The ChompSaw: A benchtop power tool that's safe for kids to use
core77.com
core77.com
Would make a nice pairing with:
which is sold by Lee Valley: https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/home/toys-and-games/cra... (an excellent company to do business with).
A prototype of this was on Reddit/Imgur a while back:
https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/9en02z/kids_table_saw/
with instructions on making one w/ a parts list at:
The very real downside is that your kids become attached to their creations. So you end up with a house perpetually full of cardboard and fighting a constant battle to part with some of it.
I strive to be open and honest in my parenting, but these battles just don’t seem worth everyone’s investment. A box spaceship that hasn’t been touched in a week is quietly “disappeared” to the basement, and if it’s not inquired after by the end of a month it goes to recycling.
Instead, you need to complete the lifecycle of a creation. They should know things they make won’t last forever, and you need to encourage the destruction when the time comes, and after that, they can create a new thing to fill the void, and the cycle continues.
My mother, OTOH, while not the greatest in the world, would ask me to choose which toys were being donated to "other children who don't have any" (Goodwill, probably). I keep things longer than I should, but can throw away the unused from time to time, keeping my house sort of tidy-esque, kinda.
When I was in my early teens, I walked in on my mom going through my brother's toys with a bag in hand to get rid of them. Once I figured out what she was doing, I asked the obvious question, if she'd ever done it to me, and she just nonchalantly asked me if I had ever missed any toys.
I never had. She actually knew which ones mattered and which ones didn't. These days I miss the magic fairy that comes in and gets rid of the things I don't use anymore when I'm not looking!
No comrade. Is better if box spaceship falls from balcony or attends special tea-party.
The price for the little plastic screws seems a bit nuts though (40p/unit), but I understand it's a razors-and-blades sales model. When I was in primary school, we used those brass split pin fasteners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_fastener) for the same thing. You can even buy metal two-piece "mother and child" rivets 1/4 that price: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/316963279193, but they need a punch and driving it with a nice safe plectrum-style tool is maybe a little fiddlier. Blunt-ended plastic drywall screw-in fittings are also very similar and run about 5-10p each in boxes of 100.
There seems like a limited age range where a "Scru" is OK but a split pin is not (I know I used them at school almost immediately, and I started at the age of 4). The scrus get tighter, I suppose.
Nah bro, its a rich people with too much money to notice cash grab all the way down. Those plastic screws are pennies per hundred to make. The tools themselves. Well you can get a 35 piece pumpkin carving set on amazon for what appears to be similar or better quality at <$15USD if you go adjacent to the source on Aliexpress the same toolset is <$3 USD or even <$1
In fact I'm pretty sure you could just use the most of the pumpkin tools on cardboard, the blunted kid safe ones. They are also meant to be not cut skin.
I'm excited to try some of these with my kid. Paired with the Microbit and bag of various motors, LEDs and sensors, she can really start expanding her projects and imagination. I love it.
You need some strength and a sharp blade to cut cardboard with scissors, for a child, it can mean going full force. And the more strength you use, the less control you have, increasing the chance of hurting yourself. That's also the reason why dull knives are considered dangerous. Scissors are for paper, not cardboard.
This tool looks much more controllable, which means it is safer, even before considering the intrinsic safety of the mechanism, more precise, and more fun to use.
I got my son some balsa, sandpaper and a sharp knife. I also got him a pair of gloves which were resistant to the blade. Showed him how to use all of those and he's quite good with his hands. Carved a few trinkets for his friends.
I remember an article about, I think the Inuit, exposing their kids to cutting tools early on in their lives. Can't find the link. Perhaps there's some kind of optimal point in between that balances between "real" and safe.
The problem lies in the words "proper education". Dropped off at school is not sufficient, so kids get blunt scissors that will barely cut.
There are many activities where accidents are rare but severe resulting in overconfidence. In activities like motorbike riding or gliding aircraft people will convince themselves that they're skilled enough when all that has happened is that they've been lucky, and given enough instances their luck will eventually run out. Knowing the stats can help avoid confusing luck with skill.
I generally study the stats and even I get caught out, usually when working while fatigued so I simply have to refuse to work when that happens - the accidents are not worth it.
Which is not to say that kids can't be trusted to use tools! It's just that they're probably more vulnerable to overconfidence and complacency than adults, who are by no means safe from these things themselves, so it's probably better to let them cut themselves once or twice on a sharp knife before you let them use something with more permanent consequences, like a bandsaw.
I was working on wood 3d model and one piece broke, and I was trying to cut a replacement out of the extra wood available, and couldn't get a cutter to work.
Kids get really dull scissors, shared with other kids. Of course they’re difficult to use.
I thought left-handed scissors are some bullshit sales tactic to eke out some extra cash out of clueless people, until I saw someone on HN explain why "handedness" of scissors is a thing - and then I finally connected the dots and realized why my (then) 4yo daughter is struggling with scissor crafts so much. Got her a pair of left-handed scissors and, lo and behold, her cutting improved on the spot.
(We then bought some more and gifted them to her kindergarten, to make sure she and other left-handed kids have a pair when needed, because the idea was new even to some of the personnel there.)
I do quite a few things right handed, some I only do right-handed; and interestingly, I have more strength/power in my right arm/hand but have more control with my left.
Left-handed scissors are something I've known about ever since I can remember, but given how infrequently I use them, I've never bothered to buy a left-handed pair, and continue to just struggle along the couple of times I do need to use them.
My kids seem to switch back and forth between left and right, but they're still young, so I'm keeping an eye out for either of them being left-handed so I can help make things easier for them (an excuse to get some left-handed scissors perhaps?) if it does turn out to be the case.
My son, fortunately for him, is right-handed. I have no doubt that this saves him a lot of frustration.
If you are left-handed and reading this, get yourself some nice left-handed scissors. Trust me.
Older generations were actively trained to 'become' right-handed. My father at school used to get slapped on the hand with a ruler by the teacher, whenever he took his pen in the left hand.
Writing was the bane of my life in high-school, where they insisted we use fountain pens; I had no idea left-handed fountain pens existed. Even with a more suited pen, I imagine it wouldn't resolve the issue of running your hand through the wet-ink you've just laid down.
That was some decades ago now, and I intend never to write with one again, so there's that.
EDIT: I just realised I still have my the last fountain pen I used at school (25+ years ago?) in my pen-holder and grabbed it, it's a Parker Frontier, steel with "gold" accent/clip. I still have a strange fondness for that pen despite not ever wanting to write with it again.
Now I write using a Japanese Kurutoga mechanical pencil. No pens for me if I can help it.
I can beat 10 egg whites by hand. I’ve done it several times. But it sucks. A handheld electric beater is fairly cheap and way better. You know what’s even better? A stand mixer that cost several hundred dollars.
Is it worth it? If you bake a lot it’s worth it.
This biggest problem with this kids toy is that it’s for kids and cost ~$250. It’s really an adult toy or something for the classroom.
If it was half the price, I’d pick one up, have bit of fun and on sell it or donate to other families.
That said, I think it's best to maintain a healthy respect for, and even to a reasonable degree to be afraid of the machines and the forces which they can exert.
True but real safety first thinking is not something that a purchasing decision will fix.
I have a scar on one of my fingers that was caused by a broken broom! How bloody naff is that but it bled like buggery and a 1" flap of finger flapped for a while and needed stitches at A&E (for Americans - that's where you pop in and a few hours later pop out, all patched up without a credit card being involved).
I wasn't wearing gloves. I am a first aider, H&S rep for my company (my company - I care about my troops) and so on. I was sweeping my drive with a broom with a hollow metal tube handle and it partially snapped and hinged and caught my finger and partially sliced a lump. Oh and I am the fire officer and even my house has a multi page fire plan.
I own a plethora of torture devices - a table saw, multiple chain saws, chisels and the rest. I have skied for four decades and drive a car/van/lorry.
Safety first thinking doesn't mean that you escape all of life's efforts to kill you but you do get a better chance of avoiding damage.
A power tool that promises safety might be missplaced. However, this one does not missrepresent itself. It does what it does and it does it well.
For me, I will be digging out the hand cranked jigsaw when I show the grand kids how to chop off their fingers: A fret saw. However that thing looks like a great introduction to dealing with power tools.
They are too scary.
Consider table saws. SawStop built its brand on not cutting fingers off, which is scary enough. But it turns out that kickback causes a lot more injuries and that's not really addressed well by any tools.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulvP8Vv9SrE
There ought to be a market for MEs to design power tools that are safer for consumers. So where is the obviously-named "KickStop" table saw? Maybe the decline in the middle class makes that market too small to consider such improvements.
Sawstop wouldn't have a business model if tablesaw accidents were tried by a jury of shop teachers whose awareness of this is brought into focus by a career of explaining how to safely use power tools (see my post elsethread).
There's a whole field of human factors engineering that seems to agree "just being careful" is not a reasonable strategy by itself.
I have one brain, and the world contains multiple objects, which exist at the same time and don't take turns in an orderly fashion.
There will always be something I'm not consciously focusing on, and there is large individual variance in how well people can do things automatically.
It's called a riving knife?
I sort of get it, for actual job sites using dimensional lumber you're going to have the saw in bypass the entire time because the wood is wet, making the safety moot so the market is there for hobbyists but not pros.
First thing the "pros" do is remove the guards. I've never seen a guard on a jointer or a shaper at a pro shop. The products fit the demand in the market.
Shapers are a mixed bag. If you're running enough straight stock making moldings, you've probably got enough featherboards and/or hold downs if not a power feeder set up that you'd really have to try to get hurt. For smaller jobs or curves work, it's a tossup, but yeah, a lot of it gets done without a guard.
Jointers I'm going to disagree with you: I pretty much refuse to run without a guard. Except for rabbeting, I haven't found a good reason to do so. I have done so in other shops, usually on machines so old that the guard was lost 50 years ago and is irreplaceable. Generally though, if I don't see a guard on a jointer in a shop, I'm pretty wary about what else might be being treated a bit too casually. A guard on a jointer is an easy win with very little downside.
The above is about table saws. There are other power saws you should consider instead that are cheap and work. However there is a reason the table saw is considered the king of so many woodshops and until you get a good one you will be compromising ability to do some common jobs. Just because everything can be done with a rock to high doesn't mean most people are willing to do that and I don't blame them: a table saw should be in your plans or shop if you are a woodworker.
For the record, mine is a Unisaw from the late '70s. I've got an original Delta sliding table for it that greatly improves dealing with any wide pieces, but it's definitely not the equal of a Felder, for example.
I would be hard pressed to justify the space for a euro-style slider. I usually have the sliding table off unless I am doing a job that requires it because of the floor space it takes up.
If you are spending $2000 on a saw spending $300 on a third party guard to go with it isn't such big deal. The cheap saws often are not even strong enough to attach the nice guard if you would spend the money.
Personally I like my digits, but I’m not in a production shop where every second counts, I just do this for myself and I make my living typing. I would tolerate any amount of friction to keep my fingers in the same configuration they are currently in.
Safety thinking can slip - you only have to cock up once when you are pushing an amorphous mass into a blade spinning at say 3000 rpm and lose concentration.
Table saws, band saws etc and the like are dreadful.
My wife manages to make a simple drill/driver somewhat dangerous to the point that I have to sometimes fake a reason why husband should take over (yes I am very careful - she's generally sharper than the tool in question!)
Now that I my power tools are back in the garage — I can't quit the power tools — right back relying on them. I just couldn't plane quite as nice as my joiner (and certainly not in one pass). And sharpening the hand tools...
I earnestly want to do more hand-tool woodworking. I keep thinking that, as I get older, I'll eventually full in on hand tools. But at 61 years old ... not yet.
A bit half-assed, wouldn't you say?
I enjoy hand-crafting small circuits but am glad to use my cell phone to take a picture of the result. I love riding a bicycle but use a car to go 30 miles when needed. There is no contradiction to be had here. Just different purposes.
Sometimes simple joy is the priority.
I'm perhaps not quite so distracted by a well rounded fillet in a cast iron or steel body as you appear to be!
I love all materials and the ingenious ways we have found to fashion those materials. I only recently bought a router because I had to cut a wide and deep rebate in a door to fit a finger handle. Doing that with chisels is possible but a bloody nightmare. An over enthusiastic wack or allowing the grain to take over too much would have needed a potentially ugly repair.
I speak en_GB so when I say router (spinning power tool) and router (IP packet shuffler) they sound different.
I've just taken a look at that page you linked and may have to dump my browser cache and try and forget where I saw the link ... 8)
The moulding plane book I linked really opened my eyes to creating profiles. I’ve had to match multiple non standard profiles cut into different mouldings, window sashes, mutton bars, etc in the old house I live in, and that would be impossible without cutting a custom profile for a shaper. Seems like a huge waste of effort to cut a tool steel profile for a one off when I can just grab a couple hollows and rounds and make literally anything.
Check out the maker of HNT Gordon using his planes. https://youtu.be/fHsEjiXv0c4?si=jyXdUilNnCtH7Xci
He actually has a different technique than the one in the moulding plane book I linked, and I like the book technique a lot more. It’s foolproof
I'm personally cultivating my fear for power tools. I consciously work on it so I wouldn't get used to them and wouldn't stop being afraid. Fear makes me more attentive, more careful, it forces me to think first and to do next. To stop myself when things go not as planned and think again. It is almost impossible to distract me while I'm cutting wood or whatever I'm doing with a power tool. I'm afraid of the tool, I wouldn't let my attention to switch from it while it is powered.
It is funny, that psychologists believe that fears is a bad thing that must be eliminated. At least all I've talked about fears believed in that. But fears are good, they come with a danger detector included, and they are hard to ignore.
> Teaching kids that power tools don't need to be scary as long as they're used safely is a worthwhile output on its own IMO.
I believe, that either "to use safely" or "not scary". There is no middle ground. Though it maybe just my own way to the safety, maybe others know other ways.
> Plenty of adults would never do woodworking because the tools seem too scary.
The fears that stop you from doing are probably bad, but from the other hand, before using power tools you'd better learn how to do it safely. I learned all of them from experienced people, who demonstrated me how to do it properly, watched me and explained me what I'm doing wrong. So, maybe, they are right.
I get what you're saying, but to get there you have to willfully conflate an irrational fear of unknown consequences with a rational fear of known consequences. The barrier for many adults to power-tool use is the former, which blocks them from acquiring the latter.
I don't know such people, and I don't know any research of the motivation of such people. But I can suggest an alternate hypothesis explaining their behavior. They just don't want to deal with power tools, have no interest in acquiring the skills, and they use their fear to explain their unwillingness causally.
A lot of people didn't even try to learn how to use musical instruments, and oftentimes they explain it by their tone deafness. But a good ear is not something people are born with, it is a result of training. Genes probably play their role, but for the most people it all boils down to practice. They didn't practiced, they cannot know about how good their ears are, but they use tone deafness as an excuse. What is really happening, they are not interested enough, or lazy, or have not enough time, but they use their inability to sing karaoke perfectly as a sign of tone deafness and as an excuse to not learning how to play music.
Tone deafness as an excuse is better than others, because it doesn't allow for persuasion, it is a full stop. The fear of power tools seems to me like that. So my hypothesis, this fear not the reason, but an excuse. I'm sure it is not true for some people, at the same time I'm sure it is true for some, the question is how many people use it as an excuse. I don't know, but I'd bet that more than 50%.
But, what does bother me is the price, $250 seems steep.
I volunteer with scouts, kids aged 5-8. We ran a cardboard based activity with the makedo stuff. We tried to supplement with scissors, they were not effective.
It can allow young children to work independently so you’d have to factor in cost of supervision with the scissors.
Main problem with it is that it is more expensive than many real nibblers designed to cut steel, I guess for now that it is niche and designed for classroom use. Mass market it and I think it could easily come down to $50.
I mean, I'm sure there's a handful of parents who value woodworking skills but do no woodworking themselves - but are there enough to support a whole product category of $250 cardboard tools?
When he's older and bigger, then using real tools will be more practical, and we can using the real thing. The risk will be more manageable then.
At this stage however, this chompsaw looks appealing. Instead of disappointing him when he wants to drive and having to diplomatically explain that he lacks the strength and coordination to use the actual tool, I can just hand him this. Give a bit of instruction, and then let him experiment. That feeling of "hey, I'm doing this myself" is exciting to him and gives him a sense of accomplishment.
Long story short, I see this as a product aimed at a younger audience who aren't old enough to take the lead (with guidance) in the workshop yet, but want the feeling of doing it themselves in a safe way. I like it.
$250 though. Ooof.
I don't like Russians, but it's so stereotypically American to over-engineer a complicated alternative to scissors.
Pencils in space were terrible. Small chunks of carbon absorber of and getting in electrics was bad. Pens were a huge improvement.
Likewise I can't only presume you haven't ever cut large quantities of corrugated cardboard with scissors or ever seen a child struggle with the task. This device looks to be a massive utility increase for cardboard cutting for children.
And grease pencils were an option, though not as good as pens.
Edit: Oh and if anyone's looking for the tool name, it's called a nibbler. This one is just table-mounted, there are power tool and unpowered versions ofc.
The other part is, I simply don't want to heavily supervise their creative play. Everything kids do these days is planned and supervised, building a fort in your house shouldn't be.
I got some of their connectors in an Adabox I think a few years back and they were neat.
A cut from a simple blade (that can't chop your finger off) can be anything from easily healed to going through just the right part to limit the dexterity for life if you're unlucky. There's lots of time to learn using a sharp knife when they have great fine motor skills already.
In my area, this type of waste is not accepted in the recycling. Just like you can put paper in recycle, but you can't put shredded paper. This would work pretty well in the compost pile though.
Recycling means making new cardboard or paper out of old material.
“Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling
Old tires to footwear is recycling even if you can see the old tread pattern you don’t have a tire at this point it’s a new item, or as I suggested cardboard crap waste to fir on a piece of artwork. The difference is you’re modifying the underlying item for use as part of something new.
It can feel like a grey area. Upcycled is often used when much of the original item remains, but shredded cardboard isn’t really cardboard as it lacks some of its fundamental properties arising from the 3D structure.
This is so low on the long list of bad things in the world that it isn't worth the calories burned to type up a callout.
> I took out my comment calling it wish-cycling propaganda as a selling point, and decided to be less cynical.
Good call. I thought the comment as you wrote it was perfectly good & useful.
A warning, it’s a bit loud, definitely invest in kid’s hearing protection to wear when using it.
Proxxon is a fairly pricy German mini-tool brand, has a far smaller addressable market (i.e. serious miniature hobbyists) and can still sell you a made-in-Europe MP 400 Micro Shaper, a mini router table, with 10 cutters, for about 200. The manual says it's 104dBA, but this video indicates it's actually fairly quiet in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpmzqvHqQM0
Routers are great tools but very powerful and finicky. This turns a router into a finger-safe jigsaw, which is a great idea.
This toy doesn't seem bad as a crafts tool that buys you several quiet weekends, but at $250... that's actually more than a miniature desktop scrollsaw (Proxxon 37088).
If you let your mind wander you might lob off a finger before the pain signal reaches your brain. Band saws are safe in that they are largely unlikely to do anything unexpected. They are very dangerous in that they seem so safe.
No one is going to messing around with a table saw. The danger is obvious. It's very tempting to be unsafe around a band saw since it seems so safe.
If you want to see some scary stuff go look up how bandsaws are used in slaughterhouses. They'll use them to lob a whole cow in half in under a second. Now imagine what it'll do to a finger while you're looking the other way.
Apart from being a complete dunce, the usual way to get cut with a bandsaw is to be feeding with too much uncontrolled force and hitting a soft spot in the wood or running the blade out of the wood.
But yeah, when I'm teaching, the safety talk includes the line "Every piece of meat you see in a butcher shop was from an animal that was cut up with a bandsaw."
If you want to see something truly terrifying, the ones they use to cut up foam are big enough to cut a massive block of foam, and the blade is just a big, continuous band of razor blade.
Or growing complacent.
I think we largely agree on the dangers of a bandsaw to be honest. The only disagreement seems to be how likely it is for a skilled operator to fuck up. Which is for sure debatable unless someone drags in statistics, but given the context I still feel like calling a bandsaw safe in the context of a childrens toy is reckless at best.
> If you want to see something truly terrifying, the ones they use to cut up foam are big enough to cut a massive block of foam, and the blade is just a big, continuous band of razor blade.
Yikes, that does sound like the sort of machine I'd not even want to be in the same building with. I sure hope they don't ship those blades coiled up like they do with regular bandsaw blades. You'd need a bomb difusal robot to unpack that safely!
I'm fortunate in that I'm self-employed and get to arrange my work to switch things up as needed. I'm also not usually making a million of anything that would demand doing the same operation for extended periods. I realize that not everyone working in wood has these advantages.
I'm curious if you have ever used a bandsaw? Woodworking bandsaws just do not cut that fast. It would take multiple seconds of sustained pushing to get through all the meat and bone, it would be very painful and messy. You have a FAR better chance of cutting off your finger with a sharp common kitchen knife than a bandsaw.
Which is less dangerous than a dull kitchen knife.
https://yakushiknives.com/blogs/yakushi-blog-all-thing-knive...
Everyone says this thing but I suspect it isn't true at all.
Like I think dull knives are more dangerous than you'd think, but saying they're "more dangerous than sharp knives" is IMO patently false. I've certainly slipped more with dull knives, but... they're dull. They just cannot do as much damage. A dull knife will not take the tip of your finger off. A sharp one will do it before you even feel the pain.
A sharp knife without proper technique is FAR more dangerous.
How about every time?
You would be amazed how many kids end up in A&E due to this mentality.
> cost you a lot of time
Welcome to parenting.
Personally I often prefer to introduce new activities just at the point where I'd feel comfortable leaving them unsupervised (once they've learned it).
A major goal of parenting is to guide your children to independence. This is a sort of negotiation between you, reality and the child. While it can be heartbreaking when they come to you with injuries, you can't watch them all the time (and it's not healthy to try).
If you introduce an activity "too early" such that you always have to supervise, it has some advantages for child but can quickly become a drain on you (they want to do that $thing again but you have other stuff to do) and they feel less independent because they always need your help to do it.
What our family looks out for a lot is "cliff edges". This is where an activity or situation has a high / unreasonable risk vs benefit, and the harm happens quickly and is surprising. These require special attention. Once kids know where the "cliff edges" are they can explore more safely.
Almost by definition, you cannot presume (as a product designer) that children will be capable of thinking of their own safety; which is not the same as a parent who knows their child, making the decision to expose their child to developmentally-appropriate risk
The video demonstrating exactly that is pretty much the only thing on the linked page beside few pictures and less than 1 paragraph of text.
And if the oscillation strokes are short enough it can saw rigid material while just vibrating jiggly flesh (this is how the saws used for cutting off casts work). Though cardboard is also pretty floppy, so the mechanism here is probably different (mostly the puck guard keeping fingers out)
There are no rotating parts in the OP tool
Like a cast saw or an electric toothbrush.
But yes, I kind of agree with other commenters here in that maybe teaching absolute respect of a knife/table saw/power tool and its power to maim is a really important lesson that this sidesteps?
When I was a tyke I had a powertool set that worked on 1/8-inch balsa wood (not easy to find!). It was powered with a 12V radio battery, and Could Not cut fingers. There was a drill (spade bit, so it sucked), a circular saw, and another tool I have forgotten.
Pulled it out decades later for my niece to play with.
This, however, has more input material than 1/8th inch balsa. And thus, more outputs possible.
Maybe they are great actors....or maybe I'm projecting because I wish i had one of these when I was a kid.
By the way, could this concept be scaled up to cut wood?
How much is your child's finger worth?
I'm looking at getting a SawStop table saw so I can teach my child woodworking with slightly more peace-of-mind that if something goes wrong, they'll be less likely to lose one or more fingers. Kids get distracted, they forget what rules you've taught them in the past, accidents happen.
This is also a tool I'll consider purchasing to provide my child an introduction to the concepts before graduating to the bigger, louder, stronger wood saws.
I use a:
https://bridgecitytools.com/products/jmpv2-jointmaker-pro
and have worked with a number of kids to make small projects using it (and hand saws/drills/yankee screwdrivers/braces/planes)
Their Chopstick Master is a great introduction.
[0]:https://www.npr.org/2024/10/11/nx-s1-5135668/planet-money-wh...
If it's an oscillation cutter it doesn't need to be that tiny, it can protrude just like a real band saw, it won't cut meat
...the child to spread them all around the house!
It had was a combined jig saw, lathe, drill press, and disc sander.
Now, I don’t know much about modern scroll saws, but the “blade” on this thing was more like a thin, round file. Perfectly adequate for something like popsicle stick thick wood. It more ground it’s way through wood than actually cutting it.
I think it would take some pressure to really hurt a finger. I can say there was no real bloodletting on my projects.
The drill bits were pointed, flat pieces of metal. It was all designed for really soft wood.
There are 4 tools and one is a finger-safe jigsaw.
I remember it as helping me develop a healthy respect for tools, and also to relate to the material world as something I can manipulate rather than something to be passively consumed. And to manage risks, and confront my fears.
Learning how to turn on one is a bit of a trick. A lot of good turning technique is body motion rather than arm motion. Standing on one foot while you treadle makes it harder to do the body motion well.
https://toolsforworkingwood.com/store/item/GT-LATHE.XX/Intro...
which kind of makes me want to repurpose my wife's (unused) stationary bicycle...
No, not all saws are the same and treating your tools like that will cause injury to yourself. Different tools have orders of magnitudes of different consequences when a blade is touched.
I've worked in multiple production and educational woodshops. I've touched running scrollsaw blades and even touched a running table saw blade and seen live a hand into a joiner. These things are no where close to being the same.
I understand you if you run your hand into the scrollsaw and try and cut off your fingers, you probably could. But in practice, that is not what happens if you graze the blade. Your hand snaps back, you may get a cut if the teeth got you, but you will mostly likely not be on your way to the hospital. Again, this is very different that other tools in a woodshop. Yes, you can cut yourself. Yes, it is much, much harder to have a serious injury.
Bit disappointed and had to handle the expectations of my kid, that was super excited about this for Christmas. It seems TMEC/NAFTA is worthless if even small entrepreneurs discover is very difficult to sell across Mexico and Canada. But decidedly they see less value in selling to Mexico to pass similar (in theory) regulatory hurdles to Canada. The same story with Kiwico, Lovevery, etc.
Even considered building something like this, but I don’t have time.
Honestly, I feel like people just underestimate the market size because of the language barriers.
For straight lines you need something like a box cutter -- with scissors it will neither be easy nor particularly straight. While for even medium-sized curves or smaller details you really do need something like this.