Comment by delichon
7 months ago
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.
"The manufacturers can already be sued if they make a product which is dangerous even when used appropriately."
In most states they will get comparative negligence, if they get sued at all.
The traditional way of doing what i suggest is paying into a fund that people make claims against without having to sue.
As for the rest, yes, you can game it, but that's easy to fix as well - you can require they have sufficient assets/surety to cover if you sell in the US. This is done all the time.
It is quite easy to ensure a level playing field, and we know, because this is not the first situation something like this has occurred in.
Also note they already can't sell saws this dangerous in europe. Between losing the european market and the US market, there isn't a lot of market left.
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> 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.
For what it's worth, this argument could be applied to anything extremely dangerous that just so happened to have some safety protocols written for it. It's an argument in a vacuum.
Having safety protocols doesn't matter if it's something deployed in situations where people are under a lot of stress or tired from working a lot and are still required to work. Ensuring safety requires us going beyond 'you should have followed the rules', you have to consider the whole context and all the facts. The facts show Tablesaws are footguns.
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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.
My internal cyncism says we may as well end up with a regime similar to healthcare insurance in the US which puts a lot of the costs on consumers ahead of time, and is otherwise hidden – a scheme where, in theory, people often get compensated for horrific accidents, but where (a) the better the compensation you want, the higher the upfront cost (of the saw), and (b) the more horrific the (saw-related) accident and the higher the potential cost to the insurer (manufacturer), the more hoops the consumer will have to jump through to prove that their injuries were due to unavoidable injury/whatever the standard is for non-frivolous claims. There's "ideal" insurance, and there's insurance in pattern, practice, and procedure, and the US is the worst example of that.
There's every incentive for a jobsite to use the cheapest saws, and cross their fingers; there's every incentive for a manufacturer to make it as painful as possible to ask for compensation. Either way, if you're working for an el cheapo contractor on an entry-level wage, you're probably screwed.
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Plus a few sacrificial digits to get the lawsuits through that prove to the manufacturers that their liability is real, serious and large.
> 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.
"Fine.. but for every dollar in job site saws sold how much useful output do they produce"
This is accounted for in the economic benefit calculation, and is estimated at somewhere around 650million-1billion total.
Even if you add sales + economic benefits, it's less than cost injuries.
The CPSC has done this analysis (3 times now), as have others, as part of the breakeven analysis.
It's honestly a bit frustrating when lots of HN is just like "i'm sure X" without spending the 30 seconds it would take to discover real data on their opinion.
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But who pays for the injuries, and who reaps the added project value?
> 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.
A bone headed take if I ever saw one. Yes, society has rules. That's what society is. You can't kill anyone either, I suppose that's an affront to your personal freedoms, too?
Socialized medicine provides equity. It removes the cost to live a healthy life. It is a fact that society works better when everyone is happy and healthy.
What's a riving/ryving knife? I searched but still unclear.
A riving knife is a piece of metal behind the blade that prevents wood from pinching the blade and being launched towards the front of the saw.
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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.
Can confirm, I've tripped a sawstop twice. Both times were because of the material, not flesh.
Not to say it isn't good technology, just that - anecdotally - it's more often a $150 mistake than a finger saving feature.
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> That $50 number seems incredibly optimistic. Just the rebuild cartridge is selling for $99 right now...
It's a niche product with a single manufacturer right now.
I'm pretty sure saw stop will send you a new cartridge in the case of any false triggers. you just need to send them the old cartridge so they can analyze it and try to avoid similar false trips.
"That $50 number seems incredibly optimistic."
It's not.
"Just the rebuild cartridge is selling for $99 right now: https://www.sawstop.com/product/standard-brake-cartridge-tsb..."
The BOM on this cartridge is not $99 or even close :) Sawstop has said this themselves.
"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."
First, you are assuming sawstop mechanism. Most alternative mechanisms are closer to https://www.altendorfgroup.com/en-us/machines/altendorf-hand...
or
https://www.felder-group.com/en-us/pcs
or similar.
None of them required significant saw frame changes, and none of them require blade replacement. All have been tested repeatedly to respond and prevent injuries in the saem time (or even faster) than sawsotop.
The saw frames can already handle stopping the blade, even in job site saws (and definitely in any cast iron trunnion table saw). Please give any data that suggests it can't?
Again, i'm also telling you what the manufacturers said. Go read the discovery yourself, don't argue with me about what their own data said.
"But it probably just wet wood or something else conductive causing a false trigger."
This is wrong.
"Show me the false rate data please."
I cited it in another post, and honestly, i'm not going to spend my time trying to convince you your particular set of opinions is wrong. There are lots of people with lots of them
Why don't you do the opposite - this data is easy to find and there is a ton of it - discovery in table saw design defect lawsuits, tons of submissions and hearings in the CPSC, etc. Why don't you read a bunch of it, preferrably prior to forming and asserting strong opinions.
That's a good way to become better informed.
This thread already has plenty of misinfo in it (job site saws are a small fraction of the market, for example, despite people thinking it's the majority), it doesn't need more.
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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.
There’s no reason to do it though. The sawstop is in the body of the tablesaw. It doesn’t get in the way. The only reason I can see someone try to disable it is that really wet (and I mean soaking) wood might set it off.
Yes, but shifting the defaults from "something they take off because it is annoying every time they use it" to "something they turn off for specific types of cuts and otherwise never notice" can be a huge game changer for tool safety.
> 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.
Probably but the problem with kickback isn’t because the cutting side isn’t working well, the problem is it catches on the back of the blade.
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 have neither on mine and still have all my fingers. Weird.
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'
Exactly. That’s the main thing I use my table saw for. Absolutely accurate, repeated cuts.
> 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.
How? Do you have a video of the near miss or can you explain it? If you use a piece of wood to push down the top I don’t see how it’s risky.
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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?
I think there's a better argument for it, because there's some power asymmetry at play between the employees and the employer. It's harder to say "no" if you need this job to pay your bills. I still wish we had clear limits and tests for this, though. Instead, we have bureaucracies that keep expanding even after they tackle the most pressing issues.
For hobby work, the government is protecting me from me, and there are no winners in that game. I'm not imagining some hypothetical dystopia. The hobby landscape in Europe is already far more constrained than it is in the US.
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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.
See: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/01/2023-23...
and https://www.cpsc.gov/cgibin/neissquery/Data/Highlights/2022/...
for general data
For table saw vs band saw, NEISS tries to track table saw vs hand saw vs radial arm saw vs band saw vs powered hack saw vs ...
It's hard, obviously, since it depends on effective coding of at point of injury.
As of about a decade ago (i don't have access to later data):
78% of injuries are table saw
9% band saw
8% miter saw
5% radial arm saw
Circular saws and track saws would be in the "other powered saw" category, and accounts for less than 1% of injuries.
blade contact was 86% of the injuries
While this data is a decade old, the data trends have been relatively stable (even the track saw one)
The simple reason that track saws don't show up meaningfully is there aren't enough sold - these aren't sale-normalized numbers, and the number of track saws vs table saws sold appears to be about 100x difference.
The main trend is that radial arm saw decreases and goes to miter saw and table saw.
This happens naturally since there are not a lot of sales of radial arm saws anymore. (But also shows you how dangerous RAS are - despite them not really being sold, they are highly overrepresented in percent injuries)
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> 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 don't have data, but there are various threats with a table saw.
1. Overconfidence / complacency. Things like reaching across the blade, not using push sticks, etc.
2. Kickback. It happens because you pinch the workpiece between the blade and the fence. Knowing how to properly configure a fench, featherboards, and how to use the kerf and ribbing knife is important.
3. Shop clutter. People tripping and/or slipping around their saw.
SawStop style tech vastly improves most of these scenarios. Kickback, though, turns a workpiece into a very large projectile. Where you stand matters a lot.
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Sawstop prevents one specific mode of improper use, and it's not even the most common danger present with table saws: kickback.
No matter how good or experienced you are with a table saw, you will have it launch material like a projectile backwards at some point (kickback.) Don't be standing behind it when it happens - instead, be on the other side of the fence.
If you're on the safe side of the fence, you likely don't have enough arm length to comfortably cut your fingers off anyway. (And why weren't you using a push stick?)
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Also, when you drop a circular saw it stops spinning. Table saws won't shut off automatically if you lose your balance or something unexpected happens in your environment.
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IMO overhead router is way worse than a table saw, but compared to its usage, the table saw wins by far.
I'm actually for this change, though normally I'm not a fan of trying to mandate the use of technology to solve social problems (like vehicles installing distraction sensors). The table saw manufactures are caught in a stalemate legally speaking, where adding a massive safety feature like this can be seen as a tacit admission that previous generations of saws are unsafe. This could lead to a massive (expensive) recall, like what happened with radial saws. This seems like the perfect example of when a government should step in and brake the local maxima to ensure better safety for its citizens.
If all this legislation does is push more people to use low-end track saws on foam, I think that's a huge safety win. In the shop, the only woodworking tool I'm more weary of than a table saw is a jointer. Interestingly both have large spinning blades on the surface of a large flat surface. I wonder if that design in general needs to go by the wayside?
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.
Would a push stick have helped this situation?
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Wow, it’s crazy that the wood kicking caused your finger to release its grip on the push stick and get hit by 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.
I just got one this week. Still in the box but I’m excited.
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.
That feels like evidence for my point? We have causal evidence that safety regulation works. Sometimes we relax those rules. Often new technologies require adjustments. Still largely seems correct?
$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.
If these were the actual concerns, you can start the discussion at jurisdiction. Starting the debates with costs, though, sorta belies that concern?
Then, a problem you are going to run headlong into is that there are plenty of things that you can argue should not be done at different levels, but that are effectively controlled at a larger level. As a fun example, who makes sure that turmeric coming into the US doesn't have too much lead? Why can't/don't we leave that up to the individual states to fully deal with? Probably more fun, what about state laws that cover how much space is required for live stock for shelved products?
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.
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