Comment by DannyBee
8 months ago
"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.
> The traditional way of doing what i suggest is paying into a fund that people make claims against without having to sue.
Which only trades one cost for another, because now there is less checking going into ensuring that the person responsible is the person paying the claim. Why should innocent people have to pay more for tools to cover claims by other careless customers who injure themselves through their own negligence and no fault of the manufacturer?
> you can require they have sufficient assets/surety to cover if you sell in the US.
And now nobody can start a small company making tools because they can't afford to post the bond.
> this is not the first situation something like this has occurred in.
It is indeed not the first time we've passed an inefficient rule that imposes higher costs on innocent customers.
> 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.
> 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.
Some products are extremely dangerous, like construction explosives, or cars. And yet many people operate them safely for years without incident. Other people get themselves killed. That doesn't mean it's the manufacturer's fault if one of their customers decides to go to a bar and then get behind the wheel.
Conversely, some products are dangerous when used as directed, for example certain poisonous plants that herbal sociopaths will advise you to eat, which provides an obvious distinction with sharp objects whose manufacturers explicitly advise you not to stick your fingers in.
> 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.
It isn't the manufacturer that caused you to be stressed or tired or created any obligation for you to work under those conditions.
> Ensuring safety requires us going beyond 'you should have followed the rules', you have to consider the whole context and all the facts.
There is no "ensuring" safety. You can very easily mangle or kill yourself with a kitchen knife if you use it wrong, but whose fault is that?
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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.
It's a fair comment, but I want to note that insurance in business and insurance for individuals operate on a rather different basis. Insurance companies are better behaved when they know they have to be, and businesses as a class are able and willing to pursue their interests in court.
The great success story for underwriting is consumer electrical devices, where Underwriters Labs was responsible for many decades in which such devices didn't burn people's houses down. That's been undermined by lax global trade policies, I no longer even trust that a UL logo on something means UL was involved, it might easily have been added in China.
It's worth reading up on the organization if one hasn't already. It makes a good case that we need less regulation and mandatory, ubiquitous underwriting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UL_(safety_organization)
It's understandable that many people hear "we need less regulation" as "corporations should have more carte blanche to screw everyone over", but I sincerely believe this would both reduce friction and cost for business, and maintain or even improve the standards for safety and the environment which regulation is intended to provide.
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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.
> the economic benefit calculation
You mean their _estimate_?
> Even if you add sales + economic benefits, it's less than cost injuries.
Provided no new error modes are revealed, like overall reduction in safety due to over reliance on safety systems and their perceived infallibility even under prolonged conditions of zero maintenance.
Not that this has _ever_ happened before.
> The CPSC has done this analysis (3 times now)
They've done this before and have been appealed before and have had their "rulings" overturned before. They should stick to recalls. Attempting to use estimates to ban products is not, to me, valid due process.
> "i'm sure X"
You're using quotes around something I didn't even remotely say. I said, "my suspicion is." Your response is one government agency has done estimates that we should just worship?
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.
Beat me to it. Picture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riving_knife
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.
What was the material? Wet wood or staples/nails?
I believe you can temporarily turn off the feature if you’re cutting questionable material.
> 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.
> what the manufacturers said You expect me to believe that? Really now. And the BOM is not the only cost, but +$50 on the BOM is probably +$100 retail.
What will the manufactures try to extract is the better question? Answer: As much as they can.
The only other saw with similar technology (Bosch) to hit the US market cost 50% more than the similar SawStop product. They had to pull it due to patent issues (despite attempting a different approach), so we don't have good market data on how well it sold.
This just reeks of regulation forcing everything to be more expensive. I'd rather just see the patent go away and see what the market really does. I really can't image this technology being added to low end saws for less than $150 retail and then you have the per activation costs. It really kills the low end market, when a minimal saw is $500.
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