Comment by mr_tristan
7 months ago
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.
I have been associated with four hackerspaces that have SawStop's.
I have seen an average of about one false firing a month--generally moisture but sometimes a jig gets close enough to cause something. I have seen 4 "genuine" firings of which 2 would have been an extremely serious injury. This is over about 8 years--call it 10 years.
So, 4 spaces * 10 years * 12 months * $100 replacement = $48,000 paid in false firings vs 4 life changing injuries over 10 years. That's a pretty good tradeoff.
Professional settings should be way better than a bunch of rank amateurs. Yeah, we all know they aren't because everybody is being shoved to finish as quickly as possible, but proper procedures would minimize the false firings.
Part of the problem with false firing is that SawStop are the only people collecting any data and that's a very small number of incidents relative to the total number of incidents from all table saws. SawStop wants the data bad enough that if you get a "real" firing, SawStop will send you a new brake back when you send them the old one just so they can look at the data.
>That's a pretty good tradeoff.
Assuming of course, there is no possible way that you could otherwise reliably prevent those injuries that doesn't depend on a human's diligence. That is, of course, ridiculous, but, that's the nature of this regulation. You're also not accounting for the cost of the blade, which isn't salvageable after activation, and those can get spendy.
Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market, which will, of course, prevent anyone from innovating a no-damage alternative to SawStop, which is certainly possible.
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Similar background and experience with sawstop. I'm a huge proponent of SawStops but it's important to be as upfront as possible. It's $100 for the cartridge and then another $60-$120 for replacement saw blade.
Sweat dripping on the work piece (especially NoVA in summer with AC on fritz) was responsible for a fair share of the cartridge firing without contacting flesh.
N=few, but thank you for sharing this actual anecdata for those of us interests.
This is a good amount of data but is $100 really the right cost for the replacement of a table saw if the saw itself is actually damaged, as OP says? Is it your experience that the saw is almost never damaged and the replacement cost is almost always the ~$150 dollar blade, or do you know how frequently these false firings damage the saw as well?
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> So, 4 spaces * 10 years * 12 months * $100 replacement = $48,000 paid in false firings vs 4 life changing injuries over 10 years.
Certainly reattaching fingers would be cheaper than $48k. That's a steal of a deal in the US.
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If it engaged incorrectly, absolutely. If it saved my thumb and I have to buy a new saw as a result, it's hard to imagine a price point where I'd call the outcome not so great.
If it saves your thumb, sure. If you're ripping a wet piece of wood, no thumb risk at all, then, yeah, not so great.
Realistically, I don't like the tech or the methodology at all. Battle bots had saws that would drop into the floor without damage, and pop back up even, also without damage, and that was decades ago. That's the right model, not "fuck up the saw".
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The point is that there's a (>1) cheaper solution that still saves your thumb, but it's (they're) being regulated out of the competition.
I tend to agree, assuming there are no false positives. Admittedly, I’m not sure how often that occurs, nor if we even can know that based on all the various work environments the cheap table saws are being used in today.
This is true, it can also fracture the motor mounts and not be noticed, until you are performing a difficult and aggressive cut and the motor mount breaks with a spinning motor attached and your board shoots across the room or into your face.
Your board shooting into your face has always been a concern with saws. Hence why you don't stand in the line of fire when making cuts.
I ran the woodshop at a local makerspace. We went through a lot of sawstop cartridges...easily 10-15 a year. The saw was never damaged because of the cartridge firing.
> 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.
OTOH (literally?) keeping your fingers but having to buy a new saw seems pretty reasonable.
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.
There used to be some pretty wild published advice on how to use a radial arm saw including ripping full sheets of plywood by walking the sheet across the cutting plane with the saw pointed at your stomach. They also travel towards the operator in the event of a catch because of the direction of the blade and the floating arbor. This makes positioning yourself out of the potential path of the blade critical and the one thing we know is that you can't trust people to be safe on a job site when they are in a hurry.
>There used to be some pretty wild published advice on how to use a radial arm saw including ripping full sheets of plywood by walking the sheet across the cutting plane with the saw pointed at your stomach.
So, similar to ripping plywood on a table saw, then? What makes one worse than the other here?
>They also travel towards the operator in the event of a catch because of the direction of the blade and the floating arbor.
So, like a modern sliding miter saw, then? What makes one worse than the other?
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https://www.grainger.com/product/DAYTON-Radial-Arm-Saw-120V-... here you go
You do realize you linked to a discontinued product that costs over $5k?
This is what I actually expect to happen to the table saw market - they all become expensive, and the sub-$1k market (which is huge) goes away. Yes, you can find an RAS but it's about 10x the price of what they used to be.
I found a RAS from Sears from 1995: $499, which is around $1000 with inflation. https://archive.org/details/SearsCraftsmanPowerAndHandTools1...
So I stand by my statement: they're effectively non-existent, demand is gone after the 2001 recall by Craftsman, and most of the major manufacturers have stopped producing them. I expect the same thing to happen to table saws.
They literally just updated the model number yesterday as they wait for new stock to arrive in July.
It even says so right under where it says discontinued. Specs are exactly the same.