Comment by hilbert42
7 months ago
"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.
Well, it seems there's both types here in equal numbers. Since I posed my comment the votes have risen and fallen many times, it's now back to unity again or close to it.
Usually I don't bother to note votes until logging in agsin which can be days later but the subject seemed somewhat controversial so I watched them (it's a shame HN only provides a summary, so if say I see two points then I've no idea if only one person voted or if it were twenty).
I thought what I said was pretty mild so I'm a bit surprised at the reaction. It's a shame most down-voters don't bother to say what they consider is wrong with one's arguments.
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.
It depends what the item is. Its intrinsic dangers and whether they're obvious or not to (a), the untrained and unskilled; (b), novices with little training and experience; (c), trained users but who are irregular uses and get out of practice; (d), trained users with regular/daily experience, (e), specialist users without experience or with little regular experience who take particular care in dangerous one-off situations; (f) specialist users who've regular/daily experience of dangerous situations; (g), any or all of the above under specialist/controlled conditions or in special environments and (h) any or of the above in emergency situations—who is selected and or authorized to take charge under under adverse/dangerous situations.
That list might seem like a lot of twaddle, but I'll illustrate with a few examples. Case (e) may involve an industrial chemist who is put in the unusual situation of having to deal with a dangerous, toxic and explosive chemical that's not normally found in common use—for example, pentaborane which comes to mind because it's a HN news item today. He knows what it is and its dangers but he hasn't dealt with it before so he goes to inordinate lengths to handle it safely. On the other hand, case (f) is a Similarly trained chemist with special training in the handling of pentaborane and he applies a regulated set of procedures to handle the substance.
Table saws are both intrinsically unsafe and have high impact when things go wrong which is borne out by statistics no matter the jurisdiction, country etc. Unfortunately, like motor bikes, they've been historically grandfathered into common use from an era when safety was hardly considered important.
Had motorbikes been suddenly invented today they wouldn't be allowed on public roadways. Same goes for table saws, they can be bought freely and anyone can use them without any training whatsoever. If invented today one would have to be trained and or licensed to use them.
We've seen how regulations change over time and how they are becoming tighter every day just about everywhere. When I was a kid, where I live anyone could buy fireworks including yours truly at the age of six. Now fireworks have been banned altogether here, not even adults such as I am who've (a) been trained in chemistry and (b) had military training and who was trained in handling things much more dangerous than fireworks for domestic consumption can do so either. I find this both irritating and irksome and an over intrusion of the nanny state into my affairs.
I'd suggest that those who voted down my original post also felt this way when they read my post, and I don't blame them one bit. The trouble is multifold, the State regulates, say fireworks after irresponsible use and after kids have become blinded. Regulations are introduced more from emotional reasons than based on actual harm to large numbers of people. The law now makes no exception for experience, nor does it allow exceptions for those with demonstrable experience (the only exception here is those with special training for public displays such as for new year's eve).
We've seen this progressive tightening of regulations in just about every country on the planet and in every field of endeavor—from drug regulations, to vehicle licenses, to firearm licenses and regulations, to restrictions on purchasing what the State perceives to be dangerous chemicals (when I was a kid local pharmacists sold thallium and strychnine for rat poison to anyone but they've long since been banned (I'd doubt if these highly toxic chemicals can still be purchased anywhere in the Western world).
The trouble is that laws and regulations are horribly uneven and often they extend into overregulation.
Now look at the facts: both thallium and strychnine were banned in many places decades ago because of a small number of accidental poisonings and an even much smaller number of deliberate ones. On the other hand, table saws—according to statistics—have maimed and ruined the lives of orders of magnitude more people than those poisons have ever done but it's only now that we are just trying to make them safer.
Unlike motor vehicles and forklifts, there's still no talk of training people before they can use table saws—nor is there any talk of requiring users to be licensed to use them.
When looked at objectively and in comparison with similar regulations elsewhere, this tightening of regulations in respect of table saws really isn't that unreasonable, and by other comparable standards it's long overdue.