The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws

npr.org

335 pointswalterbell756 comments

Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today. So many people are certain it won't happen to them. Accidents happen, even to experts.

My dad had a table saw he'd been using for over a decade when he had an accident. Luckily they were able to stitch up the finger and he missed the bone, allowing the finger tip to regrow. But my family friend who's a professional carpenter isn't as lucky and is missing the tips of three fingers from a jointer.

These tools are dangerous and table saws cause upwards of 30k injures a year. Everyone's talking about how this will kill the industry. Are businesses not innovative around costs, new technology, and regulations? Seems like everything from cars to energy have all improved with regulatory pressure

And to all the people saying this will keep hobbyists away. Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?

I am not against seatbelts.

I am against government mandates in regards to seatbelts.

>Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off? If you think this is a factor in people buying or not buying a table saw, I have a bridge to sell you.

People are driving on public roads, using public first responders, being taken to the emergency room, etc.

Not wearing a seatbelt costs society time and money.

Without regard to the merits of this particular case, in general, the offering of public services shouldn't be used as a pretext to infringe on freedoms.

When public services are offered on balance, neither infringement can be considered in isolation. You have to compare the two infringements (in this case seatbelt regulation vs hospital responsibilities). Fighting each absolutely can often result in more total infringement!

The offering of public services would only be pretextual if it wasn't a genuine offer, right? So I'm not sure I'm understanding your argument.

Also public services are inherently shared services. The delay time and tax payer expense to individuals to have public employees to remove the dead bodies and broken windshields of folks who didn't wear seatbelts on the freeway is an imposition on the shared enjoyment of the freeway and on tax payer income.

Likewise even assuming every injury were treatable, every person getting their thumb reattached or whatever because of a preventable injury means a doctor's time isn't available to treat other injuries that couldn't be prevented. uninsured individuals with these injuries also increase the cost of insurance (one of multiple reasons why our medical costs in the US are higher per capita). Nor is every injury treatable to that extent.

Bet setting that aside, if you really want the freedom to cut off your own fingers accidentally, I bet all the dangerous tablesaws that currently exist will become available at garage sales or whatever very cheaply, so the frugal consumer still wins.

Arguably gives a whole new meaning to five finger discount.

People's actions have impact on the ability of public services to function. Do you think parking a semi trailer in front of the ER is a "freedom" worth defending? What kinds of deterrence or punishment is appropriate?

Your right to buy a massive truck for driving two miles to your office job without a reversing camera infringes on the right if my three year old kid to live when you back up out of a parking space and can’t see behind the massive and oddly clean truck bed.

Similarly, you aren’t the only one that gets to use your car. Assuming you have friends, they might like a lift from you and not risk their lives doing so because you choose FREEDOM! over seat belts. Or the friends of your kid that you drive to soccer practice. Their mums and dads would like the freedom to have their kids reach adulthood.

We live in a society. We’re not Doctor Manhattan floating above the surface of Mars in perfect solipsistic isolation. It’s not about the government. It’s about your friends, family, neighbours, and community… all of whom are represented by the government.

The safety of your three year old child is your responsibility. If your child is run over then it’s due to your lack of adequate supervision in the face of lack of capability of the child to avoid the accident and/or education of not to stand in the way of moving vehicles.

Where exactly would you draw the line where responsibility would lay on this hypothetical car driver if even running over a child would be someone else’s fault?

That’s a legitimate question. Does it need malicious intent otherwise it’s up to everyone to protect themselves from others and no one has a responsibility to mitigate harm?

You are aware that “first responders” send you a bill after you use their services, right? And that’s in addition to taxes and levies that fund them in the first place. I don’t mind the seat belts of course, but let’s not pretend that all of that is free of charge to begin with. Besides, first responders will likely need to be there anyway in most situations where a seatbelt would save your life.

In a lot of countries there is no bill, it's all paid for by taxes.

Which is why seatbelt mandates make sense, they reduce the cost for everyone.

Doesn't using seatbelts still reduce cost then, as it can prevent you from having to pay for first responders?

In the US that bill is typically paid for by insurance, which means that, even if your neighbor needs the ambulance, you're paying for it in the awkwardly socialized form of raised premiums or perhaps even more awkwardly removed: lower direct compensation due to employer provided health care comprising a larger share of your total comp.

Who do I send the bill to when I'm stuck in traffic for 2 hours waiting for them to mop up the ejected person?

You could argue the same about people playing sports instead of safely exercising in a gym. And what about those consuming drugs? An argument to ban all drugs. If that's the standard there are a ton of activities you will curb or ban.

We have required safety gear to participate in most sports leagues too…

These rules are sponsored by “Big Shin-guard” and everybody knows it.

By law?

Well you won’t be allowed to participate, and could be trespassed if you refuse to follow the rules… so kinda

That's not remotely "by law."

If I could start a league tomorrow where shin-guards were optional, would the police come knocking or not?

If not, there's no law. There's private rules.

The whole question under debate is whether actual laws are necessary for this situation. I fail to see how appealing to voluntary association rules have any bearing on the question.

You wouldn’t be allowed to use public fields without insurance, and no one is going to insure you if your whole thing is “no safety gear”. So you would have to use a private field.

So the practical effect is identical to seatbelts; you can absolutely operate without seatbelts/shin guards, but only in completely private facilities.

Easy compromise: if you die without a seatbelt (or helmet for a motorcycle) you are considered to have fully donated your remains for medical and scientific use, no opt-out or exceptions.

Dying from a crash doesn't mean you don't put pressure on social services. You could die at the scene (first responders and paramedics still), on the way to the hospital, upon arrival, or hours or even days after.

This does nothing to alleviate those pressures and the number of organs that are useful for transplant after a violent crash (that kills the occupant!) is basically zero.

It’s mostly head trauma is both cases, the kidneys should be fine

Unless done alone in a windowless, lead-sealed basement, almost anything we do affects others. It's too easy to take away freedom that way.

I wear seatbelts; I could understand insurance contracts not covering costs if the insured didn't wear a seatbelt; but I don't think government should mandate it. I'm not anti-regulation; I agree with the table saw safety requirement.

It's not only your life at risk.

A British road safety advert:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE

As I said, everything we do affects others. That can't be the sole basis.

I don’t think that’s why we mandated seatbelts. I don’t see any particular reason to believe either way, that seatbelts save money or cost it—if people die quickly they don’t cost the medical system much at all.

I think we mandated seatbelts because they prevent tragic deaths and cost almost nothing to manufacture. Sometimes we actually do impose on people’s liberty in the interest of preventing them from doing something stupid, and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise.

I mean, if we did look up the data and found that they actually do end up costing more, would you be in favor of banning seatbelts? I certainly wouldn’t!

Just because society chooses to voluntarily take on a responsibility does not/should not give it the power to mitigate it.

The cost to society is voluntary and self imposed.

I can't unilaterally decide to pay for you and then use that to impose whatever rules I want on you.

You're not wrong, but this is also an argument that you shouldn't ever be allowed to do anything dangerous or risky.

We allow all sorts of dangerous activities with the same problems. If we're worried about the rescue and medical costs, we should definitely ban skiing, skydiving, climbing, etc.

But why?

I remember a time before seatbelts were compulsory and very few people wore them.

> I am against government mandates in regards to seatbelts.

I’m personally for seatbelts* and against mandates for their use. Giving the government another tool to meddle in the lives of people, fining them, raising their insurance rates, and a law that’s easy to selectively enforce seems like a worse tradeoff than a few people who will decide to not wear one and avoidably come to grief as a result of their choice.

* To the point that I added them to a car of mine that didn’t originally come equipped with them. I like them and wear them regularly by choice, as should be the case.

Don't even bother trying to get a rational explanation for this.

This kind of mentality is not rational.

Are you against public health measures in general?

Let me put it this way: I once “red-teamed” the constitution, and walked away with the conclusion health justifications were the biggest vulnerability point. Imagining a constitutional APT, I’m very wary of justifications that rely on it…

What is the point of society if not to look out for one another? Protecting you in the end makes me safer too

I think it’s more about mandates from a government vs looking out for each other.

The original fear of mandating seatbelts was it becoming a slippery slope, and the government continuing to mandate other aspects of citizens lives.

A similar fear happened when drunk driving was outlawed, but obviously its implications in harming others was a good justification for it.

With seatbelts, it’s less harm on others if I don’t wear it, more so a strain on society as a whole (first responders, more serious medical attention)

In general though I agree that governments shouldn’t be mandating what individuals can do to themselves. The argument lies in how much those actions effect others in a tertiary sense (doing drugs only effects me, but if I go into a coma that’s a strain on society and a blurry line. If become violent because of those drugs, it’s more concrete)

Meanwhile alcohol is legal, and is involved in more murders and domestic violence than any other substance.

Safety has 100% been a factor in many of my tool purchases, mistakes happen, especially to amateurs, and most people would rather not lose fingers to a hobby.

The federal government's responsibilities is literally to collect taxes to maintain a standing army, and to coordinate cross-state issues that the states themselves for some reason aren't able to regulate themselves. That's what its scope is supposed to be. Are states not able to pass the table saw regulations they feel is appropriate for their citizens? I feel like they are. Why does the federal government need to step in and mandate .. table saw laws for our states? For me it's just another small step in the long line of steps towards having one overarching federal government that controls everything, like other countries have, which the US is not supposed to have.

Unfortunately FDR's justices overturned that aspect of the constitution long ago.

I've never understood this nonsensical fear of federal oversight. Didn't we learn federalism doesn't work when the states fought each other over pandemic supplies. I recall some saying, this stuff is ours, get your own. And why does it make sense for some backwater state to decide to dumb down their residents with a crap education system. Isn't that a race to the bottom if a state is left alone to elect inferior education, which is a real issue in the American South? Some states will choose to be dominant intellectually and others will choose conspiracies as history. That makes no sense to me at all. I also recall a certain French prime minister say it gave him great comfort to know each child in France was learning poetry.

> Didn't we learn federalism doesn't work when the states fought each other over pandemic supplies.

The US learned between 1776 and 1789, under the Articles of Confederation. That's why they made a new constitution with a stronger centeral government.

And yet still with limited powers. (Though I have to admit that table saws probably fall under interstate commerce, certainly more so than the subject of other cases that were decided to be: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich )

It is hard to say if something works or not without defining a goal.

Federalism would probably work fine for the country in general. Lots of human suffering would occur in states that elect dumbasses, but the high-productivity parts of the country would continue along just fine, and probably actually benefit without the need to keep sending money.

In some case, voters might change their tune as they actually have to face the consequences of electing unhinged ideologues.

But, it would also involve lots of pain and suffering falling on vulnerable people, so it isn’t worth it.

> I am against government mandates in regards to seatbelts.

No one cares, you don't have a good enough reason. It's ok to have some kinds of mandates. I don't want my tax dollars going to pay EMS and police to shovel your remains off the highway because you wanted to drive like an idiot.

This has got to be the absolute worst argument in favor of seatbelts, and will only ever amount to preaching to the authoritarian choir. For everyone else your argument actually serves to undermine support for public services like first responders - if the societal cost of such services includes the legislating of personal behavior simply to keep the financial cost of said services down, perhaps the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

I really don't care, frankly. I'm just tired of grown adults stamping their feet and yelling "Idawanna!"

Well the harder you push your personal choices as a prescriptive agenda, the more people are going to stamp their feet and yell "Idawanna!". There are plenty of things like this that seriously affect other people (eg that whole mask thing), so I'd recommend spending your credibility on those rather than burning it on things with a tiny blast radius.

Most professional cabinetmaker shops are terribly mismanaged and incredibly behind the times. The industry is consolidating as the owners are aging out. Mostly they’re just straight up closing shop because they have no succession plan, terrible workplace habits, and mismanaged finances. The proposed regulation will “harm” this type of shop but any cabinetmaking business that _will_ exist in ~10 years already uses saws with these types of safety features (and equivalently “safe” practices when it comes to things like ventilating their finishing area.)

It's really not analogous to seatbelts.

It's really simple to use a table saw safely: don't ever get physically close enough (by far!) for the spinning blade to cut you, or stand where it can fling something at you.

Then even if there's no riving knife and blade guard it's not going to ruin your day.

This means that you'll sometimes need to build a small jig to push wood into the saw, but usually you can just use a long stick to push the wood into it.

Every single table saw accident video you'll see is people who've clearly become way too complacent with them, or are trying to save themselves a few minutes of setup time.

They're holding it wrong?

It's simple to use a car safely too. Don't ever speed, be aware of your surroundings at all times, and practice defensive driving.

In theory.

As someone who has used a table saw, you simply cannot account for every variable factored in to having a 10" piece of sharpened carbide steel spinning at 5,000 RPMs and shoving a piece of probably inconsistently structured building materials through it, many, many, many times to accomplish a job. Maybe the sawmill left a nail in there for you: shit happens.

In the immortal words of Jean Luc Picard: It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That's why we build things with safety features: to manage those risks.

No it's not. Even if you're the best defensive driver in the world a seatbelt might still save you if someone plows into you while you're stopped at a red light.

But again, it's your life, your body, your choice.

You can make an argument against seatbelts on that basis, but it's not the one I'm making here.

I think seatbelts should be mandatory, but don't think it's sensible to mandate complex and expensive technical solutions for table saws, when safe work practices can also mitigate them entirely.

Safe work practices require humans to follow through on using them. Safety features don't.

Not if you’re sat in the back and in a crash fly forward and kill the person in front of you.

Libertarians often have this problem where their ideas that work just fine in a perfectly friction-less plane with zero deviance have issues when encountering reality. The instances are too numerous to name.

Libertarianism, like any other such utopic ideology, has this problem. The ideology requires disregarding reality and assuming the frictionless plane, because otherwise it just wouldn't work properly.

When ideals and reality go against each other, reality has a nasty habit of winning. And honestly, if seatbelts and table saws that don't cut your fingers off are such an authoritarian affront to one's freedom and personal responsibility, then so be it.

Civil disobedience is always an option to those who absolutely hate this idea, but then they should take their "personal responsibility" and "bodily autonomy" and not be shocked if they have to face the consequences.

In a private car, do I really need a law to cover that case? On public transport (a place where such mandates generally do not exist), I could see the argument because it’s standardizing behavior amongst strangers.

But in my own car, I have no problem telling people to buckle up or GTFO (or not, by my own choice). If I allow them to ride unbuckled, I’m voluntarily taking the risk one will try to go through the windshield via my noggin.

A good proportion of people will take the chance rather than get into a long debate with a libertarian bore.

While I agree with your premise, mistakes still happen.

I do all of the things you mentioned, plus I use pushers or a crosscut sled whenever possible. It should be impossible for me to make contact, but it only takes a split second of stupidity or inattention to mess up

Just accept it, smile, nod, and deny the existence of the router, lathe, bandsaw, angle grinder with a circular blade on it etc. Chainsaws are probably next up against the wall though since they're pretty well represented in low-effort horror media

I think there are lots of people who would like to see this technology expanded. The issues going back more than a decade has been over the licensing of the patents. SawStop spent a lot of years aggressively suing over its IP and/or pushing for this legislation so that they could have regulatory capture. That's the problem, not the concept of safety. Maybe things have changed by now and we'll be able to see greater innovation in this space.

Weren’t the seatbelt and insulin famously given away? The people who own Sawstop IP are greedy people who have the blood, lost appendages, and deaths of a nearly countless number of people on their greedy shoulders. Absolutely shameless behavior.

I won’t sit here and say I have the solution; but this status quo is undeniably bad. Unchecked capitalism like this makes want me to vomit. Think of how many people would be living a better life if every table saw had this technology mandated by law for the past decade. Really think about it.

It's certainly an interesting problem to examine... my understanding was always that patents were designed to foster innovation by giving an inventor a way to make money on their IP so long as they gave the idea to the world. Somewhere along the way that got weaponized. So is the solution that we need to reform patents, or do we need some other way to both allow innovators to make money but in a way that doesn't exploit other parties trying to expand the footprint of a good idea? It's complicated.

This is a bizarre take because if not for SawStop, many, many more people would have lost blood, appendages, and lives to conventional table saws. In fact, SawStop the company only exists because 20 years ago every table saw manufacturer refused to license the technology from the inventor. None of them wanted it at any price because it would increase the cost of their saws and reduce their profits.

SS was not the only company to come up with blade sensing technology...

> None of them wanted it at any price

Do we actually know this? Or could the license terms have just been too high?

The analysis I read listed various reasons why existing manufacturers wouldn’t adopt the technology (sorry, I can’t find the link). Increased cost per saw was one, but adopting the technology would also create two product lines: “safe” saws and “unsafe” saws. So any manufacturer who adopted the tech partially would have to argue that half of their product lines were unsafe. Even if the license costs were zero, these problems would exist.

So it’s better that all products are unsafe lol. I get it from a liability pov but sucks for customers

Many more people _who have the money to invest in a premium saw_ have saved their appendages. People who can’t afford the saw have continued to lose them. That’s part of the issue here.

Many who argue for unchecked market systems also dispute the validity of IP, because it is viewed as a destructive intervention from the state rather than a market system.

https://www.stephankinsella.com/own-ideas/

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah but in 2017 TTS (the parent company of Festool) acquired SawStop.

https://www.sawstop.com/news/sawstop-to-be-acquired-by-tts-t...

TTS is a magnitude bigger than SawStop and they might have different ideas than a narrow minded patent attorney.

Sure, but who exactly did they send to congress to make the case? Our good friend, Steve Gass, Esq.

TTS owns the shop but Gass clearly still has influence here.

>a narrow minded patent attorney.

He's got a PhD in Physics, and invented the core Stop Saw product after dabbling in woodworking as a hobby for many years.

Call him anything, but narrow minded isn't one of the descriptors that applies.

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, he has a PhD in physics as well as being a practicing patent attorney, a skill he put to use over and over in the past 20 years. We don’t have to guess how this org will behave, we have plenty of history upon which to judge their sincerity.

If they want to give the patents (note the plural there) for the benefit of mankind, they can do so. They are not doing so.

Ok but why would he just “give” them? Patents can cost like $20k a pop to prosecute.

Because he's pushing to have the technology covered by his remaining patents to be required by law. Do you think this is OK?

No, but I don’t think he should be forced to give them away for free either. That’s literally an unconstitutional “taking”

How, if he is the one pushing for them?

Insightful quote:

> The fundamental question came down to economics. Almost a societal economic structure question. The CPSC says table saws result in about $4B in damage annually. The market for table saws is about $200-400M. This is a product that does almost 10x in damage as the market size. There's a disconnect—these costs are borne by individuals, the medical system, workers comp—and not paid by the power tools company. Because of that, there’s not that much incentive to improve the safety of these tools. Societally if there was an opportunity to spend $5 to save $10, we’d want to do that. But in this chain there's a break in people that can make those changes and people that are affected, so it’s not done.

Yes, there's an argument that society should be willing to pay up to the amount of the damage to prevent it. It's okay as far as it goes. However, that's equivalent to saying that if a safety improvement costs $1 to manufacture and saves $10 in damage, then the supplier should get the entire profit ($9). Although, he's just asking for $5. How generous!

This is a form of value-based pricing - figure out how much the customer values a thing and use that to persuade them to pay a higher price. Salespeople really like value-based pricing arguments.

Some safety measures are cheap, and suppliers can be bargained down. In the presence of robust competition, they could be bargained down to near the the cost of goods. But patents can result in a monopoly, along with monopoly pricing.

How much should you pay for tires? How about brakes? A vaccine?

In this case, I think he deserves to get rich from coming up with the idea, but there's still a lot of room for negotiation about how rich.

That's clearly a false analysis - the size of a commodity market is determined as much by the equilibrium cost of making the goods as it is by the demand side. The cost of banning an inexpensive but essential part of your car would be far greater than the total number of dollars changing hands every year to purchase them.

It's not false, it's just ignoring the additional dimensions. In the same way that the societal cost of banning cars would be much higher than the value of the car (because cars enable commuting, leisure, cargo transport etc), the societal value of table saws in creating furniture, houses, whatever is much higher than the retail price of the table saw.

The Federal government should start paying companies like this a hefty lump sum and take the patents by eminent domain. Same for drug patents.

> Federal government should start paying companies like this a hefty lump sum and take the patents by eminent domain

This means seizing the ruling class gets to seize anyone's inventions. Nobody writing these rules intends that. But while we can forgive the first dozen attempts out of naivety and, later, stupidity, I'm not sure how we similarly excuse modern performances.

Patent expiration into the public domain is already “the ruling class seizing inventions” in the same sense (in the sense that it isn’t — in both cases, the goal is to make nobody profit from the patent any longer; not to transfer the profits to the government.)

Patents only exist as a concept, as a way to construct an equitable compensation for invention, to incentivize invention, that allows the market to determine what the total compensation over the legal lifetime of the patent should be, by licensing it or refusing to at given prices.

Insofar as an equitable compensation / patent “value” can be determined analytically on a one-off basis, you don’t need the patent system; the government can just buy out at that price, and the same goal will have been achieved.

> Insofar as an equitable compensation / patent “value” can be determined analytically on a one-off basis, you don’t need the patent system; the government can just buy out at that price, and the same goal will have been achieved.

Exactly. Ideally we wouldn't have patents, but would have a "Star Trek" luxury space communism economy. Until then, if an invention proves to be highly beneficial to society after a few years, I would entirely support governments buying out patents early. In the end, information is a public good (non-rival, non-excludable), so let's start treating it that way.

Theoretically I agree completely. However in practice, analytically figuring out a dollar amount that isn't over or under paying seems nearly impossible. I fear that the gov would be buying out a lot of useless patents. That would also create an even bigger incentive to get BS patents through, because you don't even have to prove the value in the market, you just gotta convince a bureaucrat that it could be beneficial to humanity.

Why do you expect this? This doesn't happen with existing uses of eminent domain — lobbyist landholders aren't going around convincing the government to buy out useless land to their profit.

Eminent domain on real estate is only used as a last resort — it's invoked to buy out real estate where the government has some pre-existing plan that requires the use of the land; and there's no reasonable alternative to using that specific land; but the owner of the land doesn't want to sell it to them on the open market for a reasonable price (i.e. the price that they'd charge an arbitrary private buyer.)

I would assume eminent domain on patents would be the same: it would only be used if the government has a top-down plan that works out to require licensing a specific patent; with no reasonable alternative; but the patent owner is being obstructionist to licensing the patent for a reasonable price.

If we are only talking about patents for whom

> it would only be used if the government has a top-down plan that works out to require licensing a specific patent; with no reasonable alternative; but the patent owner is being obstructionist to licensing the patent for a reasonable price.

Then I fully agree. In your previous comment where you said "you don’t need the patent system;" that threw me off thinking you were basically talking about every patent. Where you said "insofar" at the beginning of the sentence, I interpreted that to mean essentialy "since" or "because" but I see what your original intent was now, and I think we are in complete agreement.

The ruling class of the United States, by and large, isn't a part of government (elected or civil service) and seeks a government that is smaller, weaker, and more dysfunctional rather than the reverse.

Or yea know get rid of patents and how broken they are, especially while our enemies are ignoring them anyway.

That’s a terrible analysis.

I assume the “cost” were injuries added up through remaining lifespan through lost work, etc.

But you can’t do a cost-benefit analysis without counting benefits.

So let’s add up all the benefits and value created by table saws.

True, it's not apples to apples to extrapolate downstream costs of accidents while not doing the same for the benefits. All manner of housing and construction would be much more expensive and slow without ubiquitous affordable on-site powered saws - not just reducing everyone's spending power, but also median quality of life with everyone's daily spaces severely limited by design/build potential.

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

That's also not what the person you're responding to was arguing.

Not the person you replied to, but reading the line below in the GP comment, I assumed the founder was exclusively a patent attorney with no product-relevant background. The GP certainly didn’t argue that, as you said, and perhaps I was alone in my confusion but characterizing someone as a “patent attorney” while leaving out relevant academic qualifications seems unclear, at best.

> SawStop was started by patent attorney Steve Gass

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

Nitpick: It doesn't destroy your blade. You just have to get it resharpened and possibly get some new teeth brazed on.

Otherwise, yeah i agree its annoying to pop the break on a wet piece of wood or a missed nail.

> You just have to get it resharpened and possibly get some new teeth brazed on.

This looks quite destructive to the teeth that contact the stop:

https://youtu.be/Ibp2Gy2CFrY?si=Pa98Vey2oE0Atx1e&t=7

I can't imagine it will ever be cost-effective the labor of repairing a blade after that instead of just getting a new one.

When I ran a woodshop we would get our blades resharpened for about $30 and new teeth were a few dollars each. Its absolutely worth it when your blades are $100+

I wouldn't re-use a blade that SawStop triggered on. I assume the blade itself will go out of true based on the forces. It's a lot more damage than a few teeth.

Professional sharpeners have tools for testing blade conditions. We had a guy who would drop by the shop once every couple months and pickup all our used blades to service.

This is really standard fare with professional carpentry. I don't understand why so many people here are in shock at the concept of blade servicing.

> This is really standard fare with professional carpentry. I don't understand why so many people here are in shock at the concept of blade servicing.

For me, I'm just surprised that the economics of it can work. I'd imagine such a specialist is not going to charge less than a $100/hr so I wouldn't have expected the cost of repair to make sense. But interesting that it does!

I think they make their money in the scale. They have a pickup guy who drives all over Los Angeles to pick up blades from all their customers. We had him come in every 2 months. He would return a batch of sharpened blades and take whatever blades were dull.

Definitely an old school style of business.

Have you had a SawStop? It really doesn’t seem like it, because if you did you wouldn’t be so stuck on this line of argument.

Just getting saw blade out of the stop is a major effort with a vice and engineers hammer. The way it brakes is an extremely violent process.

It definitely warps the blades in weird ways, and fixing them to actually be true is unlikely to be economic.

Yes I have the industrial grade Sawstop. I ran a professional carpentry business for years using it as our main saw. I probably bought it around 2012 or 2013, I can't remember exactly.

I don't know what to tell you. I ran a professional shop, I'm not a hobbyist. I couldn't tell you how many feet of lumber I've shoved through my table saw. I've never personally had the Sawstop pop due to a safety issue, but every single time it happened in the shop I was able to remove the blade and get it serviced for around $30-40 depending on how many teeth were lost. Most of my saw blades are greater then $100 new so this cost is worth it.

The workshop I used had a dozen plus false pops due to people cutting wet wood or similar issues. None of the blades were worth saving due to significant warping or damage.

I guess we’re just living in different worlds.

What brand of blades did you use? Most of mine were Forrest or Tenryu. The Forrest blades are very heavy.

This was a decade ago, and a workshop environment with a wide variety of blades.

So random folks, and random blades.

Ha. I've owned a SS for five years and used several of their high end cabinet saws in other shops. No one is going to bother brazing on new teeth on a saw blade. They'll just buy a new blade...

I've done it plenty of times. New teeth cost a few bucks when you get your blade resharpened.

When you have blades high cost blades ($100+) its absolutely worth it to get them resharpened and teeth replaced.

I have wrecked blades on my SawStop and while they likely could have this done, the easiest path is buy a new blade.

It really depends on the cost of the blade.

Are you saying you've possibly saved multiple fingers or serious injuries then?

In these cases no. It was stupidity of a different kind on my part, but never where I was in danger. For example I added a flexible ruler to one of my jigs without thinking about the fact that it was metal. The ruler (which I happened to be touching at the other end) touched the blade, so in essence the saw thought I was touching the blade.

Prior to owning the SawStop though I have had some close calls that would have been much less painful and dangerous had I been using a SawStop.

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

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

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

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

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

Came here for this.

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

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

https://youtu.be/RFsuemFKYjM

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

> Sawstop already offered their key patent for free

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

This is so naive to believe them.

According to a recent Stumpy Nubs video, Saw Stop isn't the villain they've been made out to be (or at least has changed their tune substantially).

TLDR; They've offered not to defend their patent (or whatever the patent mumbo jumbo is) if the legislation goes through.

Stumpy Nubs on the subject: https://youtu.be/nxKkuDduYLk?si=c0GchB2hc3g0OtG4

The recent CPSC hearing where many of the revelations came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyJGE2Vyid0&t=0s

I think they sold out to a European firm a few years ago - I stopped paying attention to this space a few years ago, so like I said in my OP - could be the playing field has changed, and perhaps the current owner of this IP is in a different place.

Stumpy Nubs is a fine woodworker and a great YouTuber, but he, unlike the CEO of SawStop, is not a patent attorney. Over and over in his video he glosses over serious problems with the Saw Stop proposal and presumes goodwill on behalf of SawStop.

That goodwill is not warranted, nothing about Glass' or SawStop's behavior suggests that they're doing anything other than trying to force people to license their product by way of regulation. If they want to claim they are giving the license away, then do the whole patent portfolio (required for a functioning system), not just one of them.

They've already sued their competitors to keep similar products off of the market and there is zero reason for us, the regulators, or the competition to trust this organization.

>Stumpy Nubs is a fine woodworker and a great YouTuber, but he, unlike the CEO of SawStop, is not a patent attorney.

Gass also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product.

>If they want to claim they are giving the license away, then do the whole patent portfolio (required for a functioning system), not just one of them.

They want to stay in business. If they give away all of the intellectual property of their entire system, it's likely that they wouldn't be able to for very long.

If they want to require this technology for every device on the market they need to allow other manufacturers to compete in producing it - there is likely a middle ground where only some of their patents would need to be relinquished for competitors to build a product that uses a different specific method but SawStop has an awful lot of patents and has been incredibly litigious in a bad faith manner before.

> in a bad faith manner before.

In a bath faith manner? What's bad faith about it? Enforcing a patent you own isn't bad faith. That's the point of a patent.

This question itself has all the hallmarks of bad faith.

Maybe it's not, but it exhibits all the qualities, so...

You can't claim to desire safety for all while preventing anyone else from increasing safety.

The Bosch system was totally different, sounds superior on several fronts, and SS were only able to stop it by dint of technicalities and plain flaws in the US patent and legal system that allows frankly absurd arguments to win, and most pointedly, SS were willing to do exactly that. Not because Bosch stole anything from them, not because Bosch were sonehow harming users by doing the SS system but not as well as official SS, not because of any justifiable reason except that they physically could.

There is no way to justify SS actions.

Arguing that your technology should be required by law, while offering a performative release of one patent (which is absolutely not enough to cover a working implementation), is the dictionary definition of bad faith. You don't have to go any further than the linked article for evidence of how this guy has acted throughout his entire career.

You're arguing in a circle.

"The reason why he shouldn't be trusted here is because he's done things in bad faith in the past"

"What has he done in bad faith in the past"

Your assertion "He's doing so in bad faith right there".

You can't also attempt to conclude your antecedent from your consequent.

>Gass also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product.

So what? That doesn't make him NOT an attorney. There's nothing that says a PhD and product inventor can't ALSO be a engaged in a scheme to have their own patent encumbered invention mandated by law.

> That's the problem, not the concept of safety.

Per the article, SawStop offered to 'open source' (as we'd say) the patent. Also, in TFA, end users objected to the regulation.

"These tools are dangerous and table saws cause upwards of 30k injures a year."

Right. I hate the damn things and they've always scared the shit out of me whenever I use them. I've not been seriously injured yet but I've come damn close.

Fortunately, I don't have one at present as someone stole my one during a factory move. I view this as good fortune for eventually I'll have to replace it and I'll do so with one with SawStop-like safety features.

I cannot understand what all the fuss and objections are about, yes SawStop-type saws are more expensive but their cost simply pales into insignificace the moment one's fingers go walkabout.

People are mad to say one can always use table saws safely. That may be the case for 99.99% of the time but it's the unexpected rare event that bites even the most seasoned professionals.

Table saws and their related brethren table routers are by design intrinsically unsafe, and this ought to be damn obvious to both Blind Freddy and the Village Idiot.

Frankly there's something perverse about those who consider table saws safe to use, alternatively they've misguided bravado and or they lack common sense.

Redesigning them to be intrinsically save just makes common sense, and in the long run will cost society much less (as amputations are enormously expensive per capita and it all adds up).

Edit: to those down-voters, I've a longtime friend who is one of the most meticulous and careful workers that I know (much more so than I am). Moreover, that planned thinking extends to the work he turns out, it's nothing but the finest quality.

He's been around power tools all his life and I first observed him using table saws and routers over 40 years ago. That said, about four years ago he was seriously injured when using a table router. Injuries to his hand were so severe that he has lost almost all of the dexterity in his hand, even now after many operations and ongoing professional physiotherapy, he has only regained partial use of his hand.

Perhaps the skeptics need to meet people like him and just see the negative impact such injuries have had on their lives.

There’s a certain sort of delusional self-identified genius that loves the idea of there being something that most people can’t do safely, that they can, because they simply know to be safe, whereas these other idiots do not. It’s like if you took the “C is safe, humans are not!” crowd and gave them something that caused amputations instead of buffer overflows.

Well, it seems there's both types here in equal numbers. Since I posed my comment the votes have risen and fallen many times, it's now back to unity again or close to it.

Usually I don't bother to note votes until logging in agsin which can be days later but the subject seemed somewhat controversial so I watched them (it's a shame HN only provides a summary, so if say I see two points then I've no idea if only one person voted or if it were twenty).

I thought what I said was pretty mild so I'm a bit surprised at the reaction. It's a shame most down-voters don't bother to say what they consider is wrong with one's arguments.

I'm shocked that so many people like yourself are shocked about resistance to safety devices. Regardless of how I feel about it, I can hear the objections the moment I read the article title:

"It's never hurt me"

"I accept the risk"

"It will double the price of a saw"

"I won't see any of these 'society savings', only the sawmakers will see more money"

Yeah, maybe a public ad campaign would help.

It depends what the item is. Its intrinsic dangers and whether they're obvious or not to (a), the untrained and unskilled; (b), novices with little training and experience; (c), trained users but who are irregular uses and get out of practice; (d), trained users with regular/daily experience, (e), specialist users without experience or with little regular experience who take particular care in dangerous one-off situations; (f) specialist users who've regular/daily experience of dangerous situations; (g), any or all of the above under specialist/controlled conditions or in special environments and (h) any or of the above in emergency situations—who is selected and or authorized to take charge under under adverse/dangerous situations.

That list might seem like a lot of twaddle, but I'll illustrate with a few examples. Case (e) may involve an industrial chemist who is put in the unusual situation of having to deal with a dangerous, toxic and explosive chemical that's not normally found in common use—for example, pentaborane which comes to mind because it's a HN news item today. He knows what it is and its dangers but he hasn't dealt with it before so he goes to inordinate lengths to handle it safely. On the other hand, case (f) is a Similarly trained chemist with special training in the handling of pentaborane and he applies a regulated set of procedures to handle the substance.

Table saws are both intrinsically unsafe and have high impact when things go wrong which is borne out by statistics no matter the jurisdiction, country etc. Unfortunately, like motor bikes, they've been historically grandfathered into common use from an era when safety was hardly considered important.

Had motorbikes been suddenly invented today they wouldn't be allowed on public roadways. Same goes for table saws, they can be bought freely and anyone can use them without any training whatsoever. If invented today one would have to be trained and or licensed to use them.

We've seen how regulations change over time and how they are becoming tighter every day just about everywhere. When I was a kid, where I live anyone could buy fireworks including yours truly at the age of six. Now fireworks have been banned altogether here, not even adults such as I am who've (a) been trained in chemistry and (b) had military training and who was trained in handling things much more dangerous than fireworks for domestic consumption can do so either. I find this both irritating and irksome and an over intrusion of the nanny state into my affairs.

I'd suggest that those who voted down my original post also felt this way when they read my post, and I don't blame them one bit. The trouble is multifold, the State regulates, say fireworks after irresponsible use and after kids have become blinded. Regulations are introduced more from emotional reasons than based on actual harm to large numbers of people. The law now makes no exception for experience, nor does it allow exceptions for those with demonstrable experience (the only exception here is those with special training for public displays such as for new year's eve).

We've seen this progressive tightening of regulations in just about every country on the planet and in every field of endeavor—from drug regulations, to vehicle licenses, to firearm licenses and regulations, to restrictions on purchasing what the State perceives to be dangerous chemicals (when I was a kid local pharmacists sold thallium and strychnine for rat poison to anyone but they've long since been banned (I'd doubt if these highly toxic chemicals can still be purchased anywhere in the Western world).

The trouble is that laws and regulations are horribly uneven and often they extend into overregulation.

Now look at the facts: both thallium and strychnine were banned in many places decades ago because of a small number of accidental poisonings and an even much smaller number of deliberate ones. On the other hand, table saws—according to statistics—have maimed and ruined the lives of orders of magnitude more people than those poisons have ever done but it's only now that we are just trying to make them safer.

Unlike motor vehicles and forklifts, there's still no talk of training people before they can use table saws—nor is there any talk of requiring users to be licensed to use them.

When looked at objectively and in comparison with similar regulations elsewhere, this tightening of regulations in respect of table saws really isn't that unreasonable, and by other comparable standards it's long overdue.

After two close calls I went ahead and bought a SawStop knowing it would be cheaper than an emergency room visit.

I recommend the movie "Walk the Line" for folks on the fence. Entertaining and might learn a thing or two.

A seatbelt is a small fraction of the total cost of a car. I wouldn't be surprised if a table saw with this feature is 10x the cost of one without it or more. It adds a ton of complexity to a fairly simple tool.

It's closer to 2x the cost but that's a fairly fat margin since the Sawstop models ate the whole upper end. With a competitor they could probably get down to 1.5x.

I have good news for you and your fingers. This will not increase the price of your next table saw by 10x.

At scale the cost will come down. The actual tech is remarkably simple (which is a compliment to the design and engineering). The saw blade is wired up in such a way that it becomes a capactive touch sensor. When tripped a sacrifical brake is blasted into the blade that causes it stop and drop into the table.

It isn't going to cost 10x.

https://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/the-technology/

It's expensive because of the patent holders, not the technical complexity.

When the government mandates it there's no reason not to increase the price, just like how college tuitions rose exponentially when the government guaranteed the loans.

The modules are expensive, and it destroys the blade, which can be very expensive when using real industrial ones meant to be resharpened.

Personally I've had a very poor experience using a sawstop, as well as witnessing it cause younger guys to get overly confident

There's also the knee-jerk anti-reguation crowd. Consider this comment from the article:

"If it's mandated, you're going to have people hanging on to their old saws forever," Juntunen says. "And, you know, that's when I'd say there will be more injuries on an old saw."

Does the mandate in any way change the functionality of a new saw (other than for cutting flesh)?

It does make ripping pressure treated wood a little dicey. Whenever I have to cut wood that is wet I will disable the flesh detection feature temporarily. That's a minor inconvenience though. I will never go back to a saw without the feature.

I've always thought seatbelts should be mandatory on motorcycles. Ain't had one in ages, but I still wear my helmet wherever I go. Never can have too many laws. Authority always knows best.

I luv u hackernews. Long live the eggheads!

Future Headline: Man sent to glorious and compassionate American prison for not using riving knife gets shanked to death with one days before parole.

Future Hackernews Post with 10k upvotes and gushing comments: How the judicial system is creating strong Americans and healing millions - and how silicon valley has assisted

If you had a legitimate point to make you wouldn’t resort to blatantly and intentionally absurd faux-analogies that don’t even pretend to seek to pose a fair comparison. This is childish. Though looking at your profile you seem to wear being unlikeable and hostile as some sort of badge of pride.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait and otherwise breaking the site guidelines?

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

I started taking a beginner woodworking class which actually had a bit of a waitlist to it. After the first day (all safety), I decided it wasn't worth it for just a minor hobby. Improved safety gear may have changed my mind.

I would recommend learning only one new tool at a time, rather than a suite of tools. It will be less onerous and scary learning the safety practices, and you will be far less likely to slip up. (Plus, it's more affordable to only buy a new tool as you need it.)

Also, some tools are a whole lot safer than others. Tools that carry a risk of flinging your project (such as table saws and lathes) are risky, but a lot of other tools (such as jig saws and tracks saws) are very unlikely to cause serious injury.

And, of course, you can do without power tools altogether. People have used hand tools exclusively for the vast majority of the history of woodworking, and many people today still primarily use hand tools because they are more precise, safer, and often easier to use (albeit slower).

Maybe a little safer, but you can do plenty of damage with hand tools. I haven't had any serious injuries with power tools or hand tools (knock on wood), but I have knicked myself pretty good with a chisel.

True, a chisel or a gouge can get you pretty good. I think you are still far less likely to suffer a table-saw-level injury, however.

I would recommend getting started with hand (non-power) tools. You can still make amazing things (see Paul Sellers) at a much lower risk profile.

The government is passing a law that says only company x make saws, due to various patents making it unrealistic to make your own design. They’re outlawing competition. Unless every relevant patent is opened up, this is extreme regulatory capture and is going to be a price gouging patent licensing circus after it passes

Yeah this needs to be met with invalidation of patents. If the government mandates something, it has to be possible without patent infringement.

Commonly there would be a requirement to license the patent, rather than striking it down for the crime of being indispensable.

If they applied FRAND requirements to it, then I could see that working. So long as it's just a license for the patent holder to extort other companies I can't support it at all.

Give SawStop $10B and seize the patents under eminent domain.

Jesus that would certainly kill any future innovation.

“Hey if your product is so good that absolutely everyone needs to have it we’ll make sure you get no financial reward for developing it”

Yeah this guy gets it.

Regardless of your stance on whether the government should regulate x or y, it's important to understand that the people driving this law do not care about you or your fingers. This is rent seeking; someone who makes safe saws wants to sell more of their saws, and they compete with people who sell less safe saws. They are using the legal system to benefit their own bottom line.

After the real goal is established, reasons like "think of the children" or "think of the fingers" can be fabricated.

But what do the goals matter? The only relevant question I can see is 'are the fingers worth the rent?'

To that point, a regulation requiring "if and only if" per unit licensing is available at (much) less than the worth of the fingers should be a no brainier.

Given the relatively small market share that SawStop enjoys, you can only assume that most people feel like the fingers aren't really worth the rent.

It's not really their choice to make though. (trivially, see seatbelts, smoking, airline regulations, ...).

Should it be? Maybe, but that's a discussion out of scope from 'is it in society's interest to mandate inclusion of sawstop's technology, or it's equivalent?'.

As of right now, it's 100% their choice to make. Next week, who knows?

A lot of people simply can’t afford their saws though.

>it's important to understand that the people driving this law do not care about you or your fingers

People and consumer advocates can feasibly have motives other than greed.

Seatbelts is a good example: Volvo let any one use 3 point seatbelts so this could be standardised.

Right in the article, it says most patents are now expired and for the final key patent that expires in 2033, the owner -- SawStop's corp parent -- has offered to donate it to the public if this rule passes.

edit: if you believe different, please share. But per this article, patents do not seem to be a reason to avoid this tech. And the SawStop v1 was introduced in 2004, so it stands to reason we can now produce patent-free equivalent tech to the 2004 machine.

Here is a link to Gass' patent portfolio:

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/stephen-f-gass

Notice that the vast majority of his patents have to do with various aspects of "active injury mitigation technology", primarily related to saws, and that the most recent one was filed in August 2021. The only patent being offered up is the original--- Patent 9,724,840--- which basically only releases a very specific, early implementation of the safety system that has since undergone 20 years of additional patent activity.

Thanks for the link. Does any of this block competitors from selling a 2004-equivalent table saw with brake unencumbered by patents? I don't believe it can.

Yes it can.

Sawstop, like a lot of other companies, abuse the patent process by filing multiple continuations with the exact same specification. They then let the patent office take its time granting some of them, and claim a 'patent term extension' due to the patent office delays.

So if they filed in 2001, but one of their patents wasn't granted for over 14 years due to the patent office taking 10 years in total to respond to the many arguments over patentability, it may expire in 2031. This seems absurd, but is totally legal. Being run by a patent attorney means they (a) are ninja level at drawing these arguments out and constantly filing appeals to continue examination after a denial by a patent examiner and (b) it doesn't cost them much to do so.

I'm simplifying and my numbers aren't exact, but this abuse is the problem.

Thank you! This is the first answer that isn't incoherent blathering about patents bad.

Per wikipedia, it seems those continuation patents all expire in 2026 at the latest.

They have offered to give away the key patent... I get the sense people aren't reading the story here.

>due to various patents making it unrealistic to make your own design

Is it unrealistic, or are the companies simply not pursuing that market because it would harm their existing lines of product?

>Unless every relevant patent is opened up, this is extreme regulatory capture and is going to be a price gouging patent licensing circus after it passes

Personally, I'm fine with that.

As per the article, an entry-level SawStop retails for $899.

There's not excuse why this kind of tech isn't in every saw. The low cost of existing saws is a negative externality whose cost (cut off fingers) is borne by the society (insurance companies, healthcare, and government).

I don't think seatbelts are an honest comparison, nor are you representing the arguments of others fairly here. Seatbelts are a strap you add to a chair. They don't significantly affect the function of a car, don't add much to the maintenance overhead or up-front cost, they are easily removable/replaceable, etc. This is a much more invasive legislation.

I actually love sawstops. In fact I don't use table saws that don't include that functionality. But I would never, ever push for this kind of legislation. I'm not sure if you (or anyone commenting here) have ever used one of these saws personally, but the added expense and ongoing operating cost is not negligible. It's about $150 to fix it every time it triggers. People love to say 'cheaper than a trip to the hospital!' and while that's true it's also pithy and hand-wavy given how often these things trigger.

There are a ton of edge cases that can make these trigger (including mysterious triggers that seemingly have no cause), and there are whole classes of people who don't make enough to deal with that regularly but still operate saws safely for entire careers. Those are the people that are upset, not hypothetical hobbyists, who are the most likely to be able to afford the extra cost and be able to always operate in pristine conditions.

Powertools in a site setting need to operate in all kinds of conditions, and for a jobsite saw the money spent installing sensors and gadgets to meet regulations would be better spent on literally anything else for such a tool. People working in those settings are just going to turn this feature off and will strictly be hurt by this. (There's no way they can force these features to be always-on as that would prevent tons of materials from ever being able to be run through a table saw again.) To make it literally illegal to produce the right tool for site workers is an overreach coming from out of touch people.

Woodworking is an interesting space where people generally accept the risks they take and in return are more or less trusted to make that assessment by regulatory bodies at least in the US. A better comparison than seatbelts would be the european regulations around dado blades, which as I understand are fairly unpopular. Sawstops are great for HN types. That doesn't mean it should be illegal to produce sensorless saws.

FWIW, I supervised in one of the safest industrial environments in the US, and also one with incredibly robust workman comp. The 18-25 year olds I supervised typically just found ever stupider ways to get themselves hurt or accumulate improper- or over-use injuries... Arguably we would just fire them before they got us in trouble, which we didn't, but neither do people in much riskier settings I've heard from ("get these stupid safety railings uninstalled once the inspector is gone, they just waste time and get in the way").

My suspicion is that the better analogy for these things is airbags rather than seatbelts. Because people don't use seatbelts (guards), install something expensive that can't be easily defeated, airbags (sawstops), which are touchy and known to brick the car (saw). Do sawstops, when not engaging, inhibit the function of the saw as badly as airbags inhibit visibility around A pillars?

SawStop saws work like any other table saw while you're cutting. The only difference is that you won't cut your finger off, though you are still vulnerable to kickback which is also dangerous. When I swap my regular 10" blade for an 8" dado stack I have to change the brake cartridge which only takes an additional minute. I don't change blades often so it's not a big deal. I've had my SawStop contractor saw for years and have never triggered the brake. On the other hand, blade guards, which are clear plastic things that go over the saw blade, do make using the saw more difficult imo. Lots of saws come with them now but basically no one, myself included, uses them as they obstruct what you're doing and are incompatible with certain types of cuts. I feel safe with a riving knife installed and using push blocks like the Grrr-ripper 3D to keep my hands far away from the blade at all times.

> I've had my SawStop contractor saw for years and have never triggered the brake.

Do you live in a humid environment?

Yeah, northeast US. And the only usable shop space I have is in the basement, the most humid place in the house. A dehumidifier and air filtration (don't have expensive dust collection) make it work pretty well.

If we're going to do a cost benefit analysis, we need to be pretty certain that the costs do in fact outweigh the benefits. We have hobbled Nuclear power over safety concerns and it's pretty clear we got that one completely wrong with huge negative consequences for society. This is obviously not on the same scale, but it's easy to get these things wrong and never revisit them. From the federal register notice on this, 70% of the supposed societal cost is pain and suffering, which frankly, individuals can decide on for themselves about the risks.

If you take out the pain and suffering values from these costs, you actually find that the cost benefit analysis doesn't pass at all, coming in at 0.5bn to 3.4bn in the red depending on the cost of the regulation on consumers, per the agency's own analysis.

If you got and read what people think about these regulations about people who use the tools, e.g. on /r/tools, they are unanimously opposed to them. Many people have complaints about the proposed products not working as advertised and generally wanting to bypass the system entirely: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tools/comments/19fmzko/are_you_in_f...

And that gets to the other part of this issue, if the regulation passes, what is the actual behavior change that will happen? Will people buy these saws and use them in the intended manner, or will they switch to alternatives that are just as dangerous, or will they simply turn off the safety features because the false positives are expensive ($100+ in direct costs without counting productivity losses). And note: all the SawStop products have off switches for the safety because they have false positives on wet wood and conductive materials like aluminum.

The headlines for these regulations are always great since nobody likes losing fingers, but there are always trade-offs, and it is extremely easy to make mistakes in these calculations and not foresee the actual knock on effects of them.

Particularly in this case where costs are largely internalized, rather than externalized.

Hah either we have know the same carpenter or a lot of pros have lost the top half of three fingers via jointers.

my grandfather only lost one finger tip to a joiner. My father had two fingers pretty well mangled by a table saw. I used to do some carpentry but have lost interest in the last couple of decades.

What really scares me are band saws!

Band saws are scary, but actually quite safe in comparison to table saws or radial arm saws.

Yeah I wouldn’t use a radial arm saw if you paid me. A friend had one he wasn’t using in his garage he offered to give me and I politely passed.

I've never really used a radial arm saw. What's so dangerous about it compared to the other shop tools talked about in this thread?

A table saw is a fixed position blade you feed wood into. A radial arm saw is a moving blade and the wood is stationary. Some of the cuts can involve pointing the blade directly at parts of your body, and then moving it without cutting yourself. A fixed blade is safer since you can try to avoid being in the blade area, but if the blade area is dynamic that becomes much more difficult.

A good video with examples (of pictures of recommended cuts, not injuries) is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Zeg8fHVrJBk

A good example is at 1:20 of the video.

I think bandsaws are much safer than table saws. The band saw naturally forces the work against the work surface instead of towards the user. You should give bandsaws another chance.

If I had a small hobbyist shop I think I would spend extra to get a big bandsaw and make do with a circular saw and a nice track. A circular saw and a router (for dados) can substitute for a table saw. You can't resaw without a bandsaw.

> against seatbelts

I've been wondering about this kind of thing recently.

I think people struggle all their lives with independence, and it is wonderful when you get the feeling of being "sovereign". Being your own man (or woman), confident in who you are and what you can do.

And then we run into forces bigger than us, and some people continue to defend their sovereignty. They want their freedom and they don't want to be told what to do.

(For me, I hate things like companies that want to LOG IN to my bank account to verify my income/etc and will never give up that fight.

for someone else it might be seatbelts.

I wasn't really aware of the seatbelt fight, but I remember helmet laws. My position was that I would wear a helmet, but I wouldn't want to force someone else to wear one.

... on the other hand, I think it is ok to make kids wear helmets.

> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today.

That is not a representative analogy. Imagine if in the 50s there was only one company that manufactured seatbelts and they owned every imaginable patent related to preventing car occupants from hitting surfaces in an accident (so another company couldn't for example invent the airbag because they'd block that too - see Bosch and a completely different implementation that Saw Stop sued out of the market).

Improved safety would be great, but legislation should never mandate a monopoly to a single manufacturer.

SawStop actually granted Bosch a license to their safety patents for Reaxx some time ago. Moreover, they said during the hearing that they'd offer permissive public licensing to their remaining patents should this rule be made effective.

They said, sure. Saw Stop has been such a toxic bad actor around their patents since forever, they don't get any benefit of doubt. I'm certain they'd just back down from that promise as soon as the law passes. How about they make all their patents public domain beforehand, to motivate passing the law (and I'd that point I'd be happy to support the law).

And imagine if this law passes and Saw Stop has monopoly on table saws. Sure, today you can buy one for $900 but nothing will prevent them from raising that to like $5000 when nobody else is allowed to build a table saw.

You do have some kind of proof for this wild accusation.. right?

Saw Stop's original patents are expiring. Reaxx will come back on the market and there will be a superior alternative that doesn't self-destruct. Saw Stop defending their patents during their period of exclusivity is the entire point of the patent system. There is no reason to vilify them for it when they used it to launch a successful business.

There is a huge difference between defending a patent in a free market and regulatory capture mandating a product.

The patent system is not very compatible with highly regulated markets, it changes the game from choosing to buy something innovative to a non-voluntary overreach.

What is toxic about their behavior? It seems like they genuinely invented the mousetrap for this particular type of mouse and wanting to be paid for that invention seems commercial rather than inherently toxic.

An ancestor comment mentioned a patent using electricity to detect flesh in sheep sheerers from 1982...

Detecting flesh using electricity probably dates back from the voltaic pile, more than 200 years ago.

But it wasn't used to stop sawblades. How to reliably detect flesh without too many false triggers, do it fast enough, on a spinning blade, and as part of a complete system that includes the brake and actuation mechanism. That's what the patent is about, not the vague idea of using electricity to detect flesh.

> Moreover, they said during the hearing that they'd offer permissive public licensing to their remaining patents should this rule be made effective.

It sounds incredibly naive to think this will happen. If they haven't done it so far why would they do it when the government mandates that you have to be their customer?

Because any rule should trivially have 'permissive public licensing' as a requirement?

Indeed, and Bosch did not reenter the market with a Reaxx because they believe that people will not spend the extra money. For me this is a very strong argument for a mandate.

Yes the mandate will both drive down prices and force adoption. Both good things

Also the seat belt lock ruins the seat belt and if you ever have to slam on brakes you have replace both the seat belt and the lock.

If you get in an accident and the seat belt saves your life you do in fact have to replace (at least) the seat belt.

GP's point was the false-positives (cases where a seatbelt inertial lock locks in the absence of a collision) are a low three-figure event in the case of a SawStop rather than "you need to lean back against seat to let the belt unlock itself".

I don't think GP is objecting to the cost of a true-positive [in either the saw or seatbelt case] but rather to the cost of a false-positive.

There is actually a notice tag sewed into the seatbelt that is visible when too much force is applied. Most often the spool is no longer operative at that point as well.

Saw Stop initially tried to get other companies to license their patent. They all declined because they didn’t want the extra cost. It was only after Saw Stop started manufacturing their own saws and proved there was a market demand for people not cutting their fingers off that all the other manufacturers suddenly decided they wanted to implement it.

No other manufacturers have implemented it, have they?

Volvo released it's seatbelt patent to the public, as TTS has vowed to do so if the CPSC mandates AIM. The last 20 years is not the present.

>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."

Ok, take away seat belt analogy.

How about air bags. Those are a better one.

Air bags can cause harm to people who can't sit far enough away from the steering column [1], while there are some more advanced technology air bags that may mitigate that risk, the average airbag in the average car is not so advanced.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/air-bags-may-harm-tall-small-people-...

Neither are these safety devices being proposed on table saws, so a great analogy then.

I don’t think the congress intends on prescribing the particular technology in use to accomplish this. That, would be a bad idea. They should set the goals (what constraints are acceptable in the name of making this technology affordable).

If it is being left up to the manufacturer, then half the arguments being mentioned here are moot. Other manufacturers are free to get creative about it. I can think of a few different ways myself - even something like assisted manoeuvring of the wood piece without direct contact of the hand, a retractable shield, etc.

"Everyone's talking about how this will kill the industry."

Because we know the mechanism behind the thing, and it's essentially unavoidable to trip because the lumber industry continues to sell still-wet wood. Until you put that industry firmly in its place, people are just going to be losing tons of money on 'safer' saws via constantly having to replace blades as the stop mechanism breaks them. And then we break out the handheld circular saw without that bullshit and go back to work.

> Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?

They are able, and they’re choosing not to. So SawStop is wisely spending marketing money on lobbying. If people don’t want to buy your product, nothing better than forcing them to.

Seatbelts are a legal requirement because my car insurance would have to pay for your medical bills if not wearing a seatbelt turned my failure to stop from a minor accident into a serious head injury. In other words, your lack of a seatbelt affects my liability. There is no analogy between that and safety devices for uninsured activities carried out alone, in our own homes.

This isn't the case in most countries, seatbelts did become a legal requirement though.

Thanks for this logic. It makes sense to me.

> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today. So many people are certain it won't happen to them.

Please don't mix up "being against something" and "being against legislation that forces people into something". You can support the thing, do the thing yourself, advice all of your friends and family to do the thing, and still believe that people should have the freedom not to do the thing, even if you think this decision would be extremely stupid.

> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today

Woodworker here. The equivalent SawStop to my basic table saw is 3X the price.

Your analogy wouldn’t make sense unless seatbelts tripled the price of cars.

SawStop has a huge patent portfolio and they’ve been cagey about actually letting other people use the full system. This is more of a regulatory capture play, not a safety play with consumers in mind.

"Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today. "

Those of us who ride motorcycles?

I live in a poor, developing country where seat belts aren't mandatory. Also most people get around on scooters going 25-30mph and helmet laws are almost completely unenforced.

I am constantly amazed at the number of foreigners from first world countries who don't wear seatbelts or helmets the moment there is no Big Brother forcing them to.

Road fatality rates are 10x what they are in Germany, Japan, Ireland. 9x what they are in Australia. Until this year drunk driving laws were unenforced and drunk driving was widespread.

Ironic how seatbelts aren’t mandated on public forms of transport like trains and buses, yet one is required to wear them in one’s own vehicle. If it truly is based on safety then it should be an all or nothing approach to requiring seat belts on moving vehicles.

Transit has the same advantage as a back seat of private auto: a big non-windshield to crash into in the event of a crash. seatbelts are pretty great. the proliferation of airbags is the correct comparison.

I think smashing into the back of a seat will probably do as much damage as a windshield if not more.

The mass of a bus or train will happily cleave through wayward objects, so there will be less acceleration of your face into seat backs, poles, and other passengers. School busses to my knowledge do have padded seat backs, plus they're also up high, so they're more likely to go over sudden obstacles, increasing the stopping distance.

While I can agree that tablesaws are quite dangerous, I just don't understand how we get from: "tablesaws are dangerous" to "the government should regulate tablesaws." There are safer saws out there. Sawstop. Buy one. No governmental intervention needed.

I am against seatbelt laws, so you got me there.

I grew up as a proud resident of New Hampshire which has no such law on the books despite being one of the safest states to drive in the USA.

Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t driving alone without a seatbelt? Perfect example of government overreach as cars get loaded with nanny state technology. I subscribe to the philosophy of personal responsibility, something that seems to have been lost in the modern litigious, it’s everyone-else’s-fault culture of the 21st century.

Well written. I don't know why responsibility is so scary.

I've never used a table saw but I rock climb regularly which has plenty of risk. Are table saw accidents purely due to your own actions? Or is it like a motorbike where there are factors out of your control and someone could crash into you.

If losing your fingers on a table saw is 100% due to your own actions and there are no externalities, I would call that negligence not accident.

>Well written. I don't know why responsibility is so scary.

Sure! I'm withyou!

People who buy table saws with a failsafe mechanism should not be fined for not using the failsafe or disabling it.

...selling the table saw without that mechanism should be, however, banned - just like cars without seatbelts or airbags aren't legal to sell in New Hampshire (or any other US state).

Personal responsibility is a hard sell in a world where human beings are not absolutely sovereign agents. Regardless, the law isn't stopping you from driving without a seatbelt. I find it odd that you have such a visceral response to a class of laws that is violated quite regularly.

In the jargon of philosophy this a friction point between Deontology (rules-based ethics) and Consequentialism (outcome-based ethics).

Deontologically there is a strong case against seatbelt laws, but the consequentialist perspective is rather compelling.

I’m generally a deontologist but find myself supporting the seatbelt law. It’s just such a small price to pay when stacked up against the consequences. I guess that means I’m not really a deontologist.

I agree. I also wear a seatbelt and do not ride a motorcycle, but I think people should be allowed to take risks with their own life if they want to. The next natural step from this legislation is government mandated diets and exercise regimens to combat the obesity epidemic — and the resulting mortality — in the United States.

The government has banned things like trans fats, and I am fine with that.

I disagree. If I'm going to be forced to collectively absorb risk, then I have a right to decide what risks people can take. The main issue is that it's not just the risk of death like you're suggesting, they usually just get severely injured and it's a drain on public health infrastructure, my insurance costs, and everyone else gets shafted when their serious injury gets moved to the front of the line. I've only been to the urgent care once, but a particularly bad car crash made us wait several hours. I've had appointments delayed because of risks other people take with their own life.

We're too closely connected in modern society to just let people exclusively decide what risks they want to take, because their risks are also our risks. I wish our collective wellbeing wasn't tied to the guy who wants to drive without a seatbelt, but that's the world right now.

>I grew up as a proud resident of New Hampshire which has no such law on the books despite being one of the safest states to drive in the USA.

Last time I checked, you couldn't legally sell a car in New Hampshire which did not have seatbelts.

You're comparing apples to cardboard boxes here.

>Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t driving alone without a seatbelt?

Irrelevant. The question you need to ask for a fair comparison is:

>Motorcycles are legal so why shouldn’t SELLING A CAR without a seatbelt?

The answer is: because these are different vehicles with different use cases (and adoption levels) that require different kinds of licenses to operate and have different kind of negative externalities.

Same reason motorcycles aren't required to have airbags.

Can't all these many people who want the technology purchase it today? I think for every new hobbyist that comes along only because of this saw there will be five less hobbyists who stay away because of cost.

Mischaracterizing the issue, which is people handing over (or having taken from them) responsibility, to the state, for something they should be taking responsibility for.

No chance your father or your joiner friend hadn't seen those ads of the saws which automatically stop on contact. But they chose not to buy one, because they decided they didn't need one. They had that choice. Or if before those existed, to use a hand saw.

Regulation is nothing more than saying "we're superior to you in making choices for you, so we'll do so". And it's made not by efficient innovative geniuses, but by the same people who run the DMV. And it's not imposed on children by parents, it's on grown adults by other grown adults with no legal accountability. And it ossifies technology by locking in certain measures which will quickly drift out of date. And, as we've seen with the FDA and Opioids, it gives a get out of jail free card to wrongdoers who game the rules, because they can point to their compliance and say "so look, we followed the rules, we shouldn't be liable".

It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.

> which is people handing over (or having taken from them) responsibility, to the state, for something they should be taking responsibility for.

> It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.

In general, there are many cases that most people cannot really take responsibility for. For example, if you hit a person with a car that can mean they’ll lose their income and need specialized care for decades. Such costs can run in the millions.

Now, you can argue people should take insurance against that risk. Problem is: some people won’t, and victims won’t be compensated,. If, then, you think the state should take on those costs, doesn’t the state have a say in what kinds of cars you can drive, for example that they have various safety features?

Also, this doesn’t only apply to cases where you injury others. If people get into an accident that leaves them with health costs they can’t afford to pay, we expect society to, at least partly pay up.

I think that argument applies here, too. Saw accidents can and do make lots of persons lose health and future income. In many cases, it’s the state that will have to pay up to cover that.

Ah yes a reply that is in no way doing any mischaracterizing itself. Great job!

>but by the same people who run the DMV

I wish people would stop digging on the DMV. I have had multiple positive experiences with the DMV

> It's just unbelievable people think regulation is in any way a good thing.

I dunno man, I kinda like when there’s some sort of enforcement making sure there’s not toxic waste in my food beyond hoping I find out later and a remedy even exists to make me whole. But you do you, anarchy’s worked every other time it’s been tried right?

Anarchy isn't the only solution, but it makes a great knee-jerk reaction when trust fails. Probably the more valued (ie, safety, food, etc) the more the radical the reaction, I would guess.

I’m not even for or against this specific regulation as I haven’t read enough about the technology or the field to come to a determination. However the poster I responded to was basically arguing that regulations are definitionally bad things and that is comically incorrect even if I give some benefit of doubt to the statement

I am a hobbyist carpenter and woodworker. My current project is probably the last one I will ever do without a table saw with these kinds of safety features. I have already changed over to using other tools like track saws and pull saws as much as I can for safety, but it is still hard to replace a well-calibrated table saw for certain tasks. My table saw is the only power tool I have that truly frightens me. Router tables and jointers can cause some nasty injuries as well, and I treat them with much respect, but total digit and limb loss is rarer with them.

The patent situation and much higher price are unfortunate, but it’s still a cost I am willing to bear. It’s cheap insurance compared to an ER visit and extended amounts of time spent feeling pain.

Opposition to a law mandating the use of certain safety equipment is not the same thing as opposition to the safety equipment.

Here in Seattle, there used to be a bicycle helmet law. Helmets reduce the severity of injury in a crash, less severe injuries are obviously better, forcing people to run less risk is therefore justifiable: it seemed to make sense, and it was a popular law.

And yet, it was repealed. Why? Disproportional enforcement, partially - tickets were inevitably handed out primarily to poorer and more marginalized people - but the law actually made things worse for everyone by reducing the total number of riders on the road. There is safety in numbers for bicyclists, who are less likely to be hit by motorists when they are a more common sight - but the health benefit expected from riding a bicycle at all, helmet or no, is actually greater than the health benefit expected by adding a helmet. It is therefore better, both collectively and individually, if we remove every possible barrier to bicycle riding, even though some people will choose not to ride as safely as we wish they might.

Unintended consequences are a real thing, so a person can quite reasonably believe that the SawStop is a great invention which everyone should use, and that a law mandating the use of SawStop would be a bad idea.

>> Ever think of how many more people would be willing to buy a table saw if they knew they weren't going to cut their fingers off?

There is literally nothing stopping those people from buying the saw that prevents that right now.

> Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement today.

Where have you been for the past 4 years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain_Award

When Volvo created the three-point safety belt (still in use today), they patented their invention. And then, recognizing the importance of this great improvement in safety, they absolutely gave it away for free.

When SawStop created a meat-detecting brake for table saws, they patented their invention. And then, they refused to give it away, sued the begeezus out of anyone who tried to emulate their patented inventions, and eventually paid lip-service to the concept by offering to license one aspect of it for free.

Can you spot the difference?

You know, I recently bought a table saw. Reading this makes me terrified to use it.

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.

> I'd be curious to hear the cynical take here.

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!

https://www.copyright.gov/history/copyright-exhibit/lifecycl...

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.

Carbide teeth are actually the part that gets destroyed on SawStop activations. Carbide is very brittle, so the sudden stop fractures it.

Yes, and they are consumable and replaceable by design, which goes to my point: the blade is not irreparably destroyed by the activation.

The missing teeth need to be replaced and the plate needs to be re-checked for runout, but most carbide-toothed blades are repairable.

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.

A carbide blade costs about $100.

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.

This is pretty true. Sawstop adds more to the cost of a low end table saw than a low end table saw is worth.

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."

https://www.sawstop.com/why-sawstop/faqs/

The first thing people will do is turn on the bypass and never turn it off.

> The first thing people with 10 fingers, two hands, and two arms 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 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.

There's a bypass: https://blog.ustoolandfastener.com/how-to-activate-sawstop-b...

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.

Better take away kitchen knives too.

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.

Easy to cut yourself with a kitchen knife, hard to cut your finger off. Safety being proportional to harm is perfectly reasonable.

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.

Do you risk losing fingers by repairing your Iphone?

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 would prefer woodworkers pay more for table saws than I have to pay for their reconstructive surgeries via higher health insurance premiums.

Then the insurance companies could require it.

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.

But does it actually cost that much more or does SawStop just price their saws at a premium for having a premium feature?

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.

But what if they said “unexpected complications arose” and “the release “got delayed due to a legal situation”?

Easy.

'What if'?. What makes you think this is even a possibility?

They would be forced to license it under FRAND

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.

"curious to hear the cynical take here"

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.

Elimination of competitors through safety standards has happened before.

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...

Great read - didn't expect to learn that today!

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.

At least with Heinz recipes are specifically not covered by patents.

Milk "recipes" are: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2550584A/en

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.

Calling almond milk a milk drink is a bad idea. It should be milk-like almond drink.

Almond milk has a etymology in English dating all the way back to 1381. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/almond-milk_n

Alternative milks were common in a time period before refrigeration and pasteurization. It just kept longer.

My favorite snack ever, since discontinued, are also covered by patent. Partially popped popcorn that used to be at Trader Joe's.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7579036B2/en

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.

It's the same with efficiency standards, happened with lightbulbs, is currently happening with the "technically not an EV mandate."

I wish we had a way to enact this kind of legislation without massively distorting markets.

Is there a downside to lightbulb efficiency standards? I am glad that my lightbulbs are now 10 watts instead of 60w.

Flicker and color temperature. They also used to be expensive for renters who wouldn't see out their lifetimes.

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.

I don't remember any benefit of IR. Do you have a link?

https://www.melatonin-research.net/index.php/MR/article/view...

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.

Can't use them as heaters anymore?

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.

    R = V^2 / P = (110V)^2 / 100W = ~120Ω

I'm facing this issue with my hens. Most reptile stores sell ceramic heaters in lightbulb form, and they gave done the trick nicely

RIP the original Easy-Bake.

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.

Flicker

Big Tobacco is trying this now with e-Cigarettes.

Pushing for regulations that only they have the scale to meet, as they are entering the vaping market.

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.

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2023-23898/p-145

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.

Bosch pulled their saws from the market. Speculation is that they were unreliable or posed some sort of liability risk.

There are competing systems both international and domestic that have been forced off the shelves by sawstop.

It's not outrageous that a business's investors are rewarded for an innovation that benefits humanity.

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.

Insurance profits are capped at a percentage of what they spend, and they sell to a captive market, there's no incentive for them to minimize costs.

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.

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...

This should be the top comment

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.

Correct. But not this one.

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.

Patents are already a government manipulation of markets. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been a market failure if there were never any patents around it.

If there is a mandate, then they have to license the patents under FRAND terms.

Interesting, didn’t know about that aspect of US law. Don’t see any reason to delay an implementation then.

FRAND terms which will be buried in litigation for the next 20 years.

> they have many more patents

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?

Consider patent 223,898 and then consider patent 239,153 and 425,761 and pay attention to the initial wording ( https://www.thomasedison.org/edison-patents )

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.

> 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.

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.

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".

I'm sorry, but this is a bizarre take to me. I don't care what happens to a saw if it would have otherwise cut my finger off.

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

How many expensive false alarms are you willing to accept, per serious injury avoided?

I'm no expert in this, but I'd say 'definitely way more than one'.

And many people have experienced those ratios.

Many older woodworkers lost fingers often multiple fingers in multiple accidents.

So, the risk is really quite high here.

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.

Really? I would definitely rather lose a finger than go homeless. Homeless people have far, far worse life outcomes than people with missing fingers.

A specific person isn’t the average homeless person who tend to be dealing with addiction, physical or mental illness, past incarceration, etc.

So talking about the average outcomes of a random homeless person doesn’t really apply here.

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.

StopSaw makes these. The saws, tables, and fasteners are beefy enough to survive.

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.

That just means the tech is not ideal, not that I want table saws without it.

It works on conduction and capacitance. It's not immune from false positives.

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.

Frankly, the biggest problem is that this makes it impractical to test the brake. How do I know the brake even works, if testing it is not practical?

>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.

>The question is, how fast does it need to be?

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.

REAXX retracts the blade inside the table and lets it coast to a stop. It does not damage 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):

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.

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.)

> The question is, how fast does it need to be?

According to my calculations, on a 10in/ 30tpi blade you have a teeth passing every 8.3uS.

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.

Bosch used to have a system called Reaxx that could pull the saw out of the way without damaging it.

Sawblades are consumables and cheap enough (some are ~10-12 bucks) that it's probably a worthwhile cost.

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.

The point is that there's a (>1) cheaper solution that still saves your thumb, but it's (they're) being regulated out of the competition.

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.

Your board shooting into your face has always been a concern with saws. Hence why you don't stand in the line of fire when making cuts.

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.

N=few, but thank you for sharing this actual anecdata for those of us interests.

>That's a pretty good tradeoff.

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-...

Correction to my post: apparently SawStop already got bought. It is owned by TTS Tooltechnic Systems which also owns Festool.

> So, 4 spaces * 10 years * 12 months * $100 replacement = $48,000 paid in false firings vs 4 life changing injuries over 10 years.

Certainly reattaching fingers would be cheaper than $48k. That's a steal of a deal in the US.

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.

Apparently you've never heard of this thing called worker's compensation.

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.

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.

Yeah, you're missing the joke. The joke is the US healthcare system and how expensive it is.

A sense of humor might cost in excess of a finger reattachment, though.

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.

Thanks!

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.

> 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.

OTOH (literally?) keeping your fingers but having to buy a new saw seems pretty reasonable.

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.

https://www.grainger.com/product/DAYTON-Radial-Arm-Saw-120V-... here you go

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.

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.

They literally just updated the model number yesterday as they wait for new stock to arrive in July.

It even says so right under where it says discontinued. Specs are exactly the same.

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.

I'm amazed that the patent hasn't expired yet. I was sure I heard of this more than 20 years ago.

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.

That really is the crux here.

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.

Why must there be a cynical take? Sometimes things really are as great as they seem.

My cynical take is:

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.

I saw an alternative to sawstop that would not destroy the blade when it deployes and does not require a replacement gas cartrige.

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

I agree with Stumpy Nubs on this.

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?

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.

> Also, when you drop a circular saw it stops spinning.

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?

Pretty much any circular saw made in the last twenty years has a brake.

Yes, but braking is not instantaneous. IIRC, the blade will spin for 2-3 seconds (instead of possible 10 without any brake).

It's possible that the guard would close faster than the spin would stop.

It's pretty fast: my bosch stops in about half a second.

> 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.

I try to stand away from the plane of rotation of the blade.

Yeah, you should never stand in line with it.

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.

See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39982822

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)

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 reference, this is what kickback looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7sRrC2Jpp4

The workpiece goes flying and the guy almost loses a finger.

This guy is standing in the correct place (clearly experienced) but is pushing with the wrong apparatus and technique.

See: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/01/2023-23...

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)

Thank you! This matches what I’ve heard, and what I’d expect just from the general geometry of things

IMO overhead router is way worse than a table saw, but compared to its usage, the table saw wins by far.

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.

Would a push stick have helped this situation?

It wasn't the push stick hand (that was actually holding a push stick). It was the hand that was standing in for the feather board I should have had.

Wow, it’s crazy that the wood kicking caused your finger to release its grip on the push stick and get hit by the blade.

What's crazier is that my grip on the push stick never wavered, and still managed to knock my other hand 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)

That $50 number seems incredibly optimistic. Just the rebuild cartridge is selling for $99 right now: https://www.sawstop.com/product/standard-brake-cartridge-tsb...

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.

"That $50 number seems incredibly optimistic."

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...

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 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".

That is what really "reeks" here.

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.

Can confirm, I've tripped a sawstop twice. Both times were because of the material, not flesh.

Not to say it isn't good technology, just that - anecdotally - it's more often a $150 mistake than a finger saving feature.

What was the material? Wet wood or staples/nails?

I believe you can temporarily turn off the feature if you’re cutting questionable material.

> That $50 number seems incredibly optimistic. Just the rebuild cartridge is selling for $99 right now...

It's a niche product with a single manufacturer right now.

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.

Plus a few sacrificial digits to get the lawsuits through that prove to the manufacturers that their liability is real, serious and large.

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 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.

(Just wanted to say I'll take a look at that! I appreciate your graciousness, and I'll be more like that in the future.)

> 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. This entire reply feels argumentative.

To turn your car example around, a ton of regulations exist for safety features in cars. Why not for table saws?

> 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.

> For every dollar in job site saws sold, you cause ~$20 in injuries.

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.

"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.

> the economic benefit calculation

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?

But who pays for the injuries, and who reaps the added project value?

What's a riving/ryving knife? I searched but still unclear.

A riving knife is a piece of metal behind the blade that prevents wood from pinching the blade and being launched towards the front of the saw.

Beat me to it. Picture here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riving_knife

> The one dollar goes to profit, the $20 is paid by society, for the most part (since they are also statistically uninsured).

This is why socialized medicine is a bad idea. You get "free" medicine in exchange for society dictating what you're allowed to do.

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.

> we have effectively outlawed cheaper vehicles that could probably have worked for a lot of needs.

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.

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.

> we have effectively outlawed cheaper vehicles that could probably have worked for a lot of needs. And... that largely seems like a fine thing?

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.

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?

> Maybe that is a bit safer

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.

Do you think the government should regulate workplace safety?

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.

What's the difference between a hobby table saw and a "professional" one?

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.

> I agree with Stumpy Nubs on this.

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'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.

How? Do you have a video of the near miss or can you explain it? If you use a piece of wood to push down the top I don’t see how it’s risky.

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.

Ah yeah I see. I’ve always used a micro jig like pusher to push it down and towards the backplate to try and avoid that scenario.

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.

Stumpy Nubs absolutely did once run his hand through a saw; by your ridiculous definition he is absolutely qualified to have an opinion.

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.

> But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?

What about employees? They don't get to decide.

It'd be very trivial to attach a "business of X size" or even just a business at all requirement to the law.

> But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?

I agree, at least until we get free universal health care, then the government has an argument for making these decisions.

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).

> The problem is woodworkers will do dumb things like remove both of these things from their saws to do unsafe cuts.

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.

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).

I have neither on mine and still have all my fingers. Weird.

> 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.

Probably but the problem with kickback isn’t because the cutting side isn’t working well, the problem is it catches on the back of the blade.

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.

> a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?

If you amputate your fingers, the rest of us bear the cost of your reconstructive surgery through higher health insurance premiums.

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.

You also lose a lot of potential for 'repeatable cuts'

Exactly. That’s the main thing I use my table saw for. Absolutely accurate, repeated cuts.

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 is definitely not safer if you're ripping boards!

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.

I just got one this week. Still in the box but I’m excited.

Why? If kickback happens the blade guard just closes up.

I'll forever remain skeptical of SawStop. I understand their mechanism works quite well and they sell a very high quality saw, but I will never in my life buy it.

It's amazing how the discourse online has shifted. SawStop's original focus after having their patent granted was super-litigious IP-troll type behavior. They were able to win some cases and force other manufactures like Bosch to remove alternative safety they had engineered to compete. SawStop was lobbying heavily for a regulatory requirement to mandate their patented technology be installed on all table saws.

The online opinion of them was ... not good. Look up the old SawStop stuff on Slashdot if you want to see it.

Now that their patent is about to expire, it's "oh look we have changed" -- they haven't. It's just a desperate bid to get themselves insinuated in front of manufacturers who will be suddenly charged with a mandate to ship safety devices -- and of course SawStop will be there with the business shortcut. Sorry, no. Fuck them. Let the patent expire.

Color me jaded, but isn't this just business as usual in the U.S?

Color me jaded, but isn't this just a typical dig on the US that also applies to businesses acting predictably in their best interests the world over?

Since they actually make a product using their patented technology, they would definitionally not be a patent troll. Even if they’re litigious, that’s exactly how the system is supposed to work when you’ve invented a valuable technology which you sell to recoup the costs of R&D plus the profit of your invention.

> Since they actually make a product

At the time they were up to their original shenanigans they did not sell the saw. They did not sell a saw for the first five years of their business being open. It was a pure IP play. God damn do people have short memories.

Maybe that's a reasonable timeframe to go from patent to selling it? I imagine there's a few things that can go between those, like tests on the patented prototype, designing how it'll be mass produced, mass producing it, distribution & storage, etc.

No. Their original saw was derived from a design that their OEM was already producing. All of this was well documented and well covered by various outlets at the time including Slashdot and Groklaw; please stop with the absurd speculation. SawStop was an IP troll. Whether they still are or not, I do not know, but the current situation sure smells funny. I am not at all convinced that their efforts to invite regulation is altruistic *even if* it actually improves saw safety.

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.

"Rabbit" (dado) blades aren't illegal in the EU.

Why are Dado Blades Illegal in Europe and Is It Safe to Use Them?

https://www.toolsadvisor.org/why-are-dado-blades-illegal-in-...

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.

1. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02...

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).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKPQVPUfSKo

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?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_boy

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.

You're just making things up now.

A good idea on paper, marred by reality

First, this would basically grant Sawstop a monopoly. They say they'll release the patent, but I'd like to see that requirement built into the bill

Second, it doesn't seem to allow for alternative safety systems. Bosch has a system that competes with Sawstop, and is arguably better, as it doesn't destroy the saw, blade, or carriage, but is currently unavailable in the US due to Sawstop parents

If the bill were to allow for the Bosch or other systems on us soil then I'd have far fewer qualms over it

I do like the idea of the sawstop, but in Canada at least. They're quite a bit more then a few hundred dollars: 700 CAD vs 2200 CAD.

https://www.amazon.ca/BOSCH-GTS15-10-Jobsite-Gravity-Rise-Wh...

https://www.leevalley.com/en-ca/shop/tools/power-tools/saws/...

question is how much are your fingers worth

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).

> The vast majority of tablesaw users don't lose fingers.

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%.

Almost 20 years of never coming close to losing a finger, I pay attention when I'm doing anything dangerous.

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.

I think it's more like "how much is a 0.03% risk of losing a finger worth?"

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.

You're assuming that's how pricing works. If I make a product and my COG goes up $100, I don't increase my MSRP by $100, I increase it by $200.

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.

Maybe not that extreme, but similar dynamic.

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.

Curious, what’s the origin of the term stripper here?

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.

strip away the features that aren't 100% necessary

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.

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

> 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.

NPR article from 2017 on this, "Despite Proven Technology, Attempts To Make Table Saws Safer Drag On":

* 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 usually works too! Usually.

People will disconnect the safety system, and we'll have a 500$ saw with a 300$ piece of useless gear

There are lots of things you can't saw with a sawstop, and if triggered, it is very expensive to replace

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.

Does the pressure treated wood trigger the safety device?

And is the safety device "destructive" to the saw (requires expensive parts/repair/etc to reset)?

Yes its destructive. Its a gunpowder charge that forces an aluminum block into the path of the saw blade.

It works by detecting changes in capacitance so yes some treated wood and wet wood can set it off.

But it's not destructive to the saw itself, the aluminum brake is a replaceable part.

It destroys the blade too.

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,

> 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 never use power tools (even a vacuum cleaner) without ear muffs.

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.

Pressure treated wood is electrically conductive enough for the saw to think skin is touching it

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.

I doubt it's amazing for the bearings, but you can replace those fairly easily(*) on most motors.

(*) for people who have a workshop, anyway

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.

In metal shop in high school, there was an 8*10 photo on the wall behind it of a long haired teen with about a third of the hair yanked out.

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.

Yep, a common motto in the machine shop is "If it spins it wins"

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.

Pressure treated wood is also soaked with copper azole, which I believe increases its conductivity.

If you manage to cut metal with a table saw, you are a much braver person than I am

Aluminum cuts just like wood on a table saw. I wouldn't recommend trying to cut hard metals.

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.

I've always just used a regular dull-ish wood blade... never died. Survivorship bias?

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.

https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/environmental-testers/pin...

What about some suggestions offered in good faith?

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.

You can also not wear your seatbelt, not wear a helmet, play lawn darts, etc.

If every table had a sawstop mechanism, most people would use it.

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

> if triggered, it is very expensive to replace

What a silly argument!

It will be more expensive if it isn't triggered.

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.

And after this change passes, the hobbyist workshop won't have a table saw at all.

I can only imagine the medical fees for rebuilding a shredded arm in the US

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.

It's not expensive to replace, the brake is like 100$ and it sure beats a 10,000$ hospital bill and a couple digit amputations.

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.

Indeed... "Build A Table Saw In 10 Minutes"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhORUN6oCUc

> 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.

The people doing unsafe shit around table saws already know the danger today. So let them take the risk, and deal with the consequences.

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.

[1] https://youtu.be/Xc-lIs8VNIc

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.

> Cheap saws are almost all plastic and would be horribly deformed after a trigger

Isn’t this fine? Buy an expensive saw and only lose the blade. Either way, keep your fingers.

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.”

> 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.

There are many ways to trigger it that don't involve your fingers, and many people don't have unlimited incomes. So no, not fine, in many cases

> It will be interesting to see how the hobby and industry adapt to $700 being the bar to entry

We'll probably see more DIY "table saws" using circular saws. I'm sure that'll be great.

Do you think it would be legal for Kreg to sell you an adapter to put a circ upside down ;)

I think if the patent is getting ready to expire that maybe the market can fix the issues?

> 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.

[0] https://hcup-us.ahrq.gov/reports/statbriefs/sb261-Most-Expen... [1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Day-Laborer-Salary

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.

How much money would it take for you to get your index finger chopped off? Would you do it for $350,000? I personally wouldn't.

How about a nasty nick that mostly heals in a couple months?

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.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2017-05-12/pdf/2017-0...

I don't know where to stand on this one.

I've got a table saw. The extent of my training on how to use it was my design tech teacher saying very clearly that none of us were ever to use it and some YouTube video of dubious information content. I bought it from Amazon, nothing approximating a check that I had any idea what to do with it.

I am very frightened of it and thus far only slightly injured. An automated stop thing would make me much less frightened. Possibly more frequently injured as a direct result.

Having the option to buy a more expensive saw which slags itself instead of your finger is a good thing. Making the ones without that feature illegal is less obvious. I think I'd bolt a circular saw under a table if that came to pass.

A gunpowder charge shoving a piece of aluminium into the blade on a handheld circular saw would be pretty lethal in itself. Lots of angular momentum there - jam the blade and the whole thing is going to spin.

It seems dubious that I can buy things like circular saws and angle grinders without anything along the lines of some training course first. That angle grinder definitely tries to kill me on occasion. That might be a better path to decreasing injuries.

the more expensive saw is 4 to 5x as much as a standard issue table saw of similar capabilities (barring the safety part). I don't think this will pan out when Congress critters get the details and tradeoffs.

Here's the first thing I noticed when I just looked up SawStop. They have a reasonable saw for $2k, in the same "class" as my 1970s Sears, based solely on size. And not all that much more expensive than other brands.

Looking at the picture, the saw is safer than mine even without the brake, because of the quality of the fence and other fittings. Unfortunately, a mandate won't get saws like mine out of circulation.

What's keeping me from going right out and getting a new saw is that mine is only used sporadically, and is mainly a "horizontal surface" in my garage. I'm done with the big projects that made my house livable.

My safety rule for now (this is not professional advice) is that I don't attempt tricky cuts at all. The biggest risk I've noticed is trying to hold onto a workpiece that's too small, and I'd rather just scrap it and use longer stock. My hands are never closer than several inches away from the blade. And I have other tools for other jobs, such as a chop saw, so I don't try to do "everything" with the table saw.

I slipped when using a table saw when I was around 15, I remember catching myself with my face in front of the saw blade.

I still don’t use that machine alone, almost 20 years later.

I’m going to guess you were putting a lot of pressure on the wood, pushing it through the blade ?

I’m not sure what happened to be honest. I’m just glad I caught myself…

Mom would have been pissed.

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.

This will be lost now in the conversation, but this video by woodworker Stumpy Nubs is worth watching for key context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk

Yes SawStop sued Bosch for patent infringement and won. But they also then immediately offered to allow Bosch to have a license for free to continue distributing in the US. In the safety commission meeting,they also annouced they would not puruse any lawsuits for the key technology still under patent if the rule was passed.

Does this fully address the potential cost issues for beginning woodworkers? No but I very much think the video is worth a watch to make a more nuanced judgement.

It is stuff like this that makes people think NPR is a Democratic Party organ:

> Over the years, Republicans on the commission have sided with the power tool industry in opposing further regulations.

Maybe they are siding with poor people that can't afford SawStop or people that see the heath and safety nanny state example in the UK as something to avoid?

I wish people would consider that every new regulation as an additional cost in both money and freedom. I use a table saw (with the blade guard removed) many times a week as a hobby woodworker and DIYer. I understand the risks and I'm not endangering anyone but myself. I'm an adult and fully capable of making that decision.

When you make decisions that favor an industry while also take money from them, it's safe to assume they're 'siding' with that industry.

As much as I would love to see this kind of tech added, our current “greed is good” economic climate that is eviscerating the 99% will mean that this change will disenfranchise most who would have gotten such a saw. Sawstop isn’t going to open up their patents like Volvo did out of the goodness of their heart. Those patents will be monetized to the hilt, to extract maximum possible revenue from the consumer.

The only reason why I even have a table saw is because of a convergence of events: renos on the apartment to make it more saleable, better job with more income, Bosch putting out a new model such that the old model had steep clearance pricing, and so forth.

Had that table saw cost even $100 more, I would have been doing the work with wildly inappropriate tools that likely would have made the work even more dangerous. Or used an old, pre-owned, beat-up tool that could have malfunctioned in dangerous ways, or have had safety features removed by the prior owner.

Yes, let’s implement that law. But let’s also force SawStop to pull a Volvo, especially if they aren’t working in good faith. They have already been compensated by that product many times over, it’s just a cash cow at this point. And the public interest must always come before profit. Not remuneration and RoI -- profit.

I get the opposition, but this is a huge savings in the long run, both in terms of sheer money, and pain and suffering. The math on table saws is staggering (as pointed out in this comment section.) It's hard to stomach allowing several amputations a day to save people $50-100. I know a table saw is as safe as the user; I am so terrified of mine that it's probably commercial air travel level of safe. But stats have consistently shown the average user isn't, and there's no reason to expect that to change.

I think we can expect added costs to come down a lot when every table saw has one. They will be more expensive than they are now, for sure, but I don't think it'll be 3x. And I'm not worried about beginners being unable to afford one. There's a thriving used table saw market that'll still happily amputate your digits, these things live forever. You'll be able to get one of those really cheap when every new table saw also has anti-mangling tech built in, as nobody but the knuckle draggers will want the old ones. In fact I'd expect a flood of people (myself included) selling their crappy old table saw without brakes for the first affordable table saw with them.

And if you just really don't like your limbs, I saw a radial arm saw at Menard's for pretty cheap.

Everything is a balance and you have to decide how much risk you want to take. People hate it when we use money or resources to injury and life but that is reality. How many injuries are we going to prevent? How much does it cost in productivity?

In general I am against government regulation here unless it is really an issue. We spend a lot of time preventing injuries to some things and then not to the most important ones (like our eating habits).

30,000 people are injured by table saws a year. That’s a material issue.

My two bits as a carpenter w/18yrs table saw experience -- there are plenty of safe ways to use a tablesaw, fingers nowhere near the blade. SawStop's trip randomly, and the saw itself just sucks to use, its a bad design top to bottom. And you still have to let the operator disable it at their will.

If they are so dangerous, then make it licensed and mandate training, which is really what makes saws unsafe -- the untrained.

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.

I can see some potential issues with this:

1) Patents. The article goes into this a bit -- supposedly the folks behind SawStop have said they'd open up a key patent, but I wouldn't want the U.S. government to mandate this without reading all the fine print and making sure that this can't be used by SawStop to crush all their competitors.

2) Materials. I often cut aluminum on my table saw, using a non-ferrous metal cutting blade. (It works fine for wood too.) As I understand it, SawStops are activated when they detect high conductivity materials. How does this work for cutting metals?

3) False positives, repair costs. Replacing the blade periodically due to accidentally cutting wood with slightly-too-high moisture content would get tiresome. (For that matter, so would putting off a project for months if I have to wait for the wood to dry out.)

I'm generally in favor of safer tools, but it seems like there are some significant trade-offs involved here.

For (2), I believe SawStops do have an override switch to disable the protection just for this reason.

I'm all for the Saw Stop, and I wouldn't use a table saw without one. (I prefer not to use table saws at all now!)

However, I'm pretty sure than the vast majority of the pressure to mandate the "Saw Stop" comes from the "Saw Stop" corporation, who hold exclusive rights.

I'm a woodworker, and i've suffered some injuries over the years (but not on a tablesaw). This seems like more of a political issue, those for and against regulation. I'm surprised to see this on HN and there is too much drama in this thread to otherwise comment.

I too am predisposed against regulation. Knowing nothing about the issue, I actually expected to support the regulation.

Reading on, it basically seems to give Saw Stop defacto monopoly over the table saw industry, shifting the value capture entirely to them. And seeing that swings me against it. Unless they commit to releasing their full patent portfolio in favor of this effort, it seems like the legislation vastly favors an economically motivated actor, which rubs me the wrong way.

The irony here is that the same government wonders why manufacturing doesn't come back to the United States and this case is a microcosm of something the issue of a whole.

If I'm understanding this correctly, the problem here is other saw companies aren't implementing a safety feature because SawStop has a patent on the relevant technology. Now the US federal government wants to make that safety feature a requirement and SawStop pinky swears to release the patent.

Why don't they just strike down SawStop's patent on the technology instead? Bosch apparently already tried to implement the tech but was scared away by SawStop's lawyers. There's a proven interest in the tech from other industry players. Is there any evidence that the proposed regulation is even necessary?

Seems ridiculous to me that they'd even allow a company to prevent other companies from implementing safety features in the first place.

Everything about this is awful. There must be some kind of personality distribution to opinions on this kind of thing. Government paternalism instantly causes visceral negative thought processes for me, but there are plenty of people that seem (?) to be all for it.

SS wants this to become a requirement because it elevates the cost of all table saws up towards their entry level gear. Their cheapest saw is $899, when you can get a comparable saw (sans flesh sensing tech) for around $499. If their competition now has to sell a saw at $899 (less licensing fee to SS), then they'll be at a competitive disadvantage since now the pricing floor has been lifted up to SS's level. And you know SS will be advertising that they invented this tech, blah blah blah.

SS is acting in their own interests, or they never would have used the patent system to prohibit this technology.

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.

The sharp blade isn't the only thing dangerous.

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.

I survived a childhood regularly using a radial arm saw. My dad was very clear I was not old enough to use it until I was 12, and then we did a full afternoon of what the proper way to use it and how to get hurt using it.

These are literal power tools with spinning blades of death. You shouldn't use these without training and you should understand how you get hurt on one of these. I see this as government overreach yet again. I'd only be ok with this if the requirement has an expiration date so that way it doesn't block future innovation.

When sawstop engages it destroys the blade and ruins the stop cartridge. So you need a new cartridge and a new blade, which is better than a finger but not cost free. Wet (damp) wood, aluminum, and any other material that is a bit conductive can trigger the sawstop. However sawstop has a bypass mode, which allows you to cut conductive items (and your finger).

This article is pretty aggressive with this statement “ Woodworking has been a nearly lifelong passion for Noffsinger, and he was no stranger to power tools. Back before his accident, he'd seen a demonstration of a new and much safer type of table saw at a local woodworking store. Marketed under the name SawStop, it was designed to stop and retract the spinning blade within a few milliseconds of making contact with flesh — fast enough to turn a potentially life-changing injury into little more than a scratch. Noffsinger's table saw wasn't equipped with the high-tech safety feature because manufacturers aren't required to include it.”

Actually his saw wasn’t equipped with sawstop because he chose not to equip it. He knew of its existence, it’s readily available (online and also at Lee valley tools), but he chose not to get the safety device and somehow that’s the manufacturers fault? Cmon man. This same jerk will be the guy who buys the thing, turns on bypass mode, cuts his finger off and sues the manufacturer.

We don’t need safety devices mandated on personal table saws. Maybe osha should require saws on jobsites to be retrofitted with saw stop to protect workers, but it is most certainly not the manufacturers fault if you cut off your thumb. I suppose chain saws and motorcycles should just be straight illegal then ?

I take it that simply dropping the saw (and then braking it afterward) is not fast enough to reduce injury?

I saw a demo of another safety saw, which was using very sophisticated monitoring systems. It was essentially dropping the saw if it detected the hand getting too close to the blade.

Saw Stop waits for contact. So the detector system has more time to move the saw out of the way, than the Saw Stop does.

I guess having to move the blade and the motor is too much energy, even or particularly, if its spring loaded, compared to springing the jamming piece that Saw Stop uses.

Does anyone know why SawStop never bothered to enter the EU market?

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.

Don't like it. There are systemic problems with nanny-state thinking - you either solve all cases of danger at once, or you make the problem worse.

I was close to a story recently about a kid in a climbing gym who mistied their harness. Competent climber, but got careless and no one caught the faulty safety loop and they fell 40 feet on descent. Nothing broken, in a turn of miracle, but could have been fatal for them and others had there been someone underneath at the time.

Now, I'm sure that this will garner some conversation, but IMO this is an example of the Safe Playground Effect; that is, because we put soft corners on everything we deem to be risky, we implicitly teach people that the world has been made safe for them. Without the risk of mild harm (on the playground) we don't develop the sense to be cautious with major harm (like at the climbing gym). The unconscious, innate instinct is "it can't be that bad, I've existed for X years sort of carelessly and I've never gotten hurt".

Problematically, this is the sort of effect that is nearly impossible to analyze with any reliability. Too many connected, confounding factors even in the most controlled environments. I think it's fairly intuitive, but there's a lot of room for me to be wrong and I'd be the first to admit it.

IF this is the case, however, then what we are effectively doing by adding these mandated safety measures piecemeal, is lowering the personal shelf of responsibility whilst leaving other risks at the same level of probability and effect, making them that much worse because now people as a whole are less vigilant re: their own safety.

One actual example I can think of to back this stuff up is the Burning Man festival. It's a city of 75,000 with precious little in the way of medical resources in an extreme climate peppered with dangerous art made of metal and splintered wood and fire, and yet the injury rate is far lower than that of a normal municipality of the same size (in the past decade, there have been 2 fatalities IIRC, which is way lower than the national average per pop.) My (admittedly hand-wavy) guess about the why is this: people who go there know that there are risks, and despite being largely chemically altered this awareness translates to a lower risk of injury even considering the added risk factors.

But, you know, that's just like, my opinion, man.

Good comment but,

>in the past decade, there have been 2 fatalities IIRC, which is way lower than the national average per pop

Is this controlled for age? And other obvious confounders like SES, race, etc?

You got me, it isn’t. There are other confounding factors; no driving, for instance.

An actual comparison would be pretty difficult for all kinds of reasons. But that’s part of what’s difficult about assessing something as vague as “whether people are being careful or not”, which is part of my point - this is something that’s incredibly hard to turn into a metric and (partially) due to this gets summarily ignored.

I must confess to spending quite a bit of time thinking about these sorts of things - the stuff that’s invisible to our current modalities of analysis. There’s probably something a little pathological about it.

I think it was 'DannyBee who pointed out years ago that the total cost of treating table saw injuries in the US exceeds the entire market for table saws themselves.

I'm surprised to read so much controversy, this feels like a textbook example of desirable regulation to me. If the societal cost (injuries, lost wages due to loss of function) meaningfully exceed the implementation cost then it should be done as it will make society/the economy safer and more efficient. Both sides of which should be easy enough to measure. That sawstop would benefit shouldn't enter into the equation.

My dad has three "pointy" (meaning the corners got cut off) fingers on his right hand, and at least on his left, courtesy of tablesaws. At the very least this technology should be mandated for the large non-portable saws like you find in most commercial wood shops. I'm glad to see action being taken on this finally.

I see so many videos of (predominantly USA) carpenters using table saws without even the bare minimum of safety features (even just a riving knife, for example). Is there no way to just enforce basic low-cost low-effort safety features rather than just jumping all the way to a very costly commercial saw-stop-like solution?

Here's a good in-depth video from a woodworker YouTuber that explains all the drama and pros/cons of the law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk

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).

this tech has been on the market for decades

Sorry should have been more concise.

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.

Looking at this from the UK : it's always astounding that US has an such a ligitious culture, and, at the same time, such a backwards health-and-safety culture. At least that's the impression I get from watching American tradespeople on Youtube.

I hear this a lot but it’s a myth. Germany is the most litigious county in the world. We are very close to the UK per capita 75 vs 65 per 1,000 people. The UK is #5 and the US #4.

Here is one of many Google sources: https://eaccny.com/news/member-news/dont-let-these-10-legal-...

The UK and other commonwealth states are more nanny states than the US is. I’m not surprised it’s taken this long.

I just bought a job site table saw for some home improvement projects. I’m so friggin wary of it. Bought all the safety upgrades I could find. Nice push sticks. Micro jig gripper blocks, feather boards. Try to run the guard at all times as well.

I'm in the UK, I used a tablesaw professionally for some years, often in very basic circumstances. I have never ever come close to an accident with a tablesaw. The reason:

1) UK tablesaws all come with a top-guard and a riving-knife fitted. The riving knife stops the timber from closing on the back of the blade, causing a kick back. In many designs it also holds the top guard up.

2) During my apprenticeship training there was a mandatory table saw course. We were taught how to set the guards and safely use the machine.

3) a riving knife based guard gets in the way of cutting grooves and rebates. If you take it off to do this then you replace it with a guard or jig to keep it safe. Then you put it straight back on.

4) I sometimes watch American 'makers' on YouTube and they terrify me with their working practice. My hands never went closer than the edge of the saw table. I used push sticks and jigs to handle everything close to the blade

5) I have never seen a sawstop over here, and it looks like a stupid hitech solution to a problem better solved by guards.

Are there other good examples where laws have mandated the use of a new patented technology for an industry with mature incumbents that turned out well?

Well that's a lame video.

Watch this: https://youtu.be/SYLAi4jwXcs?t=139

All my garage would be illegal. Tools have risks, you cant idiot proof everything without making an objectively worse world.

It's crazy how many people experience these injuries. I have a great uncle and know a friends dad who have both lost fingers to table saws.

> SawStop came onto the market in 2004

Which means it probably makes sense to mandate it now (and not earlier), because the patent should be expired by now.

That's funny, I was just thinking about how affordable things are nowadays; we should really make them pricier.

I can't support any business that tries to make their product mandatory. Someone says here he's not scum, he is absolutely delusional scum. Does anyone else think having the government mandate what you can buy is a good idea? Another company designed a saw which did the same thing and which didn't destroy a $200 cartridge and the blade. He said he'd sue them into oblivion. He's a greedy prick who would see people maimed before he'd give up the profits on his half-assed, shitty, Chinese made trash. Use a blade guard, ffs. Don't support this asshole.

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 gonna put so many hand surgeons near high schools with shop classes out of work.

I'm glad I got a $100 "Harbor Freight" table saw while they were legal.

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.

Is SawStop the only current manufacturer of a brake product?

An acquaintance of mine was a professional carpenter for a theater company. Thoughtful, careful guy. Never in a rush. He of course used a table saw all the time. I asked if he had Sawstop. They were too cheap.

He still has no idea what happened, he simply came to holding the bleeding stumps of his fingers. Surgeons managed to reassemble some functioning digits out of the chunks.

It is my opinion that the government should purchase and "open source" safety patents as they come up, then manufacture replaceable safety parts to sell at cost.

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?

Hooray, it's about fucking time.

I'm all for safer equipment, but the tech is expensive. I am hesistant if a gov't mandate wipes out cheaper alternatives.

Damn SawStop. You create a product that you can not only lobby the government into forcing people to use, but activating it destroys not only the SawStop but also the saw blade, necessitating replacing two products. What a perfect grift.

Oooooh, the new finangle pour-spouty gas can, part deux.

Won't be long before the safety thingie gets ripped off and short-circuited.

Or just use some scrap wood to push the work?

Enjoy your dado stacks while you can. I for one think countries outside of USA have gone way overboard regulating an inherently dangerous tool, and the productivity dive is real.

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.

It's long past time for peaceful revolution.

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.

A lot of people don't have that option; their employer buys a piece of equipment and tells them to use it.

As much as anything, this is a mandate on worker safety.

Can't they just mandate what the employer is allowed to buy?

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