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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> Table saws are mostly used by competent people and the injury rate is pretty low. When an accident does happen it only involves a single person and usually requires a few stitches.

4000 people a year suffer from being mangled by a table saw. That's losing digits or an appendage (their entire hand). (NPR had a story about this a week or two ago)

EDIT: Let's say, conservatively, each accident on average costs $100K in medical costs, disability, etc. That's $400 million/year in costs. Just a hunch, but adding the safety break seems like a clear win.

I suppose that's a perverse benefit of healthcare being so broken in America; its so expensive, its usually cheaper to fix the problem then to dump it on the healthcare system as an externality.

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> NPR had a story about this a week or two ago

...this is that story.

>Just a hunch, but adding the safety break seems like a clear win.

Human behavior is counterintuitive and maybe the situation would be worse. See excerpt:

>Data supplied by SawStop concerning the number of table saw units sold and the number of reported blade contact incidences, proves that operators are nearly five times more likely to contact the saw blade of a SawStop saw as opposed to the operator of a conventional table saw. Logic dictates that this increase in accident rate on SawStop saws is due primarily to a user’s decision to use the blade guard less frequently due to a “sense of security” in having the SawStop flesh-sensing technology on the saw. [1]

The analysis above may be flawed and/or come from a self-serving biased source. Either way, it's similar to the famous thought experiment about seat belts in cars: Volvo's generosity in giving the world seat belts without patent encumbrances didn't make the world "safer". Instead, if governments mandated a sharp iron spike in the steering wheel pointing just a few centimeters short of every driver's heart, that would actually make us safer than seatbelts.[2] It may have been tongue-in-cheek but it may also be true.

In my case when I researched saws, I seriously looked at SawStop and valued its flesh detection safety but ultimately preferred a European style sliding saw[3] that doesn't have the flesh detector. In my opinion, a sliding saw without the blade stop is "safer" overall than a SawStop. Of course, it would be nice if all saws had SawStop technology but if I had to choose among tradeoffs, I'd go with the sliding saw. The drawback is that it's more expensive.

Where there SawStop technology is more non-negotiable is the portable jobsite saw. A contractor can't transport the giant footprint of a sliding saw into a truck and then into a customer's house remodeling jobsite. Therefore, you want a portable saw with all the safety features possible.

[1] http://www.powertoolinstitute.com/pti-pages/it-table-saw-fac...

[2] http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2008/08/spikes-and-steering-w...

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=european+sliding+saw&source=...

The idea that we'd all be safer if we had a spike on our steering wheel is ludicrous. Traffic fatality rates have dropped dramatically over the past few decades, and much of that can be attributed to safety technology.

There is merit in the argument that people behave more dangerously in the presence of safety equipment. But there's no reason to think it's so extreme that it overwhelms the positive contribution of the safety technology.

> Traffic fatality rates have dropped dramatically over the past few decades, and much of that can be attributed to safety technology.

Yes that is true but it's not relevant to the idea that an alternate universe with different conditions could be safer than seat belts. If one truly engaged with the thought experiment, you'd have to try to imagine all side effects of the "ludicrous" spike. E.g. drivers no longer tailgate at 70mph -- in fact, they may drive under the speedlimit of 55mph. Instead of whizzing through the neighborhood at 40mph, they drive less than 20mph because any random squirrel running into street would trigger a reaction to hit the brakes which causes the heart to be pierced. Maybe less parents would let their kids have a drivers license at age 16 and instead make them wait until age 18 because of an iron spike pointing at their kids chest would keep them up at night. (That's 2 years less of teen driving fatalities right there.)

There may be all sorts of hard-to-imagine secondary effects that would lead to less deaths than seat belts. That's the idea of truly playing with that thought experiment. It doesn't mean we'd ever realistically implement that idea.

My point is that he hypothetical was really close to being real back before the 1970s or so. No seat belts and solid steering columns meant you'd die pretty easily. It didn't make people drive substantially more carefully.

It is posssible that the slope of the curve dramatically reverses sometime between "no seat belts and stiff steering columns" and "literal spike in the middle of the steering wheel" but that seems unlikely and there's no reason to think that would happen.

>hypothetical was really close to being real back before the 1970s or so.

Our perceptions differ then because when I drove an old Plymouth without seat belts, I didn't drive it as gingerly as driving a modern car today with a birthday cake in the front seat. A literal steel spike into the heart would make me more cautious than worrying about a birthday cake slamming into the dashboard. The Plymouth's steering column never gave me the feeling of impending death but a literal spike would. I think that sharp point on the end as a constant reminder really matters for the thought experiment.

Forgive my lack of knowledge, but what's the difference between a European sliding saw and a table saw with a sled?

In the video[1], you can see the operator walking with the sled to rip a large panel. A cross cut sled on a traditional Powermatic/Delta/SawStop doesn't have the same capacity and the operator ends up standing in front of the saw and bending his hip to push the sled into the blade. The geometry of motion is different. With a sliding saw, you're mostly out of the line of fire of kickbacks.

(The saw in the video is $40k but you can get used sliding saws for $5k which is about the price of a brand new SawStop Industrial saw.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVYUss6pJqQ&feature=youtu.be...

Seems good for a commercial application or a large volume hobbyist. Actually, not too different from what they seem to use at the hardware store for their cuts.

But, what about the small scale home hobbyist that can't dedicate a huge space to their table saw (and has a budget under $1k).

>Actually, not too different from what they seem to use at the hardware store for their cuts.

At the hardware stores I visit like Lowes & Home Depot, I see vertical panel saws which is a different beast: https://www.google.com/search?q=powermatic+panel+saw&source=...

The blade moves on tracks and the wood is stationary for cross cuts. Euro-style sliding table saw is the opposite of that.

For rip cuts, yes, the operator locks down the saw position and then pushes the wood through the blade. The issue with the vertical panel saw is that the top half of the rip cut wants to close the gap and bind the blade because of gravity. The horizontal surface of the the Euro slider doesn't have that issue.

>But, what about the small scale home hobbyist that can't dedicate a huge space to their table saw (and has a budget under $1k).

I would say make a stretch and pay $299 more to get the cheapest SawStop which is the $1299 portable jobsite saw: https://www.google.com/shopping/product/11697127655919696780

A tracksaw (Festool is a good brand) is a better alternative than most table saws, at least for cutting down sheet goods. Combine it with a chop saw and you've covered a lot of the use cases for a table saw.

So, it's a circular saw that can optionally ride on a long and straight metal track that clamps to your wood. I have rigged up things like that with 2x4s in the past.

Hadn't seen it as an actual product before, but much more convenient this way, which makes it more likely to get used. Not as advantageous as a table saw if you need to do a lot of identical cuts; but, seems like it would work well for the occasional need.

I might just replace my cheap/scary table saw with one of these the next time I build something. Thanks.

>Not as advantageous as a table saw if you need to do a lot of identical cuts;

You can do repeated identical cuts if you buy extra accessories for the tracksaw.[1] (I assume we're talking about "repeated cuts" using stops instead of constantly re-measuring with a ruler.) The parallel guides work ok but it's a lot more work to set up and dynamically adjust widths than a table saw's sliding fence.

If you like to use table saws to cut dados, rabbets, and slots for box/drawer joints, a tracksaw isn't as useful for that. Might have to get a router for those cuts in addition to the miter saw when supplementing a tracksaw.

[1] example: http://www.festoolproducts.com/festool-57000023-parallel-gui...

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