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.
I have seen an average of about one false firing a month--generally moisture but sometimes a jig gets close enough to cause something. I have seen 4 "genuine" firings of which 2 would have been an extremely serious injury. This is over about 8 years--call it 10 years.
So, 4 spaces * 10 years * 12 months * $100 replacement = $48,000 paid in false firings vs 4 life changing injuries over 10 years. That's a pretty good tradeoff.
Professional settings should be way better than a bunch of rank amateurs. Yeah, we all know they aren't because everybody is being shoved to finish as quickly as possible, but proper procedures would minimize the false firings.
Part of the problem with false firing is that SawStop are the only people collecting any data and that's a very small number of incidents relative to the total number of incidents from all table saws. SawStop wants the data bad enough that if you get a "real" firing, SawStop will send you a new brake back when you send them the old one just so they can look at the data.
Assuming of course, there is no possible way that you could otherwise reliably prevent those injuries that doesn't depend on a human's diligence. That is, of course, ridiculous, but, that's the nature of this regulation. You're also not accounting for the cost of the blade, which isn't salvageable after activation, and those can get spendy.
Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market, which will, of course, prevent anyone from innovating a no-damage alternative to SawStop, which is certainly possible.
Well, the saw manufacturers could have done that before this regulation. However, they didn't. Only once staring down imminent regulation have they been willing to concede anything.
Bosch even has a license to the SawStop technology and had their own saws with blade stops. They pulled them all from being sold.
Sorry, not sorry. The saw manufacturers have had 20+ years to fix their shit and haven't. Time to hit them with a big hammer.
> Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market
Realistically, SawStop is so damn small that they're going to disappear. They're likely to get bought by one of the big boys. Otherwise, the big boys are just going to completely mop the floor with them--there is absolutely zero chance that SawStop becomes a force in the market.
As to this proposed mandate... If it's mandating any safety device, and Bosch and others can freely compete without everyone paying SawStop, I'm all for it. But if it's mandating the SawStop design, or would require all competitors to pay SawStop, forget it.
Certainly reattaching fingers would be cheaper than $48k. That's a steal of a deal in the US.
In addition, last I checked, modern medicine cannot reattach nerves so you lose a great deal of functionality of your finger or hand even if you save it.
See: https://youtu.be/Xc-lIs8VNIc?t=1095
I hope I am simply missing the joke if someone would be so kind as to clue me in.
A sense of humor might cost in excess of a finger reattachment, though.
Replacement cost is always brake and blade.
The blade is always dead. These things work by firing what looks to be an aluminum block directly into the blade.
Sweat dripping on the work piece (especially NoVA in summer with AC on fritz) was responsible for a fair share of the cartridge firing without contacting flesh.
Realistically, I don't like the tech or the methodology at all. Battle bots had saws that would drop into the floor without damage, and pop back up even, also without damage, and that was decades ago. That's the right model, not "fuck up the saw".
> If you're ripping a wet piece of wood, no thumb risk at all
I'm no expert in this, but I'd say 'definitely way more than one'.
So, the risk is really quite high here.
So just divide the average net worth of a saw operator by the cost of a saw to get how many saws a finger is worth.
So talking about the average outcomes of a random homeless person doesn’t really apply here.
If I went bankrupt and lost everything I have a social safety net of family members who would put a roof over my head until I got on my feet again. Only people without that safety net end up on the streets. Or they have addictions that mean their family can’t take care of them anymore.
If we're concerned about job site injuries then let's address the real problem, which is that a lot of people using these things do so as fast as humanly possible with little regard for set up, site safety, or body positioning because the amount of money they will lose by doing that eats so much margin out of their piecework that it's not worth it. As usual we don't want to solve the hard problem of reducing throughput to improve safety, but we're perfectly happy to throw a part that is as expensive as the sawblade on the unit just to say we're doing something.
Solving that sounds a lot harder to me than legislating that saws have safety features.
Might be wrong, but my own amateur reasoning has me believe that a table saw has far more kinetic energy than a battery powered battle bot, and that the SawStop must likely move the saw in microseconds, vs a battle bot which may comparatively have all the time in the world.
The question is, how fast does it need to be? Likely not that fast really, certainly not microseconds, and an actuator could easily yank the saw down without damaging it if it detected you were about to lose a finger.
There's also no reason you couldn't use the same actuator to do fancy things, like vary cut depth on the fly, or precisely set the cut depth in the first place. Can't do any of that with a soft aluminum pad that gets yeeted into the sawblade when it detects a problem.
Basically, SawStop exists to sell saws. Those saws happen to be safer, but that's a marketing point, it's not what ultimately makes them money. Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.
I don't know - the marketing material actually says 5 milliseconds. That's the crux of the problem and I don't believe you can actually move the saw fast enough to not cause serious damage to the human without damaging the saw. The problem, as I understand it, is stopping the saw. The saw actuator only makes sense if it moves fast enough and given the saw stop works on detection, I'm not convinced you have that much time.
I'm considering the physical reality here - if the saw must be yanked down quickly, how much force must be applied to the saw to move it, and then can that equal and opposite force be applied to stop it without damaging the saw?
>Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.
This is true of any safety device? The SawStop inventor created his company after trying to license it and eventually won in the marketplace after nearly 30 years. Surely his competitors would have released an actuator based solution if it is was possible rather than ceding marketshare of high end saws?
As far as I can tell, REAXX also damages the blade.
This is the most asinine argument I’ve heard yet, and I am not a fan of this regulation.
Blades are typically cheap and the ones that aren’t are often repairable after an activation. Also, Sawstop barely sells any blades - I don’t know a single woodworker or cabinet shop that runs their blades.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Carpentry/comments/11s6zlr/cutting_...
While we're still not talking microseconds, I think it highlights that moving the blade out of the way needs to happen very quickly in some cases to avoid serious injury.
"Protect your equipment AND your fingers."
With the government potentially mandating these types of devices, you could be makin' the big bucks!
These incentives are clear, where's the truth?
(This is only somewhat facetious. I'm skeptical of your claims, but not enough to discount them out-of-hand. The industry honestly does seem ripe for disruption.)
According to my calculations, on a 10in/ 30tpi blade you have a teeth passing every 8.3uS.
If the rate of advancement is much slower (like a normal pace of feeding the stock into the saw accident), you have several milliseconds before reaching a 1/16" depth of injury from first contact to last contact.
I know this because I've had to buy a table saw blade to replace a $10-12 one on my wife's table saw that someone threw on there because they were doing framing work.
OTOH (literally?) keeping your fingers but having to buy a new saw seems pretty reasonable.