Hacker News Reader

Comment by monochromatic | Hacker News Reader

For anybody watching this who doesn’t know how to use a table saw, he’s lucky he still has all his fingers. I could barely watch that part.

View on HN

Maybe he ran out of scrap to push with :(. Also: no guard on the saw, blunt as can be and standing to the side instead of in front of the blade. Accident waiting to happen.

It gets worse around 25:45.

Why is it dangerous to stand to the side?

Standing out of the line of the blade is a good thing. Standing all the way around the side of the saw makes it harder to smoothly push through the cut.

Exactly. So the best spot to stand is to the right of the guard and to push with a stick when cutting long wood, and to the left of the blade when cutting sheets, and to make sure they are supported on the near and the far side so the blade doesn't get wedged.

My middle school wood shop teacher rolled over in his grave...

I moved around a lot as a kid, so I saw a lot of wood shop teachers. All were missing various parts of fingers.

Pretty good "mea culpa" video here from a guy that cut his hand up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fifjjacjLBE

I went to school for furniture design in Savannah. None of the teachers were missing any fingers, but plenty of guys from shops in the surrounding area were. From what I recall all of them had lost fingers from jointers and routers, not table saws.

Loosing a digit from a table saw certainly happens, but some of the other tools are less obvious and equally dangerous menaces.

Table saws seem to top the statistics[1][2] though perhaps just because they are so common.

[1] https://www.wwgoa.com/article/shop-accident-statistics-woodw...

[2] https://www.popularwoodworking.com/article/table-saw-injury-...

He's not using a SawStop? That's insane... Promotional video: https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk

I love my sawstop too, but even just using a miter gauge for the crosscut would have been a lot safer. Not to mention a push stick for the rip cut.

I rather dislike SawStop. It's a destructive system which is very expensive when triggered (whether legitimately or due to wet wood, etc) because it destroys both the stop and the blade. You need to repair your saw before you can continue working. Which is fine if people choose to buy it. But they have been pushing to make their device legally required for all saws, while fighting hard to suppress competing systems, thus removing consumer choice. In particular, they have killed the Bosch Reaxx, which is a non-destructive system that uses inexpensive gas cartridges to instantly drop the blade below the table. If it triggers, reset the blade, drop in a new gas cartridge, and get back to work. Love it. But I can't buy it. Thanks a lot, SawStop.

Sawstop is an innovative company that has some patents. Why wouldn’t they try to use them against a competitor?

They would try to use their patents offensively if their mission is to make as much money as possible.

They would encourage manufacturers to adopt some form of safety system, even if it wasn't theirs, if their goal was to keep table saw users safe.

There is some plausible deniability if the competing systems are not as good as theirs - is something better than nothing, or does it create a false sense of security, etc. - but it is pretty clear that Sawstop values profit over the safety of people who can't afford their system.

Yes, it is a company, not a nonprofit or an industry trade group.

If they were just preventing people from making SawStop knockoffs, I'd be fine with it. But they aren't. The Bosch system protects the user through a completely different mechanism. The only thing the two have in common is the sensing of contact with the blade, which is basic physics.

Worse, SawStop is trying to push legislation mandating their system. If they succeed, it would prevent any other system from being developed, even in the absence of patents.

Imagine Microsoft pushing for a law requiring all computers to run Windows. "Why wouldn't they try"? Sure, they can try. And they would be hated for it. As is SawStop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com