to buy a chainsaw conversion kit for your drill
In a world where "safe if you use it right," and "centrifugal killing machine" are equally non-compliant, aliexpress is going to sell the killing machines because they're cheaper and the expertise required to tell the difference is rare.
Is SawStop the only current manufacturer of a brake product?
An acquaintance of mine was a professional carpenter for a theater company. Thoughtful, careful guy. Never in a rush. He of course used a table saw all the time. I asked if he had Sawstop. They were too cheap.
He still has no idea what happened, he simply came to holding the bleeding stumps of his fingers. Surgeons managed to reassemble some functioning digits out of the chunks.
It is my opinion that the government should purchase and "open source" safety patents as they come up, then manufacture replaceable safety parts to sell at cost.
Why not just tax table saws and drills and put the money in a pool that doctors and hospitals can claim from when uninsured people cut their hands off?
Hooray, it's about fucking time.
I'm all for safer equipment, but the tech is expensive. I am hesistant if a gov't mandate wipes out cheaper alternatives.
Damn SawStop. You create a product that you can not only lobby the government into forcing people to use, but activating it destroys not only the SawStop but also the saw blade, necessitating replacing two products. What a perfect grift.
Oooooh, the new finangle pour-spouty gas can, part deux.
Won't be long before the safety thingie gets ripped off and short-circuited.
Or just use some scrap wood to push the work?
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The idea is similar to minimum wage, if people are unable to unionize and negotiate for something, the government can do it for them.
If it votes it floats ig. They should end the patents, though. A Sawstop monopoly would be stupid.
Except in this case its a single patent attorney lobbying the federal government to mandate something for the past 20 years.
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No, given the amount of injuries caused by table saws and their importance to carpentry and job sites, this is quite literally one of the more important things for them to be doing.
Education on existing safety features and measures just isn't enough to improve safety here.
Much like seatbelts and air bags, we all benefit if the baseline technology can be transparently improved to prevent entire classes of injuries.
What's your recommendation for the CPSC to focus on as a higher priority?
1. This is why the CPSC exists.
2. The CPSC (and government and society in general) is capable of doing >1 thing at a time.
Enjoy your dado stacks while you can. I for one think countries outside of USA have gone way overboard regulating an inherently dangerous tool, and the productivity dive is real.
The US Government doesn't give a damn about safety, the individuals who pass these laws have money at stake. Hence the financial windfalls that come to all the Reps in the House that just happen to sit on specific committees that oversee certain agencies which promulgate rules which have no real basis in law, but sure help them make money off building barriers to entry and functional mono/duopolies.
It's long past time for peaceful revolution.
Another example of making it harder to produce one unit of economic output (a saw, in this case). When we make it harder to produce things, we will have less of them, or less of something else if we re-direct our efforts from something else.
It's death by a thousand cuts this way, as our overall economic productivity slows.
In the current world, people have a choice to purchase a saw that took more effort to produce, if they think that it's worth it for the additional safety it provides. This new law would eliminate that choice, and those who don't think it's worth it will have to purchase the high-effort saw or go without.
A lot of people don't have that option; their employer buys a piece of equipment and tells them to use it.
As much as anything, this is a mandate on worker safety.
Can't they just mandate what the employer is allowed to buy?