Comment by spamizbad
7 months ago
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.