> However, one key patent — the "840" patent — is not set to expire until 2033. To stave off potential competitors, it describes the AIM technology very broadly. In a surprise move at February's CPSC hearing, TTS Tooltechnic Systems North America CEO Matt Howard announced that the company would "dedicate the 840 patent to the public" if a new safety standard were adopted. Howard says that this would free up rivals to pursue their own safety devices or simply copy SawStop's. At the hearing, he challenged them "to get in the game."
So there apparently is still a patent in effect. They claim they'll dedicate it to the public, though it's unclear what that means in this case. Maybe they should preemptively do so before any laws are passed, especially if they're pushing for its widespread use anyway.
I'm sure amazon and aliexpress is still going to be flooded with non-compliant tools. Hell, it's easy enough to buy a chainsaw conversion kit for your drill
In a world where "safe if you use it right," and "centrifugal killing machine" are equally non-compliant, aliexpress is going to sell the killing machines because they're cheaper and the expertise required to tell the difference is rare.
You don't need to disconnect anything, you can start a saw-stop up with safety temporarily disabled using a key that comes with it. A good thing to do any time you're cutting pressure treated wood.
> If you forgot to disable the feature and cut some wet or pressure treated wood and triggered it? Very irritating,
Scares the shit out of me every time too. I often have the garage door closed due to weather or to limit noise and it’s like a gun going off in an enclosed space.
I use hearing protection. It's a lot louder and more sudden than a power tool, especially when amplified in a small enclosed space. If I were on a shooting range it'd be no big deal, but not unexpectedly in my garage.
Yes, anything that can conduct electricity in the wood will trigger the safety device. Pressure treated wood is often so wet with copper based preservatives that it’ll trigger the safety circuit. Old nails in wood, your finger, hand, etc will also do this.
And yes in general the blade and brake are both trashed because of the wild deacceleration forces that happen instantly. Frustrating when pressure treated wood causes this, humbling when your hand caused it.
Nails alone usually won't trigger the brake. The nail would also have to be in contact with something conductive or else there's nowhere for the current to go.
It can trigger it yes, and it is destructive to the saw blade and safety device, and can ruin the clean cut of the piece, though may or may not ruin it entirely. Good saw blades aren't cheap, and neither is the safety device. I'm unsure of what wear and tear it has on the motor itself, they can at least endure a few triggers for certain and I doubt it's "good for it" but unless you're doing it frequently I also doubt it likely to ruin the device itself but admittedly am not sure about that.
And to be clear, it's well worth it IMO. Of all the tools I have in my shop, the Table Saw is easily the most dangerous. If I had long hair the Lathe would give it a good run for it's money though. I refuse to use a table saw without a sawstop (or similar safety break). The one I have and others I've used all have a key to insert to disable the safety device If need be.
My dad was a machinist when he was younger. My siblings and I grew up with a well-equipped home shop, including a table saw, a drill press, a milling machine, and my dad's pride and joy: a two ton metal lathe. He drilled into us the importance of safety for all the tools, but the most vivid lesson was the story about the drill press: When he began his apprenticeship, he noticed a large photo on the wall of the shop of a long pale stringy thing. He asked what it was. It was a tendon which had been yanked out of the arm of someone whose hand got caught in a drill press. I still think about that whenever I use a drill press.
The sawstop triggers when the blade contacts something conductive (like a finger), and needs to stop fast enough that when that happens the finger isn’t removed first.
It manages to do that within a few teeth, which is quite impressive at 1000+ RPM.
It does this by firing an explosive charge which shoves an aluminum block into the spinning blade, while dropping the blade below the level of the saw deck.
Essentially a type of airbag like braking action.
That is how it can turn s situation which would guaranteed an amputation into a minor scratch.
It can (and does) get easily triggered by things like conductive wood (pressure treated), nails or metal in the wood, metal coated plastic, etc.
Every workshop I’ve been at that has one has a collection of triggered/destroyed blades hanging on the wall.
It could undoubtably be done cheaper than it currently is ($30 a brake?) but as designed it’s destructive - and it’s hard to
imagine a effective way to do what it does that isn’t destructive.
The brake is like $80-90 and contains a computer that collects telemetry. If it triggers for a reason other than user error you can send it in for a refund.
It doesn't drop the blade, just stops it cold (at least on the model I've used). The Bosch system dropped the blade (thereby avoiding destructive damage to the blade and brake) but they were cease-and-desisted by SawStop and unable to sell it in the US.
The one I used, and their website, says that they drop the blade. [https://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/the-technology/], but I’m not clear on all the models. It’s been years since I’ve used one. Glad they’re cheaper now!
Never having used one of these before, is there anything (ideally conveniently built in) that you can use to know before you cut a particular material whether it'll trigger the stop? Touch it against the blade while it's not running and see whether an LED lights up, or similar?
(I think it's unambiguously a good thing to mandate, but I'd also prefer not to have to memorize a table of materials and their interactions with the stopping device...)
There are LED indicator lights that flash red when it detects a current drop. When the blade is not moving, you can touch it with your finger to see. In theory you could do this with whatever material you're going to cut. If you're cutting metal, it's pretty obvious that you need to disable the brake system. Usually where it's iffy is pressure treated lumber. Sometimes it'll trigger, sometimes not. Really depends on the moisture content of the wood and that can vary greatly. "testing" by touching the material to the blade with your hands on it might or might not indicate that the brake would fire. The points you're contacting could just not be that wet.
Most cheap lumber I see these days has a lot of moisture in it, treated or not. I’m surprised this works at all for anything short of quite-nice stock.
With the right blade, I would think that is possible. When a piece of wood kicks back and hits me it leaves a bruise through the clothing I wear. If a piece of aluminum kicks back and hits me, I imagine it would be nearly fatal.
Iron and steel? Of course not, go get a cold saw for that. But it's no problem and very common to cut soft stuff like aluminum and copper on a table saw.
> Never having used one of these before, is there anything (ideally conveniently built in) that you can use to know before you cut a particular material whether it'll trigger the stop?
You use a $40 “wood moisture meter” to check the water content of the lumber before cutting. If you want a built-in one I suppose you could duct tape it to your saw.
That is how you measure the moisture content of wood, with a wood moisture meter. There’s no reason for a handheld $40 tool (that any serious woodworker will already have on hand, and one that will likely fail at some point) to be built in to a multiple thousand dollar table saw.
1. Seatbelts are mostly passive, so not a good comparison
2. Same thing with helmets
3. Lawn darts is not a safety mechanism, it's a sport
A closer comparison would be car airbags, but a type of airbag that has false-positives and deploys when the operator drives on a particular type of road surface, in which case the manufacturer calls it "user error" and tells the operator to disable it for that type of road surface. The road surface might appear the same to the operator, so needs to be tested carefully with special equipment before the car is driven on it. And since the active safety system is disabled for this surface, the operator has now paid for a safety system they cannot use, due to manufacturer incompetence
Unfortunately there are lots of materials run through a table saw which can trigger a sawstop. A false positive destroys the blade. Decent blades cost several hundred dollars, and are intended to be resharpened and last for many years.
I belong to a community hobbyist workshop. There are a lot of rules, lockouts and a key in place around the table saw usage, but they won't install a sawstop because they can't afford to keep up with the wasted blades.
Personally, I think I'd rather have one, but I can absolutely see why people would disable them if they were mandatory.
Probably $9k with pretty good insurance, $17k-$20k with poor insurance (but nb the math on the good insurance probably works out such that you’re paying very close to that difference for sure every single year, in premiums)
Plus tens of hours arguing with provider billing departments and insurance. You’ll pay over what should be your max if you screw any of that up. Time lost and stress and confusion over sorting out new bills still showing up in the mail two full years after treatment was performed.
Also it’ll be a lot worse if you lose your job after.
If you don’t have insurance, you’re getting it patched up at the ER “for free” (you’ll be declaring bankruptcy soon) but not getting most of the follow-up work done. Even if your arm could be made right, it won’t be. Good luck with the nightmare of getting and maintaining disability pay-outs.
Oh and double the out of pocket costs if treatment spans two billing-years.
No, given the amount of injuries caused by table saws and their importance to carpentry and job sites, this is quite literally one of the more important things for them to be doing.
Education on existing safety features and measures just isn't enough to improve safety here.
Much like seatbelts and air bags, we all benefit if the baseline technology can be transparently improved to prevent entire classes of injuries.
Key point here is the SawStop CEO is promising to open up the patent and make it available for anyone, so it's a bit more complicated than the typical regulatory-capture lawyer success story.
The 3-point seat belt is another time this happened and probably one of the few feel-good "this should be available to everyone" patent stories: Volvo designed it, decided the safety-for-humanity* benefits outweighed patent protections, and made the patent open for anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bohlin (*: at least the segment of humanity that drives cars)
I'd be curious to hear the cynical take here. If I was to wargame it, I would guess something like: SawStop doesn't want to compete with Harbor Freight and cheap chinese tool manufacturers -- that's a race to the bottom, and power tools have turned into ecosystem lock-in plays which makes it difficult for a niche manufacturer to win in. So they'd rather compete on just the safety mechanism since they have a decade head start on it. They're too niche to succeed on SawStop(TM) workbenches, and they forsee bigger profits in a "[DeWalt|Milwaukee|EGo|...], Protected by SawStop(TM)" world.
afaik the patent was basically expiring in the next couple years anyway, even the small ancillary ones. They've been making and selling SawStop saws for the last 20 years and already made their bag. So, since SawStop has the experience designing and building the systems they want to wring out some good will and see which Big Saw manufacturer wants to pay them to get ahead of their competition.
Minor tangent- I view patents and especially physical invention as requiring more work yet patents last 20 years while copyright can last up to 120 years!
Compare the difference in effect between having a copyright on iOS and having a patent on "mobile device with a touchscreen display". In one case you can do a comparable amount of work to make a competitor, in the other competition is entirely prohibited.
Also, copyright terms are ridiculous. Historically patents and copyrights were both 14 years.
Cynical take is that the SawStop feature adds enough cost to budget table saws that they will no longer be economically viable and you can only purchase mid-high end tables saws going forward.
Another cynical take would be that SawStop has secretly invested heavily in a saw blade manufacturers to profit from more blades being destroyed when the stop event occurs.
Competitor's versions of this don't destroy the blade. The reason competition no longer exist is because SawStop sued based on the limb detection, not the blade repositioning tech.
Expect better than SawStop to appear when able, and this issue to go away.
I have had two brake activations in as many weeks, one on a dado stack (don’t ask). Neither destroyed the blade. Both blades will be back in service within a week.
Just putting out there: the popular idea that blades are always trash after an activation is not true.
That said, cheap big box store blades without carbide teeth will die a horrible death.
How much does it cost to repair a carbide toothed blade, and how accessible are shops that can perform those repairs? Is it realistic that most consumers would be able to get a blade repaired rather than just running to the hardware store and getting a new one? Not being snarky; I've just never been under the impression that repairs could really be done for less than the value of a new blade.
I’m paying about $50 service fees for the two blades currently out for repair. The 10” replacements cost over $200, and the 8” dado would require buying a new stack… around $250. The same folks who sharpen and true my blades do the repairs. They’re local to me here in Maine.
Ruminating a bit:
Cheaper blades are replaced more often with use and can’t generally be sharpened; SawStop tech doesn’t change the lifetime of a blade unless an activation happens. So, if you’re already willing to run to the box store for another blade semi-regularly, whether one survives activation perhaps isn’t material?
On the other hand, somebody who doesn’t regularly use their saw is probably both more price conscious and less likely to need sharpening/replacement often. I assume they care most about whether an activation forces them to buy a new blade (and a $100 brake). I suspect those are the people who propagate “SawStop = trashed blade”. For them, it’s true.
I'm actually kind of surprised that any implementation destroyed the blade. Like I don't actually care that the blade is moving, I care where the blade is moving. It seems like a trigger to yank the blade under the table would be the easier and more obvious way to do it.
A few-milliseconds yank covering up to a couple inches of blade height feels like a harder engineering problem than "trigger brakes already right near the blade to grab the shit out of the blade"
So we're somewhat lucky from an engineering standpoint. Because the blade is circular the only interval of time that really matters is from detection to first movement away. Because it triggers on touch the difference between getting sawed and not is millimeters. The time from first movement to full retraction only needs to be fast on human scale time in case the person's hand is still moving into the blade. Name brand SawStop is actually fairly slow on the retraction because it uses the blade's momentum to drive it and that's plenty of speed.
However, the blade-preserving system puts the explosive between the table and the pivot that's already there for retracting the blade. The full explosion force is there to force the blade down and it ends up being faster than the SawStop. Which while cool the SawStop was already fast enough so it's all the same.
So I don't know, I guess to me I'm surprised that the solution we jumped to first was a brake when the action of moving it out of the way takes far far less energy. It's only the energy to move the weight of the blade and bar down at the requisite speed, instead of needing to absorb the full energy of the spinning blade.
> Because the blade is circular the only interval of time that really matters is from detection to first movement away. Because it triggers on touch the difference between getting sawed and not is millimeters. The time from first movement to full retraction only needs to be fast on human scale time in case the person's hand is still moving into the blade. Name brand SawStop is actually fairly slow on the retraction because it uses the blade's momentum to drive it and that's plenty of speed.
Do you mean in a system with both moving it away and a break?
The only time my fingers hit the blade of a table saw they were moving with a fair amount of momentum and hit first low on the blade - dropping the blade at the speed of gravity wouldn't have been enough.
I haven't seen an explosive system like you mention - is that what Bosch had for a bit? - so I don't know just how fast that is, though dropping a spinning-towards-you blade also seems to have some other potential risks of grabbing shit with it, too. If it's fast enough I wouldn't be concerned as much, but at relatively slow speed it seems maybe nasty.
Then I guess the question really is: do we think (probably less experienced) consumers should be able to buy table saws that can easily accidentally cut their fingers off, in a way that is preventable but too costly?
You can hurt yourself with a whole array of tools, especially in construction. A sawzall is a pretty horrifying gadget really, for example, and that's likely more popular among homeowners than a table saw.
I can lose fingers with my recip saw, circular saw, oscillating multi-tool, or angle grinder; scalp myself with my dremel (long hair); put a nail through myself with one of my many nailguns; the list of potential risks associated with power tools is numerous.
I think table saw brakes are awesome and absolutely have a benefit for things like high school shop classes, but a properly functioning blade guard also does the job most times.
Based on the data we have about how people end up with finger amputations from hospitals I’d say the evidence that saw guards are inadequate in practice is strong.
Yeah, because people are foolish and disregard safety procedures. I don't think we can, or should even try to, structure society to keep people safe when they choose to disregard safety.
I have a feeling these will be as ineffective. From SawStop FAQ:
"You can operate the saw in Bypass Mode which deactivates the safety system’s braking feature, allowing you to cut aluminum, very wet/green wood (see above) and other known conductive materials. If you are unsure whether the material you need to cut is conductive, you can make test cuts using Bypass Mode to determine if it will activate the safety system’s brake."
I honestly feel like the majority of this specific community would leave it on given the nature of our interests, and in general I think enough people will leave it on for the brake to be worth it, although this reality certainly does degrade the value of a saw brake mandate.
> The first thing people will do is turn on the bypass and never turn it off.
I have a feeling that you have never used a sawstop. You can not "turn on the bypass and never turn it off." As soon as you hit the stop paddle the bypass mode is disabled. You must reenable the bypass mode every time you want to pull the paddle. If someone is dead set on getting stuff done the bypass procedure gets old quickly.
Have you ever used a sawstop? How did you turn on bypass mode forever?
When I see saws at residential construction sites the blade guards are almost always removed.
If people are already bypassing the safety features then "add more safety features" is a dubious move. Gotta go fast, can't afford if the saw has a false positive, switch it all off. Changing behavior is likely going to be a lot harder.
I don't think the Sawstop will run when the brake isn't fully engaged. I admittedly only tried that once when first using it. But in this case, it's not optional - it's more like the airbag in a car. If it's on, it's working.
Seems like you have to do it for every time you switch it on, but on the jobsite saw it's not a key, just an extra button, so we'll see if people get in the habit of just always turning it off in case they have wet wood or other material.
Blade guards are the first thing removed in a commercial environment, and probably by a good number of hobbyists who think they'll get in the way. They also can make accurate cuts difficult to align since they partially obscure the blade.
Table saws, in spite of being used far less than kitchen knives, account for far more digit amputations and more serious ones.
It is pretty uncommon and rather difficult to cause yourself a digit injury that cannot be recovered from with a kitchen knife. Bad technique is most likely to lop off the end of the fingertip which can fully regrow so long as the cut isn’t very deep.
Mandolines and meat slicers (guards are bypassed when cleaning which happens every 4hr, they also tend to be used by 16 year olds) are much much more dangerous but they tend to be dialed in quite shallowly which limits the damage.
Table saws are THE most dangerous thing for your fingers because of where people tend to put their hands when using the tool and how they can go right through your digits and how they’re dialled in to make thick cuts. The logic that well if we accept kitchen knives we shouldn’t have safety regulations on table saws doesn’t make sense because table saws are far more dangerous and unlike with kitchen knives it’s actually possible to enforce the default use of an effective safety mechanism which ensures a cut will usually be shallow enough to be recovered from. Of course some people will disable the brake excessively but the average person will likely keep it on most of the time.
You can argue we shouldn’t have this safety regulation because it will add costs to consumers, and point out that other safety approaches already exist, the safety paradox, but the comparison to kitchen knives doesn’t really make all that much sense. I’d argue adding saw brakes as a standard feature makes a ton of sense due to the high social cost of digit amputation and the inconvenient and frequently ignored use of other safety approaches.
> There's never an actual reason you need to put your fingers anywhere close to a moving blade.
But that's how it is: people do cut their fingers off on table saws. They all know what you said. And yet 30 K accidents per year in the US alone. It is a serious problem.
I never bought one because it's just too big of a risk.
Just because you're afraid of woodworking doesn't mean you should kill it for everyone. If this passes only professionals will be able to continue, which presumably is what the lobbyists want.
It's no different to Apple insisting that only they should repair Apple products, and hobbyists should be trusted.
You hit a knot in your 2x4 while on a table saw and you might be surprised when you see your fingers laying on the ground and you thought you were being safe too.
More experienced customers are likely using the saw more often so I wouldn’t presume this only or primarily benefits the inexperienced.
First digit amputation (100% recoverable) I caused myself happened after spending most of my life using a knife because I just got complacent and was cooking when I knew I was extremely fatigued. Wood is also a natural product where natural variance can cause a table saw to operate in unexpected ways that catch people off guard.
All table saws including cheap ones come with a stick used to do the termination of the cut and the instruction manual also says to use the stick. SawStop is probably more useful for experienced contractors pushing the limit to do faster cuts
Gotta love false dichotomies. There are anti-kickback and guard solutions on the market today. They suck on the cheaper saws but it would be a hell of a lot less expensive to fix that than add a saw stop.
I think you'll pay high health insurance premiums regardless of whether anyone gets hurt because it's a parasitic industry and we live in a culture of bottomless greed.
The hobbyist table saw owners I know (myself included) tend to be more careful around a saw. We have the luxury of time to setup and think about our cuts (and less complacency) than the folks shoving wood through a saw to meet a deadline or because the boss is telling them they need to make X amount of cabinets per day.
My understanding is that the excess cost isn't so much the safety device itself but that cheap, flimsy table saws can't handle the extreme torque created by stopping the saw more-or-less instantly, so the device is limited to higher end equipment that's heavier and has better build quality.
If it costs 200$ to add the device and modify the saw to accept it and the original saw cost 300$ you've got a pretty massive increase. Also from some deep dive I saw apparently SawStop has basically cornered the entire premium market and the only market left for other saw makers was the low end range.
There's some amount of altruism, but no one is cutting their own throats either. At least some corporations are run by humans.
A patent expires, but forcing competitors to adopt a technology you already incorporate raises everyone else's costs, so it's not always bad for business.
How about SawStop open their patent up first? They've already sued to prevent other tool manufacturers from making their own solutions to the problem, because they want theirs to be licensed. So even though they claim they will open their patent once the feature is enforced, what have they done in good faith to make us believe they won't move the goalposts to opening it, once they have captured the market?
Presumably there's a reasonable compromise whereby they provide a public license only valid in areas where such safety mechanisms are legally mandated.
Its extremely unlikely they would offer to open up the patent and then say "haha, fooled you!" once the law takes effect. It would do them more harm than good in the long run to lie to lawmakers & everyone else.
SawStop was never against licensing the technology, and from what I'm reading about FRAND, it doesn't force the patent holder to open their patents, only to negotiate in a good faith manner that does not discriminate between licensees, meaning they cannot license the tech to DeWalt for $10/saw and try to make Bosch or Ryobi pay $100 per saw. It doesn't say they are forced to give away their IP for free.
My first cynical reaction is to ask which politicians will benefit handsomely from stock trading with SawStop stock (assuming it's a publicly traded company) or through kickbacks of one kind or another.
I think SawStop table saws are terrific for woodworkers who work in their own shop. Less so for workers who have to bring their tools to the job site. Yes, I know that SawStop makes a portable table saw. When you're working at a job site, you have less control over the materials you're working with (as compared to the cabinet maker in his/her own shop). SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site. A common example mentioned is treated lumber, but I don't recall ever having cut treated lumber on a table saw. When I need to cut treated lumber it's with a hand held circular saw. I'm a part-time handyman (some evenings and weekends).
> SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site
You can turn the tech off to make it work as a regular table saw, but it does require pre-existing knowledge about what may false-trip the saw. Having a job site saw fail on site without cartridges and blades in supply, or a newbie on the saw could be pretty bad.
Not overly prohibitive with training though, and is something that everyone will face if this becomes mandated.
Standard oil invented tanker cars and built pipelines. Everyone else was stuck unloading 55 gallon drums from normal railcars beacuse of patents and relative lack of investment.
Then the government broke standard oil up, rather than revoke the patent or reform the system in away way, and prices got higher for consumers in the end.
This is often brought up as a success story. Patents never have worked as intended.
This patents a machine for pasteurization. The fact of pasteurization, getting milk to the target temperature, is not copyrightable. You would just have to use a different machine but you could still pasteurize.
You might be forgetting the decade of crappy compact fluorescent bulbs before reasonably-priced decent-quality LED bulbs became viable. Crappy, in that I don't think I ever owned one that lasted anywhere near their supposed 10-year life. And the long warm-up time for at least some models, but you didn't know which ones. And how to dispose of them properly. And the concerns with mercury when you broke one.
The "wasteful" infrared light turns out to have important health benefits. The same health benefits can be got from sunlight, but when indoor light was incandescent, people who couldn't get sunlight because they had to work all day would get at least some infrared from indoors lighting.
Short summary: 25 years ago, if you had asked a researcher what is the most important antioxidant in the human body, they would have answered vitamin C or maybe vitamin E. 12 years ago, they probably would have answered glutathione. Nowadays many researchers think the most important antioxidant is melatonin in the mitochondria. melatonin cannot get into the mitochondria, but serotonin can, and the mitochondria contains enzymes to convert that serotonin to melatonin -- and certain frequencies of light in the red and the near infrared greatly increase the rate of mitochondrial melatonin production.
Is it a serious journal? There are a lot of crappy journals, and it''s difficult to know if you are not in the area. It doesnt loook like a big editorial, so it's suspictious.
From the article:
> ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
> No external funding sources were used in this review.
That's also strange. It's not a smoking gun, but everyone gets some funding fro somewhere.
This last winter I was asked whether I knew if Tractor Supply still carried 100W bulbs since the person used them to keep a pipe in a barn from freezing and the current one had burnt out. The closest thing I could think of (that was easy to find) was a 275W heat lamp, but that uses a lot more power.
It took the better part of a decade to get close to the light quality that incandescent bulbs produced, and we're still not really 1:1.
For alot of things, that's fine, but I distinctly remember having to bring clothing over to a window because the bulbs I had would not render the color of it accurately enough to put an outfit together. That's partly the clothing manufacturer's fault for using cheap dyes that are prone to metameric failure, but still, annoying.
I'm still in the process of purging the early gen LED bulbs that I have with nicer, high CRI, High Ra, variants, and getting dimmable bulbs in the places where it matters, because around me, the incandescent rollout was more of a rugpull when LED's first came out, and I snagged a couple bulk cases of cheap LED bulbs to use that were... not great.
I do keep a few decorative 'eddison' bulbs, aka squirrel cage bulbs, for reading use, as they are very warm, like 2300k, and the light they produce is very comfortable to be in at night. They use a ton of power, but, because they're not running their filaments as hard as they could, they tend to last forever. I've had one go out in ~10 years because I had removed it for cleaning and dropped it while it was hot (and also because it was hot), the envelope survived but upon being turned back on it ran for about a second before failure.
All of that to say, yes, there were downsides, mostly short/mid term downsides, some that persist to this day if you're not clever or don't know what to care about.
When my parents did a remodel in the '00s they wanted can lighting. They had to use a new, specific type of receptacle because of efficiency standards.
But since then we've found a better way using the old receptacles, which wasn't an option in the '00s. They don't really make those bespoke ones anymore. When my mom did a refresh to sell her house last year, she had to replace everything done in the '00s.
I’m not utterly opposed to this regulation, but I do think SawStop stands to benefit. Even if the patents are open, it will take competitors a long time to develop new products. Meanwhile, SawStop will get the distribution that they don’t currently have. Just glancing at the HomeDepot website, I see that they sell SawStop but they are not stocked at my local store. I imagine that if this goes through, every Physical store in the country will need to stock their saws, at least until their competitors put out products. in the meantime, they can get much better economies of scale, and then try to compete on price
Usually these types of laws come with a date in the future that they will actually be implemented giving such competitors time to figure these things out.
Yeah, i looked at the proposal in more depth and it proposes 36 months from publication until the rule takes effect [1]. That does seem like a lot of time (the proposal itself notes that this is longer than usual).
I guess the benefit to SawStop is that they sell a better product, but turns out most people won't pay 2-3x the price for the added benefit. If they can make everyone implement the same feature, then they still probably won't compete on price, but the price difference will go down, and perhaps people will pay a low to medium premium for a slightly better safety mechanism.
As far as regulatory capture goes, it doesn't sound particularly nefarious. I do believe that the folks at SawStop genuinely believe this is necessary regulation.
Bosch already has these table saws ready and available for jobsite-type of saws, they are sold in Canada I think. Techtronic Industries (Milwaukee, Ryobi) and Stanley Black & Decker (DeWalt) are huge enough to just push through and it will filter to all the brands they manufacture. Delta is smaller, but this is their bread and butter so probably they have some technology lying in wait.
The higher end table saws is probably a different story, they are even smaller manufacturers, but a lot of that stuff is different anyway.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies aren't clamoring to buy out SawStops and hand-deliver them to everyone with a table saw, asking them to install them at no cost in exchange for an insurance discount.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies don't pay for gym memberships and reduce your premiums if you deliver them screenshots of your workouts and pictures of making healthy food at home.
That's what a sane insurance company that wants to increase profit margins would do. Get out there in the field and reduce the number of times they need to pay.
The patent[0] is over 20 years old so it should have expired regardless - except it got 11 years of extensions. That's a bit of an odd situation because SawStop was selling "patent-pending" saws since the very early 2000's...I'm not sure the extension guidelines were intended to give companies 30 years of exclusivity and protection - it would make more sense in a situation where they couldn't start profiting on the patent until the patent was finally granted. There's a reason they're supposed to be 20 years from "date of file" instead of "date of approval". The current system could encourage companies to try to get their patent applications tied up in appeals for as many decades as possible.
Regardless, it would have made sense for them to agree to FRAND [1] licensing >5 years ago which might have accelerated standards adoption.
> I am a patent agent and I just took a look at the patent office history of the 9,724,840 patent. It is very interesting because it spent a long time (about 8 years) being appealed in the court system before it was allowed. While patents are provided with a 20 year life from their initial filing date (Mar 13, 2002 for this patent) there are laws that extend the life of the patent to compensate the inventor for delays that took place during prosecution. The patent office initially stated that the patent was entitled to 305 days of Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) and that is what is printed on the face of the patent. But the law also allows for adjustment due to delays in the courts, which the patent office didn’t initially include. So SawStop petitioned to have the delays due to the court appeal added and their petition was granted indicating that it was proper to add those court delays to the PTA. So the PTA was extended to 4044 days, meaning that this patent doesn’t expire until 4/8/2033!
> The other interesting thing about this patent, is that its claims are very broad. Claim 1 basically covers ANY type of saw with a circular blade that stops within 10 ms of detecting contact with a human as long as the stop mechanism is “electronically triggerable.” It would be VERY difficult to work around this patent and meet the CPSC rules. So the fact that SawStop has promised to dedicate this to the public is at least somewhat meaningful.
> BUT, SawStop has many other patents that it has not dedicated to the public. I have not analyzed their overall portfolio, but is is very likely that the other patents create an environment that still makes it difficult to design a saw in compliance with CPSC rules. So it is entirely possible that the dedication of the one broad patent was done to provide PR cover while still not creating a competitive market.
Confession: The 3-point seat belt always feels like an eyeroller to me. It's not complicated, and the kind of thing that many others would have come up with soon enough anyway. The real injustice was in classing it as the kind of deep, mind-blowing, hard-won insight that deserves a patent.
> It's not complicated, and the kind of thing that many others would have come up with soon enough anyway.
Counterpoint: a lot of inventions seem obvious in retrospect, especially if you've used them routinely for most of your life. Doesn't mean they were obvious at the time.
If you go listen to their CEO's testimony, he clearly states that the one single original patent behind the idea is now open but was expiring anyway. He brags about them spending a lot of money on R&D and needing to recoup that, reiterating that they have many other patents that aren't being opened that cover the exact implementation. He talked about them exploring those other methods, choosing not to patent them, and only patenting the best solution.
All his words. He's trying to explain that sure, the patent is open, but companies are still going to have to work harder than Sawstop because they have many more patents they refuse to open that cover the best and most logical implementation of this idea.
You're asking for a "cynical" take, but it's not really cynical! The CEO is trying to tell everyone, openly, and they're not listening. They are NOT altruistic, otherwise they would have opened the entire suite of patents. They are openly saying this singular patent is open, because it doesn't matter and that they will doggedly defend their other patents. Now, every other manufacturer will now need to navigate a minefield of patent litigation, and follow the path of subpar implementations that Sawstop ruled out during their R&D.
I don't know why everyone is ignoring his testimony and thinking the company is giving anything up, it's wild!
Why not just set the mandate to begin after most of these patents expire? I would really not brush off how serious of a safety problem this is, but honestly I’d rather the government either delay the implementation or buy out the patents because this is a blatant market failure of public interest that the government is well poised to address. Digit amputation incurs a public cost even in America.
If the patent covers something that was already in the first version of the device, it should be either patented before 2004 and thus expired, or patented afterwards and thus invalid due to prior art, no?
> Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
> 35 U.S.C. 101 has been interpreted as imposing four requirements: (i) only one patent may be obtained for an invention; (ii) the inventor(s) must be identified in an application filed on or after September 16, 2012 or must be the applicant in applications filed before September 16, 2012; (iii) the claimed invention must be eligible for patenting; and (iv) the claimed invention must be useful (have utility).
The prior art requirement isn't "there exists nothing like this before" but rather "this invention hasn't been listed before".
> A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
> The prior art requirement isn't "there exists nothing like this before" but rather "this invention hasn't been listed before".
Wow. So this is how "evergreening" works? You patent enough of it that nobody can replicate it, but not everything, then every couple of years you patent one more non-obvious detail even though it's already included in v1?
I always thought patenting has to happen before first public use. I wonder if that's different in Europe.
Kind of, not really though. You can't patent the same thing again.
> 35 U.S.C. 101 has been interpreted as imposing four requirements: (i) only one patent may be obtained for an invention;
You need to improve upon it and have a new claim.
If I was to patent A and make it, and then patent B which improves upon A at some point in the future, when A's patent expires someone else can make A and if they show that they're making A and not B, there's nothing I can do about it.
The issue is that often B is better than A (why make a 223,898 light bulb when you can make a 425,761 light bulb?) so while you could make A, its not commercially viable to do so.
The thing is that I've got a research line looking at making improvements on B and patenting C later which is a further improvement on B. The investment of time, knowledge, and resources to be able to do refinements of A to make B, C, and later D - that's where it's hard to get into it.
Someone else could improve on A to make B' and if it was different than how I did B, they could patent that. Though in the real world, this often involves in hiring away people who are familiar with A and investing a lot of time / money into making a B' that might get interpreted by the courts as too similar to B.
If I had 3 years to implement a safety feature based on a patent to meet new legal requirements I would be concerned about getting sued for edge cases the patent holder worked out.. Injurues are reduced but buyer beware may no longer apply to the remaining injuries especially if even other new implementations avoid edge case largely by accident, I.e. slightly different materials and other factors not considered when only one manufacturer was attempting the feature.
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.
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.
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".
They are suggesting the blade retracted, broke the saw, in a situation in which there was no risk to the finger. Maybe there was a literally hotdog in the wood.
> If you're ripping a wet piece of wood, no thumb risk at all
The guys I've seen lose fingers were all sleep-deprived and working flat out. The biggest risk to site safety is sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion.
Most people would rather go bankrupt than lose a finger. Fingers are kind of important. If I can choose to keep my house or my finger, I’m definitely choosing the finger.
So just divide the average net worth of a saw operator by the cost of a saw to get how many saws a finger is worth.
Exactly, homeless people living on the street should really be called familyless.
If I went bankrupt and lost everything I have a social safety net of family members who would put a roof over my head until I got on my feet again. Only people without that safety net end up on the streets. Or they have addictions that mean their family can’t take care of them anymore.
SawStop works by detecting electrical conductance, and there are many reports of it misfiring when attempting to cut wood that isn't fully dry (i.e., there is moisture inside the wood, increasing its electrical conductance).
I'm aware. I'm not buying that a new saw blade and a replaced brake is too much of a cost over the peace of mind that you're at a significantly reduced chance of losing a finger.
And they're pointing out it's not just those two replaceable components - it's the _entire saw_ that they're risking destroying off a false positive that some woodworkers will hit frequently.
I do it so seldom and am so careful not to put my fingers within 3 inches of the blade that this is a non-issue for me. This is another one of those "let's put 6 extra buttons that all need to be pressed to start the saw!" kinda situations that doesn't do anything to improve safety because the stop is the first thing you disconnect if it throws a false positive.
If we're concerned about job site injuries then let's address the real problem, which is that a lot of people using these things do so as fast as humanly possible with little regard for set up, site safety, or body positioning because the amount of money they will lose by doing that eats so much margin out of their piecework that it's not worth it. As usual we don't want to solve the hard problem of reducing throughput to improve safety, but we're perfectly happy to throw a part that is as expensive as the sawblade on the unit just to say we're doing something.
"If we're concerned about job site injuries then let's address the real problem, which is that a lot of people using these things do so as fast as humanly possible with little regard for set up, site safety, or body positioning"
Solving that sounds a lot harder to me than legislating that saws have safety features.
How often do you use a saw? At $3500 a saw I care. I saw a lot of wood and inadvertently hit at least one staple/nail/screw per year. Over the last 20 years of using my saw that would be tens of thousands of dollars if even a portion of them damaged the saw. It would essentially price me out of doing woodworking.
>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".
Might be wrong, but my own amateur reasoning has me believe that a table saw has far more kinetic energy than a battery powered battle bot, and that the SawStop must likely move the saw in microseconds, vs a battle bot which may comparatively have all the time in the world.
No, I mean they had table saw rigs that would bring the saw up/down into the floor with an actuator as a 'ring hazard', ie, your robot could be subject to sawing at any moment if they happened to be there.
The question is, how fast does it need to be? Likely not that fast really, certainly not microseconds, and an actuator could easily yank the saw down without damaging it if it detected you were about to lose a finger.
There's also no reason you couldn't use the same actuator to do fancy things, like vary cut depth on the fly, or precisely set the cut depth in the first place. Can't do any of that with a soft aluminum pad that gets yeeted into the sawblade when it detects a problem.
Basically, SawStop exists to sell saws. Those saws happen to be safer, but that's a marketing point, it's not what ultimately makes them money. Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.
I don't know - the marketing material actually says 5 milliseconds. That's the crux of the problem and I don't believe you can actually move the saw fast enough to not cause serious damage to the human without damaging the saw. The problem, as I understand it, is stopping the saw. The saw actuator only makes sense if it moves fast enough and given the saw stop works on detection, I'm not convinced you have that much time.
I'm considering the physical reality here - if the saw must be yanked down quickly, how much force must be applied to the saw to move it, and then can that equal and opposite force be applied to stop it without damaging the saw?
>Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.
This is true of any safety device? The SawStop inventor created his company after trying to license it and eventually won in the marketplace after nearly 30 years. Surely his competitors would have released an actuator based solution if it is was possible rather than ceding marketshare of high end saws?
Bosch did release an actuator-based solution. They got sued by SawStop for patent violations and lost and pulled it from the market. SawStop's main patent just covers the concept of a blade brake, not a specific implementation.
The actual contention isn't whether an actuator-based solution would work, its if an actuator-based solution could stop the saw without damaging it (and therefore not give credence to the claim that SawStop is intentionally designing a poor solution in order to sell more blades).
As far as I can tell, REAXX also damages the blade.
>and therefore not give credence to the claim that SawStop is intentionally designing a poor solution in order to sell more blades
This is the most asinine argument I’ve heard yet, and I am not a fan of this regulation.
Blades are typically cheap and the ones that aren’t are often repairable after an activation. Also, Sawstop barely sells any blades - I don’t know a single woodworker or cabinet shop that runs their blades.
I think the speed that things can go wrong when using a table saw (or most power tools) is faster than some people, including some woodworkers, might expect. There's a good example video here (warning, shows a very minor injury):
While we're still not talking microseconds, I think it highlights that moving the blade out of the way needs to happen very quickly in some cases to avoid serious injury.
Sounds like you're perfectly positioned to start a SawStop competitor!
"Protect your equipment AND your fingers."
With the government potentially mandating these types of devices, you could be makin' the big bucks!
These incentives are clear, where's the truth?
(This is only somewhat facetious. I'm skeptical of your claims, but not enough to discount them out-of-hand. The industry honestly does seem ripe for disruption.)
I think the other key variable is how fast is your finger being advanced towards the saw blade and how much total depth of contact are you willing to accept and claim a victory. In an aggressive ripping the material you're holding towards the blade that might be 10 mph (~15 feet per second), if you're willing to tolerate a 1/16" depth of injury, you have about a half a millisecond.
If the rate of advancement is much slower (like a normal pace of feeding the stock into the saw accident), you have several milliseconds before reaching a 1/16" depth of injury from first contact to last contact.
An entry-level Dado blade can run about $100. The $10-12 sawblades can't make finish cuts that are worth a damn, because they chew through the work and tear splinters out rather than making precise nips at the front and back of each grain of the wood. For a saw blade an entry level blade that doesn't do this to your work can run you more like $60.
I know this because I've had to buy a table saw blade to replace a $10-12 one on my wife's table saw that someone threw on there because they were doing framing work.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Well, the saw manufacturers could have done that before this regulation. However, they didn't. Only once staring down imminent regulation have they been willing to concede anything.
Bosch even has a license to the SawStop technology and had their own saws with blade stops. They pulled them all from being sold.
Sorry, not sorry. The saw manufacturers have had 20+ years to fix their shit and haven't. Time to hit them with a big hammer.
> Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market
Realistically, SawStop is so damn small that they're going to disappear. They're likely to get bought by one of the big boys. Otherwise, the big boys are just going to completely mop the floor with them--there is absolutely zero chance that SawStop becomes a force in the market.
Bosch pulled their saws from the US market because SawStop sued and forced them to. Then SawStop started lobbying to have their own design mandated on all saws. It was only later that SawStop said they'd allow Bosch (presumably in order to collect patent license fees).
As to this proposed mandate... If it's mandating any safety device, and Bosch and others can freely compete without everyone paying SawStop, I'm all for it. But if it's mandating the SawStop design, or would require all competitors to pay SawStop, forget it.
You have the order wrong, first they lobbied (2011), then Bosch introduced (2015) and pulled their saws (2017). Then SawStop reached an agreement in 2018. And the reason Bosch hasn't reintroduced it is apparently interference from cell phone signals. https://toolguyd.com/bosch-reaxx-table-saw-why-you-cant-buy-...
Divided by four, right, so $12k? I would think the medical, rehab, lost wages/productivity, and disability costs of an average table saw hand injury would easily exceed $12k.
It is not that simple. Replacing a saw is a loss to the business owner, while an employee losing a finger by his own fault costs nothing to the company.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, this is not true. If you are injured at the workplace while performing your work duties and you are not actively intoxicated on drugs or alcohol, then you are entitled to medical care and worker's compensation for that injury. It is absolutely something that has a cost to the company.
This is both factually incorrect and not funny at all.
In addition, last I checked, modern medicine cannot reattach nerves so you lose a great deal of functionality of your finger or hand even if you save it.
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?
Well, only SawStop sells these saws, and I haven't seen anybody need to replace the saw after a firing. They just replace the blade and brake and get back to work.
Replacement cost is always brake and blade.
The blade is always dead. These things work by firing what looks to be an aluminum block directly into the blade.
I ran woodshop at a makerspace with multiple SawStops. We went through lots of cartridges and blades but never experienced damage to the rest of the saw. I have no idea where OP is getting that information/FUD.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I have the original manuals describing how to rip using a radial arm saw. The blade is set at the level of your stomach and mere inches away from a spinning blade as you walk a sheet of plywood along it. There are so many ways for that situation to go wrong, and so few ways to make that situation safe. I have a beast of a radial arm saw, and I set it up to rip out of curiosity, and it would be insane to ever do it that way. It will cut your guts wide upon if you so much as slip.
And when that saw bites, and comes at you with enough force to be too much for you to react to. If parts of you are in the way, it'll rip right through them as it punches you in the jaw.
One thing I don't see mentioned with any of these discussions is that this massively increases the cost of using different kinds of blades on the saw. If you need to use a specialty blade that's a smaller diameter, it requires a matching special size safety cartridge. Dado stack? Another, even more expensive cartridge. I know most people typically have one blade on the saw and never change it or if they do, it's just another of the same size, but for those of us who do regularly swap out blades that aren't the standard 10" x 1/8", these types of regulations add both significant cost and time/frustration.
I'm all for safety and would love for there to be more options for this kind of tech from other saw makers, but I personally don't think regulation is necessarily the right way to do it. Just like there are legitimate cases for removing the blade guard, there are legitimate cases for running without this safety feature, especially one that would require several hundred dollars more investment even if the safety feature is disabled (On SawStop, you physically can't mount a dado stack unless you buy a special dado stack cartridge).
And if SawStop really wanted to improve safety for everyone... well I find it rather telling that they'll only open their patent if the regulation becomes law. Since they're effectively the only ones with the tech, with the regulation passed, buyers instantly have only one option for however long it takes for competitors to come to market with their own (which they'll be hesitant to do based only on a spoken promise by the patent holder). Instant pseudo-monopoly.
It takes 3 minutes to swap out the normal saw stop cartridge and put the one in for dado blades. Setting up the thickness and putting the dado stack on takes twice as long. If you are doing enough woodworking that you have a dado stack and specialty blades the saw stop cartridge is not that big of a deal.
If the technology is allowed under free-use or a free limited license, that'll change things.
Right now, no one can put it on their saws without having to either risk the patent fight or pay whatever Sawstop wants, with the later probably being so high, there is a reason other brands don't have "Equipped with sawstop technology!" badged on them.
1. Many of SawStop’s patents either expired or about to expire.
2. Bosch already has a similar tech but was prohibited to sell their saws with it in the US. I think soon all the patents that were basis for this ruling going to expire.
3. SawStop already by acquired by TTS(same company that owns Festool). They may have plans to integrate it in their line up somehow and safety tech becomes less of a differentiator.
And my even more cynical take is that FTC only considered requiring safety tech after a nod from the industry leaders.
The vast majority of tablesaw users don't lose fingers. How much is avoiding a 1/100000 chance of losing a finger to you? Probably a lot less than $500.
Not just loss, but permanent damage. A good friend jammed his thumb into a table saw, only lost the "fatty" tip, but there's permanent nerve damage, so increased risk of burn or other future injury. So, that was on the mild end of possibly injury, but still cost a small fortune to fix (still required surgery) plus a lifetime of lost function (albeit only a small loss).
Have you spent 20 years using a table saw most days of your working life? I think some of this centers around people who use saws day in and day out, to the point they spend a significant part of their working life using a saw when fatigued.
I don't have strong opinions on this change. I've used a table saw for years as a homeowner, and I always leave the guards on. I've never seen a table saw on a job site with the guards on.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of the people injured by table saws owned the saw that they got hurt on. How many are workers who didn't choose which saw to buy?
There is a zero percent chance you have paid 100% attention 100% of the time. A lot of accidents happen when two (or more) edge cases collide. The wind slams a door shut at the same moment that the blade catches a knot in the wood.
It's foolish to be a human and think you have the abilities of a robot.
"It's just one additional requirement; it won't break the bank"....this logic, applied over and over by building construction regulators for the past few decades, is an underappreciated but important contributor to the housing affordability crisis. Everyone talks about zoning, but building codes, etc are a big issue too.
Most of the building codes were written in blood - either that of the construction crew (in the case of site safety regulations) or that of the eventual owner (in the case of fire standards and suchlike). In both cases, long term costs should be reduced - lower insurance for developer and owner, less rebuilding burnt out shells, less earthquake damage, etc.
The regulations that weren't written in blood generally fall into the "zoning" discussion. Stuff like parking minimums, set-backs, etc.
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that straddles the line is the requirement to have two staircases in low-rise apartment buildings. This is a uniquely (US)American code. Nominally to manage fire risk. But much of Europe and Canada manage with one staircase and improvements in building materials that reduce the risk of a fire starting before fast egress is necessary.
> Most of the building codes were written in blood
I don't know about most, but some were written to make certain types of cheap dwellings illegal because society didn't approve of the people living in them like single-room occupancy dwellings. They're perfectly safe, but lawmakers didn't like the poor people living in them.
Some are also out of date with other solves for the same problem, like NYC's rules around needing 2 staircases for buildings over a certain size. Pretty much everyone agrees its no longer necessary.
>Everyone talks about zoning, but building codes, etc are a big issue too.
In every single place where housing is "unaffordable", a literal empty plot of land is also unaffordable. It has very little to do with what it costs to build a tiny shed. This is also why "tiny houses" and "3D printed houses" are nonsense and have done nothing to improve the situation.
The problem has nothing to do with the fact that the outlet next to the bathroom sink requires a GFCI device, or that you need a separate flue for your pellet stove, and everything to do with a small plot of land being a couple hundred thousand dollars despite literally being a forest.
The homeless aren't being kicked out/arrested because their tents aren't up to code, they are being kicked out/arrested because they do not have a plot of land they are legally allowed to pitch that tent on.
Just to add; they do have a cheaper portable for 1100. I think it's a great idea for hobbyists with properly dried wood.
On a jobsite pretty much all your wood is wet, it'll be standard practice to leave the safety off or 150 CAD for a new stop (and time wasted). Not to mention you don't stop working just because of a little rain.
Which is a point frequently raised by those not supporting this regulatory action - will this cause the base price of a saw to skyrocket beyond what average individuals can afford?
My guess is probably not. The brake cartridge is roughly a hundred bucks, retail. The sensor system can’t possibly be more than a hundred bucks. And there will have to be some quality improvements to the rest of the saw in order to be better withstand the crazy decceleration forces. The bottom end of saws will proportionally be more expensive, but even this will quickly race to the bottom.
SawStop saws don't cost what they do just because of the brake technology. They're just, in general, even if you took away the safety technology, built to a high end standard. Certainly the safety tech will add to the cost, but probably not as much as you'd think.
Ah—like how if you glanced at caster-equipped fridge drawers, you might think they add $1,000 to the price of a fridge, because only higher-end ones have them, but if they were (for some reason) legally mandated they’d only add like $5-$10 to low-end refrigerators. But, without the mandate, no option for a $400 fridge with nice drawers.
Appliances are made in groups of 3 - the stripper, the luxury, and the one medium.
1. stripper - gets people into the showroom because of the low price
2. luxury - for the people who are not price sensitive and just want the best. This generates a lot of profit with little added cost to manufacture
3. medium - people see the stripper and upgrade to the medium, but aren't interested in the luxury price. This is where the bulk of the sales and profits come from
This is called "bracketing" and you'll see it all over the place. Airline seats, for example.
I don't know the origin, but it means "stripped of everything but the base functionality".
Base model cars with no options are also called "stripper cars". Collector cars that are "fully loaded" with all the options fetch a much higher price.
I hope they find a way to bring costs down. It seems like a very hard problem - you seem to need fairly high quality materials for the braking system to not bust up the machine itself, and the circuitry is a non trivial expense.
But if folks can't buy a $100-200 table saw, and they can't afford anything higher, then ideas like affixing a circular saw in an upside-down jig might start to become more common. And then they'd lose the baseline safety features of even a cheap table saw, such as the blade guard and riving knife, which might be even worse for overall injuries.
> But if folks can't buy a $100-200 table saw, and they can't afford anything higher, then ideas like affixing a circular saw in an upside-down jig might start to become more common.
FTFY: then they shouldn't be in business as the business model is unsustainable. Even for purely private usage - if you can't afford to buy a SawStop saw, then rent one. Your fingers should be more than worth it.
Op didn't mention businesses so why are you? Plenty of regular people own them as well, woodworking is a very popular hobby.
>Even for purely private usage - if you can't afford to buy a SawStop saw, then rent one.
Dunno why some people decide they get to nanny everyone else. There's plenty of other dangerous tools (when misused) to come after next if you go down this path.
The op here is right, the most likely path is rigging a circular saw into a table saw from some internet tutorial. People have done worse to save less.
> Dunno why some people decide they get to nanny everyone else. There's plenty of other dangerous tools (when misused) to come after next if you go down this path.
We mandate safety features on plenty of dangerous machinery, most importantly cars - seatbelts, airbags, brake anti-locks, lane-keeper assists... or we ban stuff entirely, even if it is completely safe to use when one has the proper equipment and knowledge like asbestos.
The key thing is 30.000 accidents a year. Each of these probably costs society around 50k, and that's just the medical cost, not to account for (permanent) loss or reduction of income.
I agree that some will rig up completely unsafe "alternatives" but honestly, doing that rather than renting a safe saw for a dozen bucks... those people at least know of the danger.
This isn’t realistic. Table saws are central to many hobbyist workshops and good table saw weigh several hundred pounds. Renting a table saw is far too inconvenient for most.
43000 people die in car accidents a year, why not enforce a 15mph speed limit? That's gotta reduce the number of deaths.
>I agree that some will rig up completely unsafe "alternatives" but honestly, doing that rather than renting a safe saw for a dozen bucks... those people at least know of the danger.
You can't rent a table saw for a dozen bucks lol. Especially not with a safety saw blade.
On the other hand, if these become common, will people be more cavalier about letting kids or poorly trained users use them? And will malfunctioning or disabled brakes consequently lead to more accidents instead of less?
You can apply this logic to any safety measure for any product, and campaigns against safety requirements often do. Additional safety measures result in more safety. Good talk.
Related: Woodworking Injuries in Slow Motion [1], including an interview with a person who experienced each type of injury, because these kinds of injuries are just so common. Lots of missing fingers at wood working meetups.
They are forcing these guardrails because the safety culture is being obliterated in the pursuit of cheap immigrant lavor.
Since the businesses won't implement it due to extra cost and the person harmed will be on Medicare and not any company health care plan. They will hide behind subcontractors etc like they do now.
So to avoid the govt being on the hook for medical care and permanent disability...
This is a pretty interesting problem. At what point of an ongoing tragedy does a relatively expensive mitigation become a mandate?
I'm grateful that SawStop is releasing their IP. This doesn't address the issue of added implementation cost, but does address the concern about rent-seeking. It would have been a better world if Ryobi and others had licensed the technology 20 years ago.
In a surprise move at February's CPSC hearing, TTS Tooltechnic Systems North America CEO Matt Howard announced that the company would "dedicate the 840 patent to the public" if a new safety standard were adopted. Howard says that this would free up rivals to pursue their own safety devices or simply copy SawStop's.
Steve Gass, a patent attorney and amateur woodworker with a doctorate in physics, came up with the idea for SawStop's braking system in 1999. It took Gass two weeks to complete the design, and a third week to build a prototype based on a "$200 secondhand table saw." After numerous tests using a hot dog as a finger-analog, in spring 2000, Gass conducted the first test with a real human finger: he applied Novocain to his left ring finger, and after two false starts, he placed his finger into the teeth of a whirring saw blade. The blade stopped as designed, and although it "hurt like the dickens and bled a lot," his finger remained intact.
> This doesn't address the issue of added implementation cost,
It does not address that people will likely disable the "feature" and never re-enable it. SawStop saws have a bypass "feature" so they can cut conductive material.
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. I have one of those, a cheap $150 Ryobi. It would be more like $450 with the SawStop feature and I would not have been able to afford it.
I'd be using a circular saw instead. Maybe that is a bit safer, and at least it's more affordable until they require the same tech in circular saws. But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?
This video is a great overview of the history and the recent hearings, came here to link it.
Not sure I agree with his conclusion though - once all manufacturers are required to include the technology, surely they will still compete on price and find ways to get cheaper models to market? They will be unencumbered by the risk of patent violation to innovate on cheaper approaches to the same problem.
He also argues for riving knives and blade guards as an alternative, which are great, but not all cuts can be made with them in place.
As a hobby woodworker that sometimes makes mistakes, I've wanted a SawStop for a long time but have been stymied by the cost, so maybe I'm just being optimistic.
That's a good point. I would think that a circular saw or track saw is more dangerous. You tend to be hunched over the blade in an awkward position. I use a table saw over a circular saw because, for me, it seems safer.
I would love if someone could chime in with actual statistics here, but I've always heard that table saws are the most dangerous common power tool in the US by raw injury count alone. I have a weak assumption that more people have circular saws than have table saws. This seems unsurprising to me, because both track and circular saws are used with the blades faced away from the person. I can't speak to track saws, but I've never had a board launched at me by a circular saw. People also tend to over-extend themselves over tablesaws, and have their hands inches from the blades.
Also, when you drop a circular saw it stops spinning. Table saws won't shut off automatically if you lose your balance or something unexpected happens in your environment.
> I would love if someone could chime in with actual statistics here, but I've always heard that table saws are the most dangerous common power tool in the US by raw injury count alone.
I don't have data, but there are various threats with a table saw.
1. Overconfidence / complacency. Things like reaching across the blade, not using push sticks, etc.
2. Kickback. It happens because you pinch the workpiece between the blade and the fence. Knowing how to properly configure a fench, featherboards, and how to use the kerf and ribbing knife is important.
3. Shop clutter. People tripping and/or slipping around their saw.
SawStop style tech vastly improves most of these scenarios. Kickback, though, turns a workpiece into a very large projectile. Where you stand matters a lot.
To be clear: I was asking for data about relative frequencies of accidents with varying tools, not about risks from table saws.
But yes, those are all risks. Additionally, like most tools a poorly maintained table saw is more dangerous.
The table saw I grew up using was from the 1940s, so was about 50 years old by the time I started using it in the late 90s. Its fence was always around 1-3° out of alignment. Absolutely no safety features whatsoever. The motor was fairly weak too, and the surface was rough, so you needed to use a bit of force while cutting, which obviously increases the risk of slipping into the blade.
I got a SawStop last year for my new house's shop and was pleasantly surprised by how little force I needed to use to guide workpieces along it while cutting.
I'm actually for this change, though normally I'm not a fan of trying to mandate the use of technology to solve social problems (like vehicles installing distraction sensors). The table saw manufactures are caught in a stalemate legally speaking, where adding a massive safety feature like this can be seen as a tacit admission that previous generations of saws are unsafe. This could lead to a massive (expensive) recall, like what happened with radial saws. This seems like the perfect example of when a government should step in and brake the local maxima to ensure better safety for its citizens.
If all this legislation does is push more people to use low-end track saws on foam, I think that's a huge safety win. In the shop, the only woodworking tool I'm more weary of than a table saw is a jointer. Interestingly both have large spinning blades on the surface of a large flat surface. I wonder if that design in general needs to go by the wayside?
Sawstop prevents one specific mode of improper use, and it's not even the most common danger present with table saws: kickback.
No matter how good or experienced you are with a table saw, you will have it launch material like a projectile backwards at some point (kickback.) Don't be standing behind it when it happens - instead, be on the other side of the fence.
If you're on the safe side of the fence, you likely don't have enough arm length to comfortably cut your fingers off anyway. (And why weren't you using a push stick?)
For table saw vs band saw, NEISS tries to track table saw vs hand saw vs radial arm saw vs band saw vs powered hack saw vs ...
It's hard, obviously, since it depends on effective coding of at point of injury.
As of about a decade ago (i don't have access to later data):
78% of injuries are table saw
9% band saw
8% miter saw
5% radial arm saw
Circular saws and track saws would be in the "other powered saw" category, and accounts for less than 1% of injuries.
blade contact was 86% of the injuries
While this data is a decade old, the data trends have been relatively stable (even the track saw one)
The simple reason that track saws don't show up meaningfully is there aren't enough sold - these aren't sale-normalized numbers, and the number of track saws vs table saws sold appears to be about 100x difference.
The main trend is that radial arm saw decreases and goes to miter saw and table saw.
This happens naturally since there are not a lot of sales of radial arm saws anymore.
(But also shows you how dangerous RAS are - despite them not really being sold, they are highly overrepresented in percent injuries)
Intuitively, the table saw seems more dangerous to me (and I'm typing this with a finger with three pins in it from a table saw injury) because you're manipulating the circular saw directly, and thus more consciously. With a table saw you're manipulating the workpiece into the blade, which is indirectly a threat--in my case, the wood kicked, knocking my finger into the blade.
"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)
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.
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."
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.
So, basically, your opinion is both more right and more valuable than the manufacturers own emails, R&D costs, BOM's, and retail costs produced in discovery.
Why? Because otherwise you might have to admit that you actually have zero data to back the opinion you offer in the last sentence.
As for Bosch, they have admitted they priced the Reaxx very high on purpose hoping to capture a premium user and avoid regulation. They knew they were going to get sued off the market. In fact, they were later granted patent rights for free and once that happened, suddenly, well, you know, we don't wanna. Because it was (as discovered later) literally intended to stave off regulation through game playing, not do something real.
Of course, you would know this if you would bother to read any of the actual data i pointed you at
I'm remarkably aware of what happened here - i attended the CPSC hearings and also have read all the lawsuit data.
But please, continue to just not produce any real data to back up your view because then you might actually have to change it.
I'm not going to respond further unless we are going to have a real conversation here that doesn't consist of me producing data and facts and you just saying "yeah well i like my view better".
Product market fit is a real thing. I'm a typical low end table saw user. You can ignore me at your peril, but many people will have similar values.
I just finished a flooring project that made use of the table saw. My low end $350 saw was perfect for the rip cuts. There isn't another tool that would do it as well, but I might be tempted to try if a low end table saw starts at $500 (which is already way lower than the cheapest SawStop sold today). Do you have data on safety of alternate ways to solve a problem when the obvious solution has been priced out of reach?
As far as what manufacturers promise, I want to see the contract. We been promised "it will be so cheap you won't even notice" so many times that I just assume is marketing bluster from the get go. They will charge what the market will bear and they will exit if there isn't enough profit. Things they said in a committee room are meaningless. The only thing we know for sure is that what has worked so far is about to get banned.
Obviously I don't have time to do all the research you have done. I'm just a typical low end user who is looking at what it will cost me and what options are likely to disappear.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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?
> My post was not about manufacturers or liablity, so I don't know why you're arguing that here.
Because that was the context of the post you replied to.
> To turn your car example around, a ton of regulations exist for safety features in cars. Why not for table saws?
Regulation of this type generally falls into two categories.
The first is sensible new safety technologies that are in the process of being adopted by the market anyway. Legislators then race to mandate them so they can try to take credit for the resulting safety improvement that would have happened regardless.
The second is incumbents who have invented something weak and then discover that their "feature" is failing in the market because it's burdensome to use or isn't worth the cost, so they try to have it mandated.
Both of these are dumb. The second one is more dumb, but we can get a better understanding of how by noticing the problem with the first: It's mandating a particular technology. Now nobody can invent something better because better is different and different is prohibited.
It also eliminates nuance and context. For example, package delivery trucks are required to have seat belts like anything else. But the drivers don't use them, because they'd be getting in the truck, putting on the seat belt, driving ten feet to the next house and then taking it back off again. It would be better to design the vehicle to be driven while standing up and then use some alternate mechanism to restrain the driver in the event of a crash, like a padded barrier at the level of the driver's chest and waist which would still be in place even when the driver only expects to be in the vehicle for ten seconds. But that's not allowed, so the mandate precludes a passive safety feature in favor of a manual one that the drivers often don't use.
"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.
> 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?
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.
I mean, we have effectively outlawed cheaper vehicles that could probably have worked for a lot of needs. And... that largely seems like a fine thing?
I think it is fair that a holistic analysis of the legislation would make a lot of sense. I would be surprised to know that changing a saw from 150 to 450 would be a major change in its use. But, I could be convinced that it is not worth it.
I will note that is also taking at face value the cost of implementing the tech. In ways I don't know that I grant. I remember when adding a camera to a car's license plate was several hundred dollars of added cost. And I greatly regret not having one on my older vehicle. Mandating those was absolutely the correct choice. My hunch is when all saws have the tech, the cost of implementing will surprisingly shrink.
If these were the actual concerns, you can start the discussion at jurisdiction. Starting the debates with costs, though, sorta belies that concern?
Then, a problem you are going to run headlong into is that there are plenty of things that you can argue should not be done at different levels, but that are effectively controlled at a larger level. As a fun example, who makes sure that turmeric coming into the US doesn't have too much lead? Why can't/don't we leave that up to the individual states to fully deal with? Probably more fun, what about state laws that cover how much space is required for live stock for shelved products?
Maybe some power tools that get only occasional use could be fine with a better rental market. Not long ago I bought a ceramic tile cutter because renting one for 3 days was more expensive that buying one outright, but if that market went towards more expensive but safer models I'd reconsider and would do just fine with renting. And then tradespeople who need these tools more than 10 days per lifetime need to buy upscale anyway...
$150 is the cost of a really good table saw blade - a decent one would be half that. If you're using the saw at home, $150 is only 2-3x more than the shop vac you'll need to clean up after anything. At a job site, it's a lot less than the cost of the nailgun you'll use once you've cut something.
That feels like evidence for my point? We have causal evidence that safety regulation works. Sometimes we relax those rules. Often new technologies require adjustments. Still largely seems correct?
Isn’t that the entire point? Weekend warriors and small operators are going to be those getting injuries. Those with massive operations are likely using high spec gear already.
I live in a country (NZ) with fairly aggressive workplace safety legislation. We also have a single payer for accidental injuries and time off work (The Accident Compensation Corporation). It helps keep the courts clear but also means they have a lot of visibility into injury types and help work to prevent common accident methods.
Don’t delve too deep into the dark side of their work, its grim.
Circular saws are not just "a bit" safer. They cause far fewer injuries despite getting more use in construction. Table saws really are a menace.
I'm not in favor of this regulation because I don't like the idea of the government regulating hobbies, and I think it ends with some tools and hobbies getting banned altogether... but we should make this much clear.
I think there's a better argument for it, because there's some power asymmetry at play between the employees and the employer. It's harder to say "no" if you need this job to pay your bills. I still wish we had clear limits and tests for this, though. Instead, we have bureaucracies that keep expanding even after they tackle the most pressing issues.
For hobby work, the government is protecting me from me, and there are no winners in that game. I'm not imagining some hypothetical dystopia. The hobby landscape in Europe is already far more constrained than it is in the US.
The hobby table saw is the one I have in my basement that I use by my own choice, on my own time. The professional one is the one somebody else pays me to use everyday. They might be identical, that doesn't matter.
I'm going to be the guy that buys for cheap the "professional table saw" that got liquidated in the event that some new safety tech is legally mandated. 100% if I choose to buy it for my personal use, the government doesn't get to say I can't because I might hurt myself.
That said, I've never liked the table saw very much as a tool. The use-case is narrow, and yeah, you have to pay attention and be careful.
[ ] Check here is you testify, under penalty of perjury, that you are purchasing this saw solely for your own personal use, that you warranty you will never outside of premises that you own and control, that you will never undertake paid or unpaid work with this saw for any 3rd party, and that in the event of an accident with the saw, you will not seek public assistance with medical care.
"very good sir, let one of my colleagues help you load that into your car"
The setting. There are countless safety regulations that apply only to workplaces. This isn't OSHA regulation. This is coming from the consumer protection agency.
There’s only one reason to use a tablesaw- repeatable cuts and nothing else can really do that. It’s also indispensable for any kind of furniture building.
While I understand the name is not meant to be taken literally, I'd be curious to know the opinion of someone like Jamie Perkins who does actually have 'stumpy' fingers because of a woodworking incident:
I've seen jointer near-miss videos and the adult education woodworking class I took is even more terrifying in retrospect. I knew table saws were dangerous and assumed they were the most dangerous. At least with a table saw the fingers can often be reattached. Jointers and router tables just make hamburger.
I'm becoming a much bigger fan of mounting an uneven piece of wood to plywood and running it through the table saw to get that first edge.
The common theme is that when the blades catch the wood and the hand is gripping it, the hand tries to follow the wood. If you get very unlucky the wood escapes about the time your hand is nearing the blade and momentum carries you in. For routing tables it’s the curved pieces that’ll get ya. Snag, spin, bzzzt.
I believe my instructor suggested but didn’t mandate a two pusher technique with the jointer, where the left hand pushes the wood against the back plate and forward while the right helps stabilize. Less pressure on the hand with a vector toward the blade. Seemed safer to me.
Pushing sticks should save you because the hand never gets close to the table. But those thin plastic pushers aren’t enough elevation. I think Stumpy Nubs has a video about how people (and how many of them) get injured by those things. I’ve never been brave enough to watch it.
I don’t understand how you can hurt yourself with a jointer (presuming you’re using a push stick and pad to push the wood down from the top). There’s no risk of kickback and most jointers these days come with spring loaded blade guards that only expose enough of the blade that the wood makes contact with.
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).
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
I'm a fan of Stumpy Nubs but I disagree with his economic analysis here. Saw Stop has effectively had a monopoly on this type of saw, so of course they've been pricing it high. When Bosh came out with their own version it only made sense to price it at a comparable level to their only competitor. For them to massively undercut Saw Stop would leave money on the table.
There will be some cost in re-engineering the cheap saws to handle a sensor and brake. But those costs will be amortized over time and the materials themselves will be incredibly cheap. We're talking about a capacitive sensor and a chunk of sacrificial metal.
There will also probably be some cost saving innovation around the tech. Since Saw Stop is a premium brand coasting on patent-enforced monopoly they haven't had to invest in R&D the way Dewalt, Bosh, and Makita will.
I think you're on a reasonable path with your thinking there. Something I learned a couple of years ago is that table saws are particularly popular in the US. It varies from country to country, but in some places circular saws on tracks are the norm for the same purposes, especially on job sites.
These aren't very popular in the US so you don't see the dedicated "track saws" in stores here that are common in the UK for example. You can pretty easily buy a Kregg Accu-Cut which is a similar idea that you bolt onto your existing circular saw, but it's a little bit annoying compared to purpose-built track saws that are a tidier design and often plunge cut as well so it's simpler to start the cut. But you can also get proper track saws online, and I'll probably pick one up eventually to replace my Accu-Cut.
I don't think this is a perfect solution, getting cabinetry precision with a track saw might be tricky. But no one's doing that with a portable contractor table saw anyway. And the track saws are even more portable. I think the table saw concept is a better fit for larger, fixed tools, which I would guess probably have a better safety record than portables (larger table, cleaner environment, etc) even without sawstop technology. And I think it's more feasible to have good quality guards that will be less annoying on a fixed tool than a portable one, where they have a tendency to break off.
The US has space and pick up trucks that can fit plenty of table saws. Big tools in general are more accessible and affordable in the US. I have not seen as many people owning large tools like table saws, metal mills and lathes as in the US.
Maybe but I presume the Chinese will jump in to subsidize that through mass production and we will all end up with saw stop enabled $250 contractor saws.
A circ saw might not be, but a tracksaw is much safer for breaking down sheet goods. Just not as fast as blasting a sheet of plywood through a job site saw.
You hear a lot from long-time woodworkers that this is unnecessary, as they are perfectly capable of using a table saw safely with just the riving knife/splitter and proper technique. Which is anecdotally true, but hard to accept with the actual data of 30k injuries a year. So it's not a question of _if_ there's a cost to society here, it's a question of _where_ we put the cost: up-front on prevention, or in response to injury in the healthcare system. Is the trade-off worth it to force all consumers to spend a few hundred dollars more for a job-site table-saw, if it means the insurance market won't have to bear several thousand for an injury? I'd say yes.
There's a second aspect to the "tradeoff" that's worth emphasizing: it's not an equal trade. A significant percentage of those injured never fully recover regardless of the insurance money spent. Even a 1:1 trade of prevention vs response dollars means we have tens of thousands fewer permanent injuries.
If you look on YouTube, almost all US woodworking channels remove the riving knife and blade guard. That just encourages new woodworkers to do the same. They then demo rabbit blades which are illegal in the EU due to being so dangerous.
Holy shit, is that verbal diarrhea written by ChatGPT or something? It's multiple pages of talking in circles, in the end it doesn't provide anything other than an unsourced assertion. This is how you get your information?
But no, they're not illegal. The actual directive governing that is MD 2006/42/EC[1].
The reason for why you don't see them in the EU are probably twofold:
1. That directive mandates a stopping time for the blade which wouldn't be possible with the same saw with a dado blade, a dado stack has more inertia.
Therefore saw manufacturers cut the arbor short so they don't need to deal with accommodating and certifying that fringe use-case.
But you're perfectly free to import a saw that can do this yourself, or modify and use an existing saw, or even start a niche "dado saws with EU stopping times" manufacturer.
2. There's a lot of difference in everyday life between the EU and US that don't come down to someone banning something.
That directive is from 2006, dado stacks weren't in wide use before that either.
I'm fairly sure that the reason this is a thing in the US is because of the relatively wide availability of table saws. I think most people over here wouldn't think to modify a saw for this task, they'd use a router.
I would be surprised if you see a moderately popular woodworker on YouTube that has removed the riving knife. Are you assuming that no blade guard implies that the riving knife is also not present? Yes a lot of people remove the blade guard but they then insert the riving knife. If they would make the safety pawls slightly better I think more people might leave the blade guard on.
Here's an example of a popular woodworker with no blade guard, (also no mask). Wood particulate is really something you don't want to breathe in...
At least he has the riving knife in place. But YT is a cesspool of bad safety habits when it comes to most crafts (welding, woodworking, plumbing, soldering and don't even get me started on electrical work).
I said "I'd be surprised if you find [someone] that has removed the riving knife." And you comment with a video of someone that has the riving knife installed? I'm not sure what you were getting at.
I'm a member of a local artisan's workshop, where a whole bunch of talented folks share shop space for woodworking, metalworking, and various other stuff. All the saws are SawStop - the difference in price just isn't worth it. When you look at the costs of a table saw installation - space, blades, dust collector, etc. - going with non-SawStop would only save a few percent on the total.
> but hard to accept with the actual data of 30k injuries a year.
Lacerations are the most common form of injury. Counting "bulk injuries" is not a particularly useful way to improve "safety."
> _if_ there's a cost to society here
The question you really want to ask is "is the risk:reward ratio sensible?" People aren't using saws for entertainment, they are using to produce actual physical products, that presumptively have some utility value and should be considered in terms of their _benefit_ to society.
> it's a question of _where_ we put the cost
With the owner of the saw. If you don't want saw injuries, don't buy a saw, most people don't actually need one. I fail to see this as a social problem.
> if it means the insurance market won't have to bear several thousand for an injury?
Shouldn't owners of saws just pay more in premiums? Why should the "market" bear the costs? Isn't "underwriting" precisely designed to solve this exact issue?
> I'd say yes.
With a yearly injury rate of 1:10,000 across the entire population? I'd have to say, obviously not, you're far more likely to do harm than you are to improve outcomes.
The junior apprentice didn’t buy the saw that took his fingers off. His disinterested, profit-seeking boss did.
A defining aspect of developed countries is that their governments don’t allow business owners to lock the factory doors. We used to. Now we don’t. Are you saying we should go back to the good old times when children worked in coal mines?
You're making a lot of assumptions. That the apprentice is totally incapable of evaluating the tools he uses. That his boss is disinterested or that the additional profits aren't used to pay his workers above what the other shops do. You're painting a hyperbolic narrative here and there's not a lot of evidence that this is the norm or the root cause of even a simple majority of the 30,000 incidents per year.
You're going from safety releases on exterior doors in the same breath to child labor? It genuinely makes me wonder if you've spent much time in places where manual labor with saws are done. In most of these places, the "apprentice" owns his own tools, and works as a sub contractor because that pay structure is ideal for them.
If you want to mandate that employers who own a saw that is used by shift workers must have some sort of safety technology, I think you'll be disappointed to find that these regulations already exist, and it's unlikely that "sawstop" technology is going to benefit these locations at all. They already have a more abstract set of rules that's more comprehensive and compliance is driven by worker complaints and fines.
Finally, it should be an obvious coincidence to everyone that we only outlawed child labor once gasoline engines were well developed and prevalent. Our social reasoning that "children just shouldn't work" isn't as simple as everyone presumes it to be.
You're the one making assumptions about my assumptions.
> The apprentice is totally incapable of evaluating the tools he uses.
Apprentices are by definition inexperienced, but for the sake of argument, let's say the apprentice full well knows that the circular saw can take his fingers off if he makes a mistake.
What choice does he have? Unemployment? Complain to the disinterested boss?
> That his boss is disinterested
Some might care deeply about the safety of their employees. Most don't do anything that isn't enforced by law.
Here every constructions site by law must have all staff wear high-vis vests, hearing protection, helmets, steel-toed boots, and so forth.
YouTube is filled with videos of workers in Pakistan using the "safety squint" when welding for eye protection, or using a moist rag as their lung protection.
This is the reality versus abstract bullshit arguments.
> Additional profits aren't used to pay his workers above what the other shops do.
Are you... kidding?
First of all, let's say in this hypothetical perfectly efficient job market, a junior apprentice receives an extra $100 compensation annually because his workplace saved $500 on a circular saw that year and have five employees.
Do you think $100 is a fair price for your fingers?
We can meet up. I'll give you $100 in cash. I get to remove the fingers from one of your hands. You get to choose which hand. Deal?
Alternatively: Before accepting a work placement, do you personally spend several days evaluating the safety of that workplace? Do you check the fire escape? The smoke alarms? The material used for the carpets? Do you then adjust the contract if you find that the work environment is not up to your standards?
No, seriously, have you ever done literally this? If not, why would you expect any young, junior, desperate-for-a-job kid to factor any of this into any decision?
> In most of these places, the "apprentice" owns his own tools
I've never heard of an apprentice bringing their own circular saw (a huge table!) to a workshop. Clearly you've never been anywhere near an industrial workshop yourself.
> They already have a more abstract set of rules that's more comprehensive and compliance is driven by worker complaints and fines.
That's hilarious.
"Sure, you lost your fingers, but you can fill this form out and submit a complaint."
> outlawed child labor once gasoline engines were well developed and prevalent
The movement to outlaw child labour started in the 1870s, but diesel engines weren't invented until 1898 and didn't become commonplace until the 1920s and 30s.
Another example of making it harder to produce one unit of economic output (a saw, in this case). When we make it harder to produce things, we will have less of them, or less of something else if we re-direct our efforts from something else.
It's death by a thousand cuts this way, as our overall economic productivity slows.
In the current world, people have a choice to purchase a saw that took more effort to produce, if they think that it's worth it for the additional safety it provides. This new law would eliminate that choice, and those who don't think it's worth it will have to purchase the high-effort saw or go without.
> The Consumer Product Safety Commission says that when a person is hospitalized, the societal cost per table saw injury exceeds $500,000 when you also factor in loss of income and pain and suffering.
Seems fishy[0][1], so I checked the study:
> Overall, medical costs and work losses account for about 30 percent of these costs, or about $1.2 billion. The intangible costs associated with pain and suffering account for the remaining 70 percent of injury costs.
So the actual cost of each injury which results in hospitalization is (allegedly) $150,000, and they only get to the $500,000 figure by adding $350,000 in intangible "costs" tacked on. Totally legit.
> Because of the substantial societal costs attributable to blade-contact injuries, and the expected high rate of effectiveness of the proposed requirement in preventing blade-contact injuries, the estimated net benefits (i.e. benefits minus costs) for the market as a whole averaged $1,500 to $4,000 per saw.
There is no cost to the regulation, but rather a "net benefit", because the cost (in real dollars) of the saw-stop devices is more than offset by the savings (in intangible pain-and-suffering-dollars)! Based on this obviously, intentionally misleading "math", they include this canard in the summary:
> The Commission estimates that the proposed rule's aggregate net benefits on an annual basis could range from about $625 million to about $2,300 million.
Did you catch that? They didn't include so much as a hint that these dollar savings are, in fact, not dollars, but pain in suffering, measured in dollars!
In this life, only three things are certain: death, taxes, and being lied to by the United States federal government.
There's nothing dishonest about it. If you want to measure something, you need to pick a unit. For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
> You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
Choosing to re-define a word (like 'dollar') to mean something other than its actual meaning is perfectly fine, so long as you take care to inform the reader whenever you employ your nonstandard definition.
If you do not take care to make this distinction, then you are putting a false idea in another person's mind, which is, by definition, deception.
If you intentionally use your bespoke definition of 'dollar' to communicate about pain and suffering, refusing to define it (as the author of the paper did in the summary), while knowing full well that the reader will assume you mean actual dollars, then you are lying.
> For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
That's a noble goal. Yet the only clear and honest way to communicate human suffering is in human terms, not in dollars and cents. Laundering that suffering into "per-unit economic benefits" adds zero clarity to the issue of suffering. It adds zero urgency. All it adds is a likelihood of misunderstanding, which is clearly the point.
It is common for people to measure the value of a lot of things that aren't literally money in dollars. e.g. equity, risk, debt, etc. In a lot of these cases I think it is completely normal for a reader to understand that the value is not actualized.
> Yet the only clear and honest way to communicate human suffering is in human terms, not in dollars and cents
But do we have any better economic units to measure it other than dollars and cents? I don't think we do. So in the context of an economic discussion, it's the best that can be done.
There’s nothing misleading in the study, because they very clearly state the methodology for intangibles, and even provide an alternate calculation excluding it:
Finally, net benefits were significantly reduced when benefits were limited to the reduction in economic losses associated with medical costs and work losses, excluding the intangible costs associated with pain and suffering
…although net benefits appear to have remained positive using a 3 percent discount rate, benefits were generally comparable to costs when a 7 percent discount rate was applied.
I've been tracking this closely, I don't know if I should wait to buy one in a year or so when the technology is available or buy one now so I get a cheap saw. I am not a cabinet maker so it would be for various building projects (like finish work).
If I buy one now, I pay $150 for a cheap saw without the tech.
I can of course buy a saw-stop for $1000 right now.
If I wait a year or so, this legislation would probably allow me to get a saw-stop capable saw for $450ish, but it's a gamble, because they COULD be over $1000. We don't know.
Maybe think about going with the cheap table saw and spending the remainder of the money to get a nice track saw.
Of course, there are some things that you really do need a table saw for, but track saws are amazing and inherently safer in comparison to a table saw.
Particularly for sheet goods, I’ll never use anything but a track saw at this point.
This has been my particular position for a long time now. We don't need safer table saws. If you want a safe table saw, just use a different type of saw.
In the past I've found myself pushing wood quite hard into the blade. I don't really do it anymore usually it means there is some problem. But the few times I've done it, I've thought about ending up in a similar situation to you.
> Gass is a physicist and he designed a saw that could tell the difference between when it was cutting wood and the instant it started cutting a human finger or hand. The technology is beautiful in its simplicity: Wood doesn't conduct electricity, but you do. Humans are made up mostly of salty water — a great conductor.
> Gass induced a very weak electrical current onto the blade of the saw. He put an inexpensive little sensing device inside it. And if the saw nicks a finger, within 3/1000ths of a second, it fires a brake that stops the blade. Gass demonstrates this in an epic video using a hot dog in place of a finger. The blade looks like it just vanishes into the table.
The US Government doesn't give a damn about safety, the individuals who pass these laws have money at stake. Hence the financial windfalls that come to all the Reps in the House that just happen to sit on specific committees that oversee certain agencies which promulgate rules which have no real basis in law, but sure help them make money off building barriers to entry and functional mono/duopolies.
Why not just tax table saws and drills and put the money in a pool that doctors and hospitals can claim from when uninsured people cut their hands off?
EU always had stricter safety standards for table saws. I moved to the US in the late 90s, sold my table saw in the UK and got a new one in the US. It lacked the quick stop feature that my UK saw had.
That makes this whole SawStop thing so confusing to me. I'm sure some fingers are lost in Europe by table saws, but that doesn't seem to be anywhere near the 'must mandate auto-breaking saw tech' level.
So here's the problem: you can buy an older cast-iron table saw with good precision and a large bed for $50-$150 on craigslist, or you can buy a cheap piece of made-in-china plastic at home depot for $500. The cheap piece of plastic checks off more safety features from a regulatory standpoint, but tiny size and poor tolerances results in more kick-back and accidents.
This will kill off the cheap table saw. It will be interesting to see how the hobby and industry adapt to $700 being the bar to entry — and that would be RYOBI grade stuff. The added cost isn’t from the mechanism, the cost is from needing to build a real frame around the blade instead of plastic and thin aluminum. The SawStop trigger is incredibly violent, the braking force will sheer the carbide tips off the saw blade from inertia alone. Cheap saws are almost all plastic and would be horribly deformed after a trigger.
I anticipate a return of something that used to be more common, the upside-down circular saw bolted to a table top.
The “cheap” saws in this scenario are still several hundred dollars. A SawStop is made well enough to withstand multiple activations and costs $100 for a new cartridge plus the cost of a new blade. It’s kind of a situation where it’s “cheap to be rich.”
Sure. Sort of like methanol. As a society, we sometimes raise the (legal) floor even if it helps those at the margin. Not commenting on this policy alone. But one could make the same argument about seatbelts, airbags, flame-retardant bedwear or anything else purchased privately with lethal consequences.
We had a hole in the cinderblock in school where someone let the wood get away from them and the table saw kicked it back. This was in shop class, not a random wall in the school.
Most amputations on a table saw are because of kickback pulling the worker's hand into the blade. Riving knife, a well adjusted fence, and knowing which cuts have potential for kickback can mitigate this.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadIf it votes it floats ig. They should end the patents, though. A Sawstop monopoly would be stupid.
> However, one key patent — the "840" patent — is not set to expire until 2033. To stave off potential competitors, it describes the AIM technology very broadly. In a surprise move at February's CPSC hearing, TTS Tooltechnic Systems North America CEO Matt Howard announced that the company would "dedicate the 840 patent to the public" if a new safety standard were adopted. Howard says that this would free up rivals to pursue their own safety devices or simply copy SawStop's. At the hearing, he challenged them "to get in the game."
So there apparently is still a patent in effect. They claim they'll dedicate it to the public, though it's unclear what that means in this case. Maybe they should preemptively do so before any laws are passed, especially if they're pushing for its widespread use anyway.
There are lots of things you can't saw with a sawstop, and if triggered, it is very expensive to replace
And is the safety device "destructive" to the saw (requires expensive parts/repair/etc to reset)?
It works by detecting changes in capacitance so yes some treated wood and wet wood can set it off.
The replacement parts are often more expensive than an entire cheap table saw.
If it saved your finger? Worth it.
If you forgot to disable the feature and cut some wet or pressure treated wood and triggered it? Very irritating,
Scares the shit out of me every time too. I often have the garage door closed due to weather or to limit noise and it’s like a gun going off in an enclosed space.
And yes in general the blade and brake are both trashed because of the wild deacceleration forces that happen instantly. Frustrating when pressure treated wood causes this, humbling when your hand caused it.
And to be clear, it's well worth it IMO. Of all the tools I have in my shop, the Table Saw is easily the most dangerous. If I had long hair the Lathe would give it a good run for it's money though. I refuse to use a table saw without a sawstop (or similar safety break). The one I have and others I've used all have a key to insert to disable the safety device If need be.
(*) for people who have a workshop, anyway
My dad (military) never did like long hair. He said it was just a convenient handle for someone to pull back your head and cut your throat.
It manages to do that within a few teeth, which is quite impressive at 1000+ RPM.
It does this by firing an explosive charge which shoves an aluminum block into the spinning blade, while dropping the blade below the level of the saw deck.
Essentially a type of airbag like braking action.
That is how it can turn s situation which would guaranteed an amputation into a minor scratch.
It can (and does) get easily triggered by things like conductive wood (pressure treated), nails or metal in the wood, metal coated plastic, etc.
Every workshop I’ve been at that has one has a collection of triggered/destroyed blades hanging on the wall.
It could undoubtably be done cheaper than it currently is ($30 a brake?) but as designed it’s destructive - and it’s hard to imagine a effective way to do what it does that isn’t destructive.
It doesn't drop the blade, just stops it cold (at least on the model I've used). The Bosch system dropped the blade (thereby avoiding destructive damage to the blade and brake) but they were cease-and-desisted by SawStop and unable to sell it in the US.
(I think it's unambiguously a good thing to mandate, but I'd also prefer not to have to memorize a table of materials and their interactions with the stopping device...)
You use a $40 “wood moisture meter” to check the water content of the lumber before cutting. If you want a built-in one I suppose you could duct tape it to your saw.
https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/environmental-testers/pin...
If every table had a sawstop mechanism, most people would use it.
A closer comparison would be car airbags, but a type of airbag that has false-positives and deploys when the operator drives on a particular type of road surface, in which case the manufacturer calls it "user error" and tells the operator to disable it for that type of road surface. The road surface might appear the same to the operator, so needs to be tested carefully with special equipment before the car is driven on it. And since the active safety system is disabled for this surface, the operator has now paid for a safety system they cannot use, due to manufacturer incompetence
What a silly argument!
It will be more expensive if it isn't triggered.
I belong to a community hobbyist workshop. There are a lot of rules, lockouts and a key in place around the table saw usage, but they won't install a sawstop because they can't afford to keep up with the wasted blades.
Personally, I think I'd rather have one, but I can absolutely see why people would disable them if they were mandatory.
Plus tens of hours arguing with provider billing departments and insurance. You’ll pay over what should be your max if you screw any of that up. Time lost and stress and confusion over sorting out new bills still showing up in the mail two full years after treatment was performed.
Also it’ll be a lot worse if you lose your job after.
If you don’t have insurance, you’re getting it patched up at the ER “for free” (you’ll be declaring bankruptcy soon) but not getting most of the follow-up work done. Even if your arm could be made right, it won’t be. Good luck with the nightmare of getting and maintaining disability pay-outs.
Oh and double the out of pocket costs if treatment spans two billing-years.
Education on existing safety features and measures just isn't enough to improve safety here.
Much like seatbelts and air bags, we all benefit if the baseline technology can be transparently improved to prevent entire classes of injuries.
2. The CPSC (and government and society in general) is capable of doing >1 thing at a time.
The 3-point seat belt is another time this happened and probably one of the few feel-good "this should be available to everyone" patent stories: Volvo designed it, decided the safety-for-humanity* benefits outweighed patent protections, and made the patent open for anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bohlin (*: at least the segment of humanity that drives cars)
I'd be curious to hear the cynical take here. If I was to wargame it, I would guess something like: SawStop doesn't want to compete with Harbor Freight and cheap chinese tool manufacturers -- that's a race to the bottom, and power tools have turned into ecosystem lock-in plays which makes it difficult for a niche manufacturer to win in. So they'd rather compete on just the safety mechanism since they have a decade head start on it. They're too niche to succeed on SawStop(TM) workbenches, and they forsee bigger profits in a "[DeWalt|Milwaukee|EGo|...], Protected by SawStop(TM)" world.
afaik the patent was basically expiring in the next couple years anyway, even the small ancillary ones. They've been making and selling SawStop saws for the last 20 years and already made their bag. So, since SawStop has the experience designing and building the systems they want to wring out some good will and see which Big Saw manufacturer wants to pay them to get ahead of their competition.
https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...
Also, copyright terms are ridiculous. Historically patents and copyrights were both 14 years.
Expect better than SawStop to appear when able, and this issue to go away.
Just putting out there: the popular idea that blades are always trash after an activation is not true.
That said, cheap big box store blades without carbide teeth will die a horrible death.
The missing teeth need to be replaced and the plate needs to be re-checked for runout, but most carbide-toothed blades are repairable.
Ruminating a bit:
Cheaper blades are replaced more often with use and can’t generally be sharpened; SawStop tech doesn’t change the lifetime of a blade unless an activation happens. So, if you’re already willing to run to the box store for another blade semi-regularly, whether one survives activation perhaps isn’t material?
On the other hand, somebody who doesn’t regularly use their saw is probably both more price conscious and less likely to need sharpening/replacement often. I assume they care most about whether an activation forces them to buy a new blade (and a $100 brake). I suspect those are the people who propagate “SawStop = trashed blade”. For them, it’s true.
However, the blade-preserving system puts the explosive between the table and the pivot that's already there for retracting the blade. The full explosion force is there to force the blade down and it ends up being faster than the SawStop. Which while cool the SawStop was already fast enough so it's all the same.
So I don't know, I guess to me I'm surprised that the solution we jumped to first was a brake when the action of moving it out of the way takes far far less energy. It's only the energy to move the weight of the blade and bar down at the requisite speed, instead of needing to absorb the full energy of the spinning blade.
Do you mean in a system with both moving it away and a break?
The only time my fingers hit the blade of a table saw they were moving with a fair amount of momentum and hit first low on the blade - dropping the blade at the speed of gravity wouldn't have been enough.
I haven't seen an explosive system like you mention - is that what Bosch had for a bit? - so I don't know just how fast that is, though dropping a spinning-towards-you blade also seems to have some other potential risks of grabbing shit with it, too. If it's fast enough I wouldn't be concerned as much, but at relatively slow speed it seems maybe nasty.
I think table saw brakes are awesome and absolutely have a benefit for things like high school shop classes, but a properly functioning blade guard also does the job most times.
"You can operate the saw in Bypass Mode which deactivates the safety system’s braking feature, allowing you to cut aluminum, very wet/green wood (see above) and other known conductive materials. If you are unsure whether the material you need to cut is conductive, you can make test cuts using Bypass Mode to determine if it will activate the safety system’s brake."
https://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/faqs/
The first thing people will do is turn on the bypass and never turn it off.
I'd have a hard time leaving it off if I had a gristly accident. That might just be me though.
I have a feeling that you have never used a sawstop. You can not "turn on the bypass and never turn it off." As soon as you hit the stop paddle the bypass mode is disabled. You must reenable the bypass mode every time you want to pull the paddle. If someone is dead set on getting stuff done the bypass procedure gets old quickly.
Have you ever used a sawstop? How did you turn on bypass mode forever?
If people are already bypassing the safety features then "add more safety features" is a dubious move. Gotta go fast, can't afford if the saw has a false positive, switch it all off. Changing behavior is likely going to be a lot harder.
Seems like you have to do it for every time you switch it on, but on the jobsite saw it's not a key, just an extra button, so we'll see if people get in the habit of just always turning it off in case they have wet wood or other material.
Also, you can get a push stick for pennies. There's never an actual reason you need to put your fingers anywhere close to a moving blade.
It is pretty uncommon and rather difficult to cause yourself a digit injury that cannot be recovered from with a kitchen knife. Bad technique is most likely to lop off the end of the fingertip which can fully regrow so long as the cut isn’t very deep.
Mandolines and meat slicers (guards are bypassed when cleaning which happens every 4hr, they also tend to be used by 16 year olds) are much much more dangerous but they tend to be dialed in quite shallowly which limits the damage.
Table saws are THE most dangerous thing for your fingers because of where people tend to put their hands when using the tool and how they can go right through your digits and how they’re dialled in to make thick cuts. The logic that well if we accept kitchen knives we shouldn’t have safety regulations on table saws doesn’t make sense because table saws are far more dangerous and unlike with kitchen knives it’s actually possible to enforce the default use of an effective safety mechanism which ensures a cut will usually be shallow enough to be recovered from. Of course some people will disable the brake excessively but the average person will likely keep it on most of the time.
You can argue we shouldn’t have this safety regulation because it will add costs to consumers, and point out that other safety approaches already exist, the safety paradox, but the comparison to kitchen knives doesn’t really make all that much sense. I’d argue adding saw brakes as a standard feature makes a ton of sense due to the high social cost of digit amputation and the inconvenient and frequently ignored use of other safety approaches.
But that's how it is: people do cut their fingers off on table saws. They all know what you said. And yet 30 K accidents per year in the US alone. It is a serious problem.
I never bought one because it's just too big of a risk.
It's no different to Apple insisting that only they should repair Apple products, and hobbyists should be trusted.
First digit amputation (100% recoverable) I caused myself happened after spending most of my life using a knife because I just got complacent and was cooking when I knew I was extremely fatigued. Wood is also a natural product where natural variance can cause a table saw to operate in unexpected ways that catch people off guard.
A patent expires, but forcing competitors to adopt a technology you already incorporate raises everyone else's costs, so it's not always bad for business.
Easy.
My first cynical reaction is to ask which politicians will benefit handsomely from stock trading with SawStop stock (assuming it's a publicly traded company) or through kickbacks of one kind or another.
I think SawStop table saws are terrific for woodworkers who work in their own shop. Less so for workers who have to bring their tools to the job site. Yes, I know that SawStop makes a portable table saw. When you're working at a job site, you have less control over the materials you're working with (as compared to the cabinet maker in his/her own shop). SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site. A common example mentioned is treated lumber, but I don't recall ever having cut treated lumber on a table saw. When I need to cut treated lumber it's with a hand held circular saw. I'm a part-time handyman (some evenings and weekends).
You can turn the tech off to make it work as a regular table saw, but it does require pre-existing knowledge about what may false-trip the saw. Having a job site saw fail on site without cartridges and blades in supply, or a newbie on the saw could be pretty bad.
Not overly prohibitive with training though, and is something that everyone will face if this becomes mandated.
Heinz was the first company to make shelf stable ketchup without any of the chemical stabilizers that had been in use before, and then successfully lobbied against preservatives. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketch...
Then the government broke standard oil up, rather than revoke the patent or reform the system in away way, and prices got higher for consumers in the end.
This is often brought up as a success story. Patents never have worked as intended.
So are fruit leather "recipes": https://patents.google.com/patent/AU2021200204B2/en
I'd imagine they had something like that. Probably have to do something special to not burn the ketchup while you heat it.
Alternative milks were common in a time period before refrigeration and pasteurization. It just kept longer.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7579036B2/en
I wish we had a way to enact this kind of legislation without massively distorting markets.
Short summary: 25 years ago, if you had asked a researcher what is the most important antioxidant in the human body, they would have answered vitamin C or maybe vitamin E. 12 years ago, they probably would have answered glutathione. Nowadays many researchers think the most important antioxidant is melatonin in the mitochondria. melatonin cannot get into the mitochondria, but serotonin can, and the mitochondria contains enzymes to convert that serotonin to melatonin -- and certain frequencies of light in the red and the near infrared greatly increase the rate of mitochondrial melatonin production.
From the article:
> ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
> No external funding sources were used in this review.
That's also strange. It's not a smoking gun, but everyone gets some funding fro somewhere.
This last winter I was asked whether I knew if Tractor Supply still carried 100W bulbs since the person used them to keep a pipe in a barn from freezing and the current one had burnt out. The closest thing I could think of (that was easy to find) was a 275W heat lamp, but that uses a lot more power.
For alot of things, that's fine, but I distinctly remember having to bring clothing over to a window because the bulbs I had would not render the color of it accurately enough to put an outfit together. That's partly the clothing manufacturer's fault for using cheap dyes that are prone to metameric failure, but still, annoying.
I'm still in the process of purging the early gen LED bulbs that I have with nicer, high CRI, High Ra, variants, and getting dimmable bulbs in the places where it matters, because around me, the incandescent rollout was more of a rugpull when LED's first came out, and I snagged a couple bulk cases of cheap LED bulbs to use that were... not great.
I do keep a few decorative 'eddison' bulbs, aka squirrel cage bulbs, for reading use, as they are very warm, like 2300k, and the light they produce is very comfortable to be in at night. They use a ton of power, but, because they're not running their filaments as hard as they could, they tend to last forever. I've had one go out in ~10 years because I had removed it for cleaning and dropped it while it was hot (and also because it was hot), the envelope survived but upon being turned back on it ran for about a second before failure.
All of that to say, yes, there were downsides, mostly short/mid term downsides, some that persist to this day if you're not clever or don't know what to care about.
But since then we've found a better way using the old receptacles, which wasn't an option in the '00s. They don't really make those bespoke ones anymore. When my mom did a refresh to sell her house last year, she had to replace everything done in the '00s.
Pushing for regulations that only they have the scale to meet, as they are entering the vaping market.
I guess the benefit to SawStop is that they sell a better product, but turns out most people won't pay 2-3x the price for the added benefit. If they can make everyone implement the same feature, then they still probably won't compete on price, but the price difference will go down, and perhaps people will pay a low to medium premium for a slightly better safety mechanism.
As far as regulatory capture goes, it doesn't sound particularly nefarious. I do believe that the folks at SawStop genuinely believe this is necessary regulation.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-23898/p-145
The higher end table saws is probably a different story, they are even smaller manufacturers, but a lot of that stuff is different anyway.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies don't pay for gym memberships and reduce your premiums if you deliver them screenshots of your workouts and pictures of making healthy food at home.
That's what a sane insurance company that wants to increase profit margins would do. Get out there in the field and reduce the number of times they need to pay.
Regardless, it would have made sense for them to agree to FRAND [1] licensing >5 years ago which might have accelerated standards adoption.
From https://toolguyd.com/sawstop-patent-promise/ :
> I am a patent agent and I just took a look at the patent office history of the 9,724,840 patent. It is very interesting because it spent a long time (about 8 years) being appealed in the court system before it was allowed. While patents are provided with a 20 year life from their initial filing date (Mar 13, 2002 for this patent) there are laws that extend the life of the patent to compensate the inventor for delays that took place during prosecution. The patent office initially stated that the patent was entitled to 305 days of Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) and that is what is printed on the face of the patent. But the law also allows for adjustment due to delays in the courts, which the patent office didn’t initially include. So SawStop petitioned to have the delays due to the court appeal added and their petition was granted indicating that it was proper to add those court delays to the PTA. So the PTA was extended to 4044 days, meaning that this patent doesn’t expire until 4/8/2033!
> The other interesting thing about this patent, is that its claims are very broad. Claim 1 basically covers ANY type of saw with a circular blade that stops within 10 ms of detecting contact with a human as long as the stop mechanism is “electronically triggerable.” It would be VERY difficult to work around this patent and meet the CPSC rules. So the fact that SawStop has promised to dedicate this to the public is at least somewhat meaningful.
> BUT, SawStop has many other patents that it has not dedicated to the public. I have not analyzed their overall portfolio, but is is very likely that the other patents create an environment that still makes it difficult to design a saw in compliance with CPSC rules. So it is entirely possible that the dedication of the one broad patent was done to provide PR cover while still not creating a competitive market.
0: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9724840B2/en
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
Counterpoint: a lot of inventions seem obvious in retrospect, especially if you've used them routinely for most of your life. Doesn't mean they were obvious at the time.
All his words. He's trying to explain that sure, the patent is open, but companies are still going to have to work harder than Sawstop because they have many more patents they refuse to open that cover the best and most logical implementation of this idea.
You're asking for a "cynical" take, but it's not really cynical! The CEO is trying to tell everyone, openly, and they're not listening. They are NOT altruistic, otherwise they would have opened the entire suite of patents. They are openly saying this singular patent is open, because it doesn't matter and that they will doggedly defend their other patents. Now, every other manufacturer will now need to navigate a minefield of patent litigation, and follow the path of subpar implementations that Sawstop ruled out during their R&D.
I don't know why everyone is ignoring his testimony and thinking the company is giving anything up, it's wild!
How does that work though?
If the patent covers something that was already in the first version of the device, it should be either patented before 2004 and thus expired, or patented afterwards and thus invalid due to prior art, no?
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2104.html
> 35 U.S.C. 101 Inventions patentable.
> Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2103.html
> 35 U.S.C. 101 has been interpreted as imposing four requirements: (i) only one patent may be obtained for an invention; (ii) the inventor(s) must be identified in an application filed on or after September 16, 2012 or must be the applicant in applications filed before September 16, 2012; (iii) the claimed invention must be eligible for patenting; and (iv) the claimed invention must be useful (have utility).
The prior art requirement isn't "there exists nothing like this before" but rather "this invention hasn't been listed before".
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2120.html
> A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Wow. So this is how "evergreening" works? You patent enough of it that nobody can replicate it, but not everything, then every couple of years you patent one more non-obvious detail even though it's already included in v1?
I always thought patenting has to happen before first public use. I wonder if that's different in Europe.
> 35 U.S.C. 101 has been interpreted as imposing four requirements: (i) only one patent may be obtained for an invention;
You need to improve upon it and have a new claim.
If I was to patent A and make it, and then patent B which improves upon A at some point in the future, when A's patent expires someone else can make A and if they show that they're making A and not B, there's nothing I can do about it.
The issue is that often B is better than A (why make a 223,898 light bulb when you can make a 425,761 light bulb?) so while you could make A, its not commercially viable to do so.
The thing is that I've got a research line looking at making improvements on B and patenting C later which is a further improvement on B. The investment of time, knowledge, and resources to be able to do refinements of A to make B, C, and later D - that's where it's hard to get into it.
Someone else could improve on A to make B' and if it was different than how I did B, they could patent that. Though in the real world, this often involves in hiring away people who are familiar with A and investing a lot of time / money into making a B' that might get interpreted by the courts as too similar to B.
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.
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.
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".
> If you're ripping a wet piece of wood, no thumb risk at all
I'm no expert in this, but I'd say 'definitely way more than one'.
So, the risk is really quite high here.
So just divide the average net worth of a saw operator by the cost of a saw to get how many saws a finger is worth.
So talking about the average outcomes of a random homeless person doesn’t really apply here.
If I went bankrupt and lost everything I have a social safety net of family members who would put a roof over my head until I got on my feet again. Only people without that safety net end up on the streets. Or they have addictions that mean their family can’t take care of them anymore.
If we're concerned about job site injuries then let's address the real problem, which is that a lot of people using these things do so as fast as humanly possible with little regard for set up, site safety, or body positioning because the amount of money they will lose by doing that eats so much margin out of their piecework that it's not worth it. As usual we don't want to solve the hard problem of reducing throughput to improve safety, but we're perfectly happy to throw a part that is as expensive as the sawblade on the unit just to say we're doing something.
Solving that sounds a lot harder to me than legislating that saws have safety features.
Might be wrong, but my own amateur reasoning has me believe that a table saw has far more kinetic energy than a battery powered battle bot, and that the SawStop must likely move the saw in microseconds, vs a battle bot which may comparatively have all the time in the world.
The question is, how fast does it need to be? Likely not that fast really, certainly not microseconds, and an actuator could easily yank the saw down without damaging it if it detected you were about to lose a finger.
There's also no reason you couldn't use the same actuator to do fancy things, like vary cut depth on the fly, or precisely set the cut depth in the first place. Can't do any of that with a soft aluminum pad that gets yeeted into the sawblade when it detects a problem.
Basically, SawStop exists to sell saws. Those saws happen to be safer, but that's a marketing point, it's not what ultimately makes them money. Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.
I don't know - the marketing material actually says 5 milliseconds. That's the crux of the problem and I don't believe you can actually move the saw fast enough to not cause serious damage to the human without damaging the saw. The problem, as I understand it, is stopping the saw. The saw actuator only makes sense if it moves fast enough and given the saw stop works on detection, I'm not convinced you have that much time.
I'm considering the physical reality here - if the saw must be yanked down quickly, how much force must be applied to the saw to move it, and then can that equal and opposite force be applied to stop it without damaging the saw?
>Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.
This is true of any safety device? The SawStop inventor created his company after trying to license it and eventually won in the marketplace after nearly 30 years. Surely his competitors would have released an actuator based solution if it is was possible rather than ceding marketshare of high end saws?
As far as I can tell, REAXX also damages the blade.
This is the most asinine argument I’ve heard yet, and I am not a fan of this regulation.
Blades are typically cheap and the ones that aren’t are often repairable after an activation. Also, Sawstop barely sells any blades - I don’t know a single woodworker or cabinet shop that runs their blades.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Carpentry/comments/11s6zlr/cutting_...
While we're still not talking microseconds, I think it highlights that moving the blade out of the way needs to happen very quickly in some cases to avoid serious injury.
"Protect your equipment AND your fingers."
With the government potentially mandating these types of devices, you could be makin' the big bucks!
These incentives are clear, where's the truth?
(This is only somewhat facetious. I'm skeptical of your claims, but not enough to discount them out-of-hand. The industry honestly does seem ripe for disruption.)
According to my calculations, on a 10in/ 30tpi blade you have a teeth passing every 8.3uS.
If the rate of advancement is much slower (like a normal pace of feeding the stock into the saw accident), you have several milliseconds before reaching a 1/16" depth of injury from first contact to last contact.
I know this because I've had to buy a table saw blade to replace a $10-12 one on my wife's table saw that someone threw on there because they were doing framing work.
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.
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.
Well, the saw manufacturers could have done that before this regulation. However, they didn't. Only once staring down imminent regulation have they been willing to concede anything.
Bosch even has a license to the SawStop technology and had their own saws with blade stops. They pulled them all from being sold.
Sorry, not sorry. The saw manufacturers have had 20+ years to fix their shit and haven't. Time to hit them with a big hammer.
> Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market
Realistically, SawStop is so damn small that they're going to disappear. They're likely to get bought by one of the big boys. Otherwise, the big boys are just going to completely mop the floor with them--there is absolutely zero chance that SawStop becomes a force in the market.
As to this proposed mandate... If it's mandating any safety device, and Bosch and others can freely compete without everyone paying SawStop, I'm all for it. But if it's mandating the SawStop design, or would require all competitors to pay SawStop, forget it.
Certainly reattaching fingers would be cheaper than $48k. That's a steal of a deal in the US.
In addition, last I checked, modern medicine cannot reattach nerves so you lose a great deal of functionality of your finger or hand even if you save it.
See: https://youtu.be/Xc-lIs8VNIc?t=1095
I hope I am simply missing the joke if someone would be so kind as to clue me in.
A sense of humor might cost in excess of a finger reattachment, though.
Replacement cost is always brake and blade.
The blade is always dead. These things work by firing what looks to be an aluminum block directly into the 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.
OTOH (literally?) keeping your fingers but having to buy a new saw seems pretty reasonable.
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.
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.
It even says so right under where it says discontinued. Specs are exactly the same.
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?
And when that saw bites, and comes at you with enough force to be too much for you to react to. If parts of you are in the way, it'll rip right through them as it punches you in the jaw.
I'm all for safety and would love for there to be more options for this kind of tech from other saw makers, but I personally don't think regulation is necessarily the right way to do it. Just like there are legitimate cases for removing the blade guard, there are legitimate cases for running without this safety feature, especially one that would require several hundred dollars more investment even if the safety feature is disabled (On SawStop, you physically can't mount a dado stack unless you buy a special dado stack cartridge).
And if SawStop really wanted to improve safety for everyone... well I find it rather telling that they'll only open their patent if the regulation becomes law. Since they're effectively the only ones with the tech, with the regulation passed, buyers instantly have only one option for however long it takes for competitors to come to market with their own (which they'll be hesitant to do based only on a spoken promise by the patent holder). Instant pseudo-monopoly.
If the technology is allowed under free-use or a free limited license, that'll change things.
Right now, no one can put it on their saws without having to either risk the patent fight or pay whatever Sawstop wants, with the later probably being so high, there is a reason other brands don't have "Equipped with sawstop technology!" badged on them.
1. Many of SawStop’s patents either expired or about to expire.
2. Bosch already has a similar tech but was prohibited to sell their saws with it in the US. I think soon all the patents that were basis for this ruling going to expire.
3. SawStop already by acquired by TTS(same company that owns Festool). They may have plans to integrate it in their line up somehow and safety tech becomes less of a differentiator.
And my even more cynical take is that FTC only considered requiring safety tech after a nod from the industry leaders.
It appeared to work just as well but I believe it pulls the blade away instead of stopping it.
Sadly I currently can't find it.
Edit: I think it was this one https://www.felder-group.com/en-us/pcs
https://www.amazon.ca/BOSCH-GTS15-10-Jobsite-Gravity-Rise-Wh...
https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/power-tools/saws/...
Practically every single person I know who does "woodworking" has some finger injury from a saw--generally the table saw. It's north of 75%.
I don't have strong opinions on this change. I've used a table saw for years as a homeowner, and I always leave the guards on. I've never seen a table saw on a job site with the guards on.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of the people injured by table saws owned the saw that they got hurt on. How many are workers who didn't choose which saw to buy?
It's foolish to be a human and think you have the abilities of a robot.
The regulations that weren't written in blood generally fall into the "zoning" discussion. Stuff like parking minimums, set-backs, etc.
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head that straddles the line is the requirement to have two staircases in low-rise apartment buildings. This is a uniquely (US)American code. Nominally to manage fire risk. But much of Europe and Canada manage with one staircase and improvements in building materials that reduce the risk of a fire starting before fast egress is necessary.
I don't know about most, but some were written to make certain types of cheap dwellings illegal because society didn't approve of the people living in them like single-room occupancy dwellings. They're perfectly safe, but lawmakers didn't like the poor people living in them.
Some are also out of date with other solves for the same problem, like NYC's rules around needing 2 staircases for buildings over a certain size. Pretty much everyone agrees its no longer necessary.
In every single place where housing is "unaffordable", a literal empty plot of land is also unaffordable. It has very little to do with what it costs to build a tiny shed. This is also why "tiny houses" and "3D printed houses" are nonsense and have done nothing to improve the situation.
The problem has nothing to do with the fact that the outlet next to the bathroom sink requires a GFCI device, or that you need a separate flue for your pellet stove, and everything to do with a small plot of land being a couple hundred thousand dollars despite literally being a forest.
The homeless aren't being kicked out/arrested because their tents aren't up to code, they are being kicked out/arrested because they do not have a plot of land they are legally allowed to pitch that tent on.
On a jobsite pretty much all your wood is wet, it'll be standard practice to leave the safety off or 150 CAD for a new stop (and time wasted). Not to mention you don't stop working just because of a little rain.
My guess is probably not. The brake cartridge is roughly a hundred bucks, retail. The sensor system can’t possibly be more than a hundred bucks. And there will have to be some quality improvements to the rest of the saw in order to be better withstand the crazy decceleration forces. The bottom end of saws will proportionally be more expensive, but even this will quickly race to the bottom.
Maybe not that extreme, but similar dynamic.
1. stripper - gets people into the showroom because of the low price
2. luxury - for the people who are not price sensitive and just want the best. This generates a lot of profit with little added cost to manufacture
3. medium - people see the stripper and upgrade to the medium, but aren't interested in the luxury price. This is where the bulk of the sales and profits come from
This is called "bracketing" and you'll see it all over the place. Airline seats, for example.
Base model cars with no options are also called "stripper cars". Collector cars that are "fully loaded" with all the options fetch a much higher price.
But if folks can't buy a $100-200 table saw, and they can't afford anything higher, then ideas like affixing a circular saw in an upside-down jig might start to become more common. And then they'd lose the baseline safety features of even a cheap table saw, such as the blade guard and riving knife, which might be even worse for overall injuries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhORUN6oCUc
FTFY: then they shouldn't be in business as the business model is unsustainable. Even for purely private usage - if you can't afford to buy a SawStop saw, then rent one. Your fingers should be more than worth it.
>Even for purely private usage - if you can't afford to buy a SawStop saw, then rent one.
Dunno why some people decide they get to nanny everyone else. There's plenty of other dangerous tools (when misused) to come after next if you go down this path.
The op here is right, the most likely path is rigging a circular saw into a table saw from some internet tutorial. People have done worse to save less.
We mandate safety features on plenty of dangerous machinery, most importantly cars - seatbelts, airbags, brake anti-locks, lane-keeper assists... or we ban stuff entirely, even if it is completely safe to use when one has the proper equipment and knowledge like asbestos.
The key thing is 30.000 accidents a year. Each of these probably costs society around 50k, and that's just the medical cost, not to account for (permanent) loss or reduction of income.
I agree that some will rig up completely unsafe "alternatives" but honestly, doing that rather than renting a safe saw for a dozen bucks... those people at least know of the danger.
>I agree that some will rig up completely unsafe "alternatives" but honestly, doing that rather than renting a safe saw for a dozen bucks... those people at least know of the danger.
You can't rent a table saw for a dozen bucks lol. Especially not with a safety saw blade.
[1] https://youtu.be/Xc-lIs8VNIc
Since the businesses won't implement it due to extra cost and the person harmed will be on Medicare and not any company health care plan. They will hide behind subcontractors etc like they do now.
So to avoid the govt being on the hook for medical care and permanent disability...
I'm grateful that SawStop is releasing their IP. This doesn't address the issue of added implementation cost, but does address the concern about rent-seeking. It would have been a better world if Ryobi and others had licensed the technology 20 years ago.
In a surprise move at February's CPSC hearing, TTS Tooltechnic Systems North America CEO Matt Howard announced that the company would "dedicate the 840 patent to the public" if a new safety standard were adopted. Howard says that this would free up rivals to pursue their own safety devices or simply copy SawStop's.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/02/1241148577/table-saw-injuries...
Steve Gass, a patent attorney and amateur woodworker with a doctorate in physics, came up with the idea for SawStop's braking system in 1999. It took Gass two weeks to complete the design, and a third week to build a prototype based on a "$200 secondhand table saw." After numerous tests using a hot dog as a finger-analog, in spring 2000, Gass conducted the first test with a real human finger: he applied Novocain to his left ring finger, and after two false starts, he placed his finger into the teeth of a whirring saw blade. The blade stopped as designed, and although it "hurt like the dickens and bled a lot," his finger remained intact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SawStop
It does not address that people will likely disable the "feature" and never re-enable it. SawStop saws have a bypass "feature" so they can cut conductive material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk
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. I have one of those, a cheap $150 Ryobi. It would be more like $450 with the SawStop feature and I would not have been able to afford it.
I'd be using a circular saw instead. Maybe that is a bit safer, and at least it's more affordable until they require the same tech in circular saws. But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?
Not sure I agree with his conclusion though - once all manufacturers are required to include the technology, surely they will still compete on price and find ways to get cheaper models to market? They will be unencumbered by the risk of patent violation to innovate on cheaper approaches to the same problem.
He also argues for riving knives and blade guards as an alternative, which are great, but not all cuts can be made with them in place.
As a hobby woodworker that sometimes makes mistakes, I've wanted a SawStop for a long time but have been stymied by the cost, so maybe I'm just being optimistic.
The blade is still moving very fast, it doesn’t stop spinning. The guard is what makes it safe - though maybe there are other types out there?
It's possible that the guard would close faster than the spin would stop.
I don't have data, but there are various threats with a table saw.
1. Overconfidence / complacency. Things like reaching across the blade, not using push sticks, etc.
2. Kickback. It happens because you pinch the workpiece between the blade and the fence. Knowing how to properly configure a fench, featherboards, and how to use the kerf and ribbing knife is important.
3. Shop clutter. People tripping and/or slipping around their saw.
SawStop style tech vastly improves most of these scenarios. Kickback, though, turns a workpiece into a very large projectile. Where you stand matters a lot.
But yes, those are all risks. Additionally, like most tools a poorly maintained table saw is more dangerous.
The table saw I grew up using was from the 1940s, so was about 50 years old by the time I started using it in the late 90s. Its fence was always around 1-3° out of alignment. Absolutely no safety features whatsoever. The motor was fairly weak too, and the surface was rough, so you needed to use a bit of force while cutting, which obviously increases the risk of slipping into the blade.
I got a SawStop last year for my new house's shop and was pleasantly surprised by how little force I needed to use to guide workpieces along it while cutting.
I tried to give the data you asked for.
(I moved from a sawstop to a sliding table saw so i'm nowhere near the blade in the first place)
If all this legislation does is push more people to use low-end track saws on foam, I think that's a huge safety win. In the shop, the only woodworking tool I'm more weary of than a table saw is a jointer. Interestingly both have large spinning blades on the surface of a large flat surface. I wonder if that design in general needs to go by the wayside?
No matter how good or experienced you are with a table saw, you will have it launch material like a projectile backwards at some point (kickback.) Don't be standing behind it when it happens - instead, be on the other side of the fence.
If you're on the safe side of the fence, you likely don't have enough arm length to comfortably cut your fingers off anyway. (And why weren't you using a push stick?)
The workpiece goes flying and the guy almost loses a finger.
and https://www.cpsc.gov/cgibin/neissquery/Data/Highlights/2022/...
for general data
For table saw vs band saw, NEISS tries to track table saw vs hand saw vs radial arm saw vs band saw vs powered hack saw vs ...
It's hard, obviously, since it depends on effective coding of at point of injury.
As of about a decade ago (i don't have access to later data):
78% of injuries are table saw
9% band saw
8% miter saw
5% radial arm saw
Circular saws and track saws would be in the "other powered saw" category, and accounts for less than 1% of injuries.
blade contact was 86% of the injuries
While this data is a decade old, the data trends have been relatively stable (even the track saw one)
The simple reason that track saws don't show up meaningfully is there aren't enough sold - these aren't sale-normalized numbers, and the number of track saws vs table saws sold appears to be about 100x difference.
The main trend is that radial arm saw decreases and goes to miter saw and table saw.
This happens naturally since there are not a lot of sales of radial arm saws anymore. (But also shows you how dangerous RAS are - despite them not really being sold, they are highly overrepresented in percent injuries)
"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)
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.
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 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.
Why? Because otherwise you might have to admit that you actually have zero data to back the opinion you offer in the last sentence.
As for Bosch, they have admitted they priced the Reaxx very high on purpose hoping to capture a premium user and avoid regulation. They knew they were going to get sued off the market. In fact, they were later granted patent rights for free and once that happened, suddenly, well, you know, we don't wanna. Because it was (as discovered later) literally intended to stave off regulation through game playing, not do something real. Of course, you would know this if you would bother to read any of the actual data i pointed you at
I'm remarkably aware of what happened here - i attended the CPSC hearings and also have read all the lawsuit data.
But please, continue to just not produce any real data to back up your view because then you might actually have to change it.
I'm not going to respond further unless we are going to have a real conversation here that doesn't consist of me producing data and facts and you just saying "yeah well i like my view better".
That is what really "reeks" here.
I just finished a flooring project that made use of the table saw. My low end $350 saw was perfect for the rip cuts. There isn't another tool that would do it as well, but I might be tempted to try if a low end table saw starts at $500 (which is already way lower than the cheapest SawStop sold today). Do you have data on safety of alternate ways to solve a problem when the obvious solution has been priced out of reach?
As far as what manufacturers promise, I want to see the contract. We been promised "it will be so cheap you won't even notice" so many times that I just assume is marketing bluster from the get go. They will charge what the market will bear and they will exit if there isn't enough profit. Things they said in a committee room are meaningless. The only thing we know for sure is that what has worked so far is about to get banned.
Obviously I don't have time to do all the research you have done. I'm just a typical low end user who is looking at what it will cost me and what options are likely to disappear.
Not to say it isn't good technology, just that - anecdotally - it's more often a $150 mistake than a finger saving feature.
I believe you can temporarily turn off the feature if you’re cutting questionable material.
It's a niche product with a single manufacturer right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
To turn your car example around, a ton of regulations exist for safety features in cars. Why not for table saws?
Because that was the context of the post you replied to.
> To turn your car example around, a ton of regulations exist for safety features in cars. Why not for table saws?
Regulation of this type generally falls into two categories.
The first is sensible new safety technologies that are in the process of being adopted by the market anyway. Legislators then race to mandate them so they can try to take credit for the resulting safety improvement that would have happened regardless.
The second is incumbents who have invented something weak and then discover that their "feature" is failing in the market because it's burdensome to use or isn't worth the cost, so they try to have it mandated.
Both of these are dumb. The second one is more dumb, but we can get a better understanding of how by noticing the problem with the first: It's mandating a particular technology. Now nobody can invent something better because better is different and different is prohibited.
It also eliminates nuance and context. For example, package delivery trucks are required to have seat belts like anything else. But the drivers don't use them, because they'd be getting in the truck, putting on the seat belt, driving ten feet to the next house and then taking it back off again. It would be better to design the vehicle to be driven while standing up and then use some alternate mechanism to restrain the driver in the event of a crash, like a padded barrier at the level of the driver's chest and waist which would still be in place even when the driver only expects to be in the vehicle for ten seconds. But that's not allowed, so the mandate precludes a passive safety feature in favor of a manual one that the drivers often don't use.
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.
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.
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?
This is why socialized medicine is a bad idea. You get "free" medicine in exchange for society dictating what you're allowed to do.
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.
I think it is fair that a holistic analysis of the legislation would make a lot of sense. I would be surprised to know that changing a saw from 150 to 450 would be a major change in its use. But, I could be convinced that it is not worth it.
I will note that is also taking at face value the cost of implementing the tech. In ways I don't know that I grant. I remember when adding a camera to a car's license plate was several hundred dollars of added cost. And I greatly regret not having one on my older vehicle. Mandating those was absolutely the correct choice. My hunch is when all saws have the tech, the cost of implementing will surprisingly shrink.
Some states have done that but many states have not. This would be fine as a state law but it is infringing as a federal law.
Then, a problem you are going to run headlong into is that there are plenty of things that you can argue should not be done at different levels, but that are effectively controlled at a larger level. As a fun example, who makes sure that turmeric coming into the US doesn't have too much lead? Why can't/don't we leave that up to the individual states to fully deal with? Probably more fun, what about state laws that cover how much space is required for live stock for shelved products?
Odd conclusion given the highest rate of pedestrian deaths in the US in history correlated strongly with a work truck tax deduction passed in 2017.
Or when scooters and ebikes have changed both high density traffic and recreation significantly over the last decade.
Isn’t that the entire point? Weekend warriors and small operators are going to be those getting injuries. Those with massive operations are likely using high spec gear already.
I live in a country (NZ) with fairly aggressive workplace safety legislation. We also have a single payer for accidental injuries and time off work (The Accident Compensation Corporation). It helps keep the courts clear but also means they have a lot of visibility into injury types and help work to prevent common accident methods.
Don’t delve too deep into the dark side of their work, its grim.
I'm not in favor of this regulation because I don't like the idea of the government regulating hobbies, and I think it ends with some tools and hobbies getting banned altogether... but we should make this much clear.
For hobby work, the government is protecting me from me, and there are no winners in that game. I'm not imagining some hypothetical dystopia. The hobby landscape in Europe is already far more constrained than it is in the US.
I'm going to be the guy that buys for cheap the "professional table saw" that got liquidated in the event that some new safety tech is legally mandated. 100% if I choose to buy it for my personal use, the government doesn't get to say I can't because I might hurt myself.
That said, I've never liked the table saw very much as a tool. The use-case is narrow, and yeah, you have to pay attention and be careful.
"very good sir, let one of my colleagues help you load that into your car"
While I understand the name is not meant to be taken literally, I'd be curious to know the opinion of someone like Jamie Perkins who does actually have 'stumpy' fingers because of a woodworking incident:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZMe0QIET6g
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8XEQ1XKYNDXTUhEZWcHA...
It wasn't with a table saw though, but rather a jointer:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jointer
He now has a prosthetic hand:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu52UOeJAj8
I'm becoming a much bigger fan of mounting an uneven piece of wood to plywood and running it through the table saw to get that first edge.
I believe my instructor suggested but didn’t mandate a two pusher technique with the jointer, where the left hand pushes the wood against the back plate and forward while the right helps stabilize. Less pressure on the hand with a vector toward the blade. Seemed safer to me.
What about employees? They don't get to decide.
I agree, at least until we get free universal health care, then the government has an argument for making these decisions.
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).
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.
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.
There will be some cost in re-engineering the cheap saws to handle a sensor and brake. But those costs will be amortized over time and the materials themselves will be incredibly cheap. We're talking about a capacitive sensor and a chunk of sacrificial metal.
There will also probably be some cost saving innovation around the tech. Since Saw Stop is a premium brand coasting on patent-enforced monopoly they haven't had to invest in R&D the way Dewalt, Bosh, and Makita will.
If you amputate your fingers, the rest of us bear the cost of your reconstructive surgery through higher health insurance premiums.
These aren't very popular in the US so you don't see the dedicated "track saws" in stores here that are common in the UK for example. You can pretty easily buy a Kregg Accu-Cut which is a similar idea that you bolt onto your existing circular saw, but it's a little bit annoying compared to purpose-built track saws that are a tidier design and often plunge cut as well so it's simpler to start the cut. But you can also get proper track saws online, and I'll probably pick one up eventually to replace my Accu-Cut.
I don't think this is a perfect solution, getting cabinetry precision with a track saw might be tricky. But no one's doing that with a portable contractor table saw anyway. And the track saws are even more portable. I think the table saw concept is a better fit for larger, fixed tools, which I would guess probably have a better safety record than portables (larger table, cleaner environment, etc) even without sawstop technology. And I think it's more feasible to have good quality guards that will be less annoying on a fixed tool than a portable one, where they have a tendency to break off.
https://www.toolsadvisor.org/why-are-dado-blades-illegal-in-...
But no, they're not illegal. The actual directive governing that is MD 2006/42/EC[1].
The reason for why you don't see them in the EU are probably twofold:
1. That directive mandates a stopping time for the blade which wouldn't be possible with the same saw with a dado blade, a dado stack has more inertia.
Therefore saw manufacturers cut the arbor short so they don't need to deal with accommodating and certifying that fringe use-case.
But you're perfectly free to import a saw that can do this yourself, or modify and use an existing saw, or even start a niche "dado saws with EU stopping times" manufacturer.
2. There's a lot of difference in everyday life between the EU and US that don't come down to someone banning something.
That directive is from 2006, dado stacks weren't in wide use before that either.
I'm fairly sure that the reason this is a thing in the US is because of the relatively wide availability of table saws. I think most people over here wouldn't think to modify a saw for this task, they'd use a router.
1. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02...
At least he has the riving knife in place. But YT is a cesspool of bad safety habits when it comes to most crafts (welding, woodworking, plumbing, soldering and don't even get me started on electrical work).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKPQVPUfSKo
Lacerations are the most common form of injury. Counting "bulk injuries" is not a particularly useful way to improve "safety."
> _if_ there's a cost to society here
The question you really want to ask is "is the risk:reward ratio sensible?" People aren't using saws for entertainment, they are using to produce actual physical products, that presumptively have some utility value and should be considered in terms of their _benefit_ to society.
> it's a question of _where_ we put the cost
With the owner of the saw. If you don't want saw injuries, don't buy a saw, most people don't actually need one. I fail to see this as a social problem.
> if it means the insurance market won't have to bear several thousand for an injury?
Shouldn't owners of saws just pay more in premiums? Why should the "market" bear the costs? Isn't "underwriting" precisely designed to solve this exact issue?
> I'd say yes.
With a yearly injury rate of 1:10,000 across the entire population? I'd have to say, obviously not, you're far more likely to do harm than you are to improve outcomes.
A defining aspect of developed countries is that their governments don’t allow business owners to lock the factory doors. We used to. Now we don’t. Are you saying we should go back to the good old times when children worked in coal mines?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_boy
You're going from safety releases on exterior doors in the same breath to child labor? It genuinely makes me wonder if you've spent much time in places where manual labor with saws are done. In most of these places, the "apprentice" owns his own tools, and works as a sub contractor because that pay structure is ideal for them.
If you want to mandate that employers who own a saw that is used by shift workers must have some sort of safety technology, I think you'll be disappointed to find that these regulations already exist, and it's unlikely that "sawstop" technology is going to benefit these locations at all. They already have a more abstract set of rules that's more comprehensive and compliance is driven by worker complaints and fines.
Finally, it should be an obvious coincidence to everyone that we only outlawed child labor once gasoline engines were well developed and prevalent. Our social reasoning that "children just shouldn't work" isn't as simple as everyone presumes it to be.
> The apprentice is totally incapable of evaluating the tools he uses.
Apprentices are by definition inexperienced, but for the sake of argument, let's say the apprentice full well knows that the circular saw can take his fingers off if he makes a mistake.
What choice does he have? Unemployment? Complain to the disinterested boss?
> That his boss is disinterested
Some might care deeply about the safety of their employees. Most don't do anything that isn't enforced by law.
Here every constructions site by law must have all staff wear high-vis vests, hearing protection, helmets, steel-toed boots, and so forth.
YouTube is filled with videos of workers in Pakistan using the "safety squint" when welding for eye protection, or using a moist rag as their lung protection.
This is the reality versus abstract bullshit arguments.
> Additional profits aren't used to pay his workers above what the other shops do.
Are you... kidding?
First of all, let's say in this hypothetical perfectly efficient job market, a junior apprentice receives an extra $100 compensation annually because his workplace saved $500 on a circular saw that year and have five employees.
Do you think $100 is a fair price for your fingers?
We can meet up. I'll give you $100 in cash. I get to remove the fingers from one of your hands. You get to choose which hand. Deal?
Alternatively: Before accepting a work placement, do you personally spend several days evaluating the safety of that workplace? Do you check the fire escape? The smoke alarms? The material used for the carpets? Do you then adjust the contract if you find that the work environment is not up to your standards?
No, seriously, have you ever done literally this? If not, why would you expect any young, junior, desperate-for-a-job kid to factor any of this into any decision?
> In most of these places, the "apprentice" owns his own tools
I've never heard of an apprentice bringing their own circular saw (a huge table!) to a workshop. Clearly you've never been anywhere near an industrial workshop yourself.
> They already have a more abstract set of rules that's more comprehensive and compliance is driven by worker complaints and fines.
That's hilarious.
"Sure, you lost your fingers, but you can fill this form out and submit a complaint."
> outlawed child labor once gasoline engines were well developed and prevalent
The movement to outlaw child labour started in the 1870s, but diesel engines weren't invented until 1898 and didn't become commonplace until the 1920s and 30s.
You're just making things up now.
It's death by a thousand cuts this way, as our overall economic productivity slows.
In the current world, people have a choice to purchase a saw that took more effort to produce, if they think that it's worth it for the additional safety it provides. This new law would eliminate that choice, and those who don't think it's worth it will have to purchase the high-effort saw or go without.
As much as anything, this is a mandate on worker safety.
Seems fishy[0][1], so I checked the study:
> Overall, medical costs and work losses account for about 30 percent of these costs, or about $1.2 billion. The intangible costs associated with pain and suffering account for the remaining 70 percent of injury costs.
So the actual cost of each injury which results in hospitalization is (allegedly) $150,000, and they only get to the $500,000 figure by adding $350,000 in intangible "costs" tacked on. Totally legit.
> Because of the substantial societal costs attributable to blade-contact injuries, and the expected high rate of effectiveness of the proposed requirement in preventing blade-contact injuries, the estimated net benefits (i.e. benefits minus costs) for the market as a whole averaged $1,500 to $4,000 per saw.
There is no cost to the regulation, but rather a "net benefit", because the cost (in real dollars) of the saw-stop devices is more than offset by the savings (in intangible pain-and-suffering-dollars)! Based on this obviously, intentionally misleading "math", they include this canard in the summary:
> The Commission estimates that the proposed rule's aggregate net benefits on an annual basis could range from about $625 million to about $2,300 million.
Did you catch that? They didn't include so much as a hint that these dollar savings are, in fact, not dollars, but pain in suffering, measured in dollars!
In this life, only three things are certain: death, taxes, and being lied to by the United States federal government.
[0] https://hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb261-Most-Expen... [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Day-Laborer-Salary
You're not point out a lie, you're pointing out that there's no direct conversion between dollars and happiness.
Choosing to re-define a word (like 'dollar') to mean something other than its actual meaning is perfectly fine, so long as you take care to inform the reader whenever you employ your nonstandard definition.
If you do not take care to make this distinction, then you are putting a false idea in another person's mind, which is, by definition, deception.
If you intentionally use your bespoke definition of 'dollar' to communicate about pain and suffering, refusing to define it (as the author of the paper did in the summary), while knowing full well that the reader will assume you mean actual dollars, then you are lying.
> For many people with serious injuries, and especially disfiguring or life-altering injuries, the hospital bill is an afterthought in terms of impact.
That's a noble goal. Yet the only clear and honest way to communicate human suffering is in human terms, not in dollars and cents. Laundering that suffering into "per-unit economic benefits" adds zero clarity to the issue of suffering. It adds zero urgency. All it adds is a likelihood of misunderstanding, which is clearly the point.
> Yet the only clear and honest way to communicate human suffering is in human terms, not in dollars and cents
But do we have any better economic units to measure it other than dollars and cents? I don't think we do. So in the context of an economic discussion, it's the best that can be done.
Finally, net benefits were significantly reduced when benefits were limited to the reduction in economic losses associated with medical costs and work losses, excluding the intangible costs associated with pain and suffering
…although net benefits appear to have remained positive using a 3 percent discount rate, benefits were generally comparable to costs when a 7 percent discount rate was applied.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2017-05-12/pdf/2017-0...
If I buy one now, I pay $150 for a cheap saw without the tech.
I can of course buy a saw-stop for $1000 right now.
If I wait a year or so, this legislation would probably allow me to get a saw-stop capable saw for $450ish, but it's a gamble, because they COULD be over $1000. We don't know.
Of course, there are some things that you really do need a table saw for, but track saws are amazing and inherently safer in comparison to a table saw.
Particularly for sheet goods, I’ll never use anything but a track saw at this point.
I still don’t use that machine alone, almost 20 years later.
Mom would have been pissed.
* https://www.npr.org/2017/08/10/542474093/despite-proven-tech...
Per above, the way SawStop® works:
> Gass is a physicist and he designed a saw that could tell the difference between when it was cutting wood and the instant it started cutting a human finger or hand. The technology is beautiful in its simplicity: Wood doesn't conduct electricity, but you do. Humans are made up mostly of salty water — a great conductor.
> Gass induced a very weak electrical current onto the blade of the saw. He put an inexpensive little sensing device inside it. And if the saw nicks a finger, within 3/1000ths of a second, it fires a brake that stops the blade. Gass demonstrates this in an epic video using a hot dog in place of a finger. The blade looks like it just vanishes into the table.
It's long past time for peaceful revolution.
I anticipate a return of something that used to be more common, the upside-down circular saw bolted to a table top.
Isn’t this fine? Buy an expensive saw and only lose the blade. Either way, keep your fingers.
Sure. Sort of like methanol. As a society, we sometimes raise the (legal) floor even if it helps those at the margin. Not commenting on this policy alone. But one could make the same argument about seatbelts, airbags, flame-retardant bedwear or anything else purchased privately with lethal consequences.
We'll probably see more DIY "table saws" using circular saws. I'm sure that'll be great.
The sharp blade isn't the only thing dangerous.