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Comment by pnw

7 months ago

Sawstop already offered their key patent for free to get this technology adopted.

https://www.sawstop.com/news/sawstop-to-dedicate-key-u-s-pat...

52 comments

pnw

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Junk_Collector  7 months ago

They offered to relinquish one important patent, but they have a huge portfolio of patents covering blade breaks specifically applied to table saws. If you go look at the actual testimony instead of a summarized article, SawStop's representative very explicitly will not even discuss relinquishment of their other patents including their patent on "using electrical signals to detect contact with arbor mounted saws" which does not expire until 2037.

A large part of the testimony was companies such as Grizzly complaining that SawStop is unwilling to engage with them in good faith on licensing their technology. Given SawStop's history, I'm unfortunately inclined to believe them.

  • luma  7 months ago

    And this right here is the key bit. SawStop was started by patent attorney Steve Gass. He has spent years claiming that other vendors won't talk to him while leaving out the actual terms of his licensing (which, by some rumors, was somwhere around "extortionate"). Bosch released a saw with similar tech in the US and then SawStop sued the product off of the market.

    Every step of the way Glass has not acted in good faith and instead acted like a patent attorney. We have little reason to believe that he has all of a sudden found goodwill toward man in his heart when there's a dollar somewhere he could instead put into his wallet.

    • meowface  7 months ago

      He also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product: https://www.machinepix.com/p/machinepix-weekly-30-dr-steve-g...

      >Gass: I was out in my shop one day, and I looked over at my table saw, and the idea kind of came to me. I wondered if one could stop the blade fast enough if you ran your hand into it to prevent serious injury.

      >I started puttering around on how to stop things quickly. The simplest would have been a solenoid, but that would have been too slow and weak. I had come from RC airplanes—so I used the nose landing gear torsion spring from an RC airplane for an early experiment, that spring provided the force and I held it back with a fuse wire, a maybe 10 thou diameter fuse wire. I set up some capacitors to discharge through the wire and melt it in a few milliseconds, and I was able to generate maybe 20 lbs of force against a blade.

      So this isn't one of those cases of a patent attorney taking over an existing invention/company.

      >Gass: Now that SawStop is established, any royalties Grizzly might pay would be less than what SawStop could earn by selling the same number of saws itself, and therefore, as I have explained, a license at the present time is far more challenging because of the risk it creates to SawStop’s business. This, of course, changes should the CPSC implement a requirement for table saws to include active injury mitigation systems. Should that happen, we have said we would offer non-discriminatory licenses to all manufacturers.

      22 replies →

    • diggernet  7 months ago

      The Bosch design wasn't just similar, it was much better, by being non-destructive. Bosch instantly retracts the blade into the table using a $5 gas cartridge. Replace that cartridge and get back to work. By contrast, SawStop destroys a $100+ brake module PLUS your $$ saw blade every time it triggers (including false positives due to damp wood). To this day, I wish I could buy the Bosch design in the US.

      18 replies →

  • defrost  7 months ago

    > their patent on "using electrical signals to detect contact with arbor mounted saws" which does not expire until 2037.

    I'm curious about when that was filed and whether there's an Australian patent on "using electrical signals to detect close contact and then stop machine ripping through flesh" from ~1982 (ish) for a sheep shearing robot.

    Tangential prior art exists (as is common with many patents) but it's always a long drawn out bunfight that largely only laywers win to engage in patent disputes.

    • Teever  7 months ago

      It'll be a terrible lawyer knight fight that bleeds money from everyone except the lawyers and the conclusion will some BS like "Sheep flesh != human flesh therefor the patent is not invalid."

OJFord  7 months ago

On the date this comes into affect, either because they know they'll have to or for the PR (or both, the PR of coming out with it first). Not goodness of heart. As GP says they've prevented wider industry adoption by aggressively defending their patents in the past, despite not distributing their saws in Europe or expanding the range into other tools.

xdennis  7 months ago

> Sawstop already offered their key patent for free

They didn't offer the patent, the offered to offer. It's no different to when billionaires pledge to donate billions, yet year after year they're still on the Forbes top 100.

This is so naive to believe them.

throwiforgtnlzy  7 months ago

Came here for this.

It's a cost thing that the craptastic, corporate inversion power tool megacorps and Hazard Fraught's have resisted.

Btw, here's the video I got gargling for "!yt ave table saw", which compares a "Rigid" HF house brand saw to a SawStop saw:

https://youtu.be/RFsuemFKYjM

PS: https://hfpricetracker.com which emphasizes the demand-side obsession of budget-priced gear. Perhaps a bigger issue is working people should be paid more (income equality) so they aren't pushed to buy or rent crappier, more dangerous tools.