[HN Gopher] The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table ...
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The U.S. government may finally mandate safer table saws
Author : walterbell
Score : 205 points
Date : 2024-04-09 07:48 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| h2odragon wrote:
| I'm glad I got a $100 "Harbor Freight" table saw while they were
| legal.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I'm sure amazon and aliexpress is still going to be flooded
| with non-compliant tools. Hell, it's easy enough to buy a
| chainsaw conversion kit for your drill
| whatshisface wrote:
| In a world where "safe if you use it right," and "centrifugal
| killing machine" are equally non-compliant, aliexpress is
| going to sell the killing machines because they're cheaper
| and the expertise required to tell the difference is rare.
| CraigRo wrote:
| People will disconnect the safety system, and we'll have a 500$
| 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
| c22 wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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)?
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| But it's not destructive to the saw itself, the aluminum
| brake is a replaceable part.
| lazide wrote:
| 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,
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I never use power tools (even a vacuum cleaner) without
| ear muffs.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Pressure treated wood is electrically conductive enough for
| the saw to think skin is touching it
| xkqd wrote:
| 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.
| avemg wrote:
| 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.
| Zandikar wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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
| rimunroe wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| c22 wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| 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...)
| avemg wrote:
| 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.
| vundercind wrote:
| 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.
| rrauenza wrote:
| Pressure treated wood is also soaked with copper azole,
| which I believe increases its conductivity.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| If you manage to cut metal with a table saw, you are a
| much braver person than I am
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Aluminum cuts just like wood on a table saw. I wouldn't
| recommend trying to cut hard metals.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > 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...
| binarymax wrote:
| 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.
| GJim wrote:
| > if triggered, it is very expensive to replace
|
| What a silly argument!
|
| It will be more expensive if it isn't triggered.
| mdpye wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| And after this change passes, the hobbyist workshop won't
| have a table saw at all.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I can only imagine the medical fees for rebuilding a shredded
| arm in the US
| vundercind wrote:
| Probably $9k with pretty good insurance, $17k-$20k with
| poor insurance (but nb the math on the good insurance
| probably works out such that you're paying very close to
| that difference _for sure_ every single year, in premiums)
|
| Plus tens of hours arguing with provider billing
| departments and insurance. You'll pay over what should be
| your max if you screw any of that up. Time lost and stress
| and confusion over sorting out new bills still showing up
| in the mail two full years after treatment was performed.
|
| Also it'll be a lot worse if you lose your job after.
|
| If you don't have insurance, you're getting it patched up
| at the ER "for free" (you'll be declaring bankruptcy soon)
| but not getting most of the follow-up work done. Even if
| your arm could be made right, it won't be. Good luck with
| the nightmare of getting and maintaining disability pay-
| outs.
|
| Oh and double the out of pocket costs if treatment spans
| two billing-years.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| It's not expensive to replace, the brake is like 100$ and it
| sure beats a 10,000$ hospital bill and a couple digit
| amputations.
| floatrock wrote:
| 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.
| kaibee wrote:
| > 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| 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.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| 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.
| evilduck wrote:
| 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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.
| bitbckt wrote:
| 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.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| Carbide teeth are actually the part that gets destroyed
| on SawStop activations. Carbide is very brittle, so the
| sudden stop fractures it.
| bitbckt wrote:
| 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.
| 0x0203 wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| A carbide blade costs about $100.
| bitbckt wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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"
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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.
| smolder wrote:
| This is pretty true. Sawstop adds more to the cost of a low
| end table saw than a low end table saw is worth.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| 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?
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| 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.
| snuxoll wrote:
| 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.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| > 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.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| grumple wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| Easy to cut yourself with a kitchen knife, hard to cut
| your finger off. Safety being proportional to harm is
| perfectly reasonable.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| 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
| deelowe wrote:
| 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.
| gammarator wrote:
| I would prefer woodworkers pay more for table saws than I
| have to pay for their reconstructive surgeries via higher
| health insurance premiums.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Then the insurance companies could require it.
| 83 wrote:
| 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.
| ender341341 wrote:
| But does it actually cost that much more or does SawStop
| just price their saws at a premium for having a premium
| feature?
| simplicio wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| dessimus wrote:
| 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?
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| Presumably there's a reasonable compromise whereby they
| provide a public license only valid in areas where such
| safety mechanisms are legally mandated.
| smolder wrote:
| 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.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| But what if they said "unexpected complications arose" and
| "the release "got delayed due to a legal situation"?
|
| Easy.
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| They would be forced to license it under FRAND
| neverartful wrote:
| "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).
| oooyay wrote:
| > 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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...
| dmbche wrote:
| Great read - didn't expect to learn that today!
| willcipriano wrote:
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| At least with Heinz recipes are specifically not covered by
| patents.
| willcipriano wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Calling almond milk a milk drink is a bad idea. It should
| be milk-like almond drink.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| 0cVlTeIATBs wrote:
| 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
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Is there a downside to lightbulb efficiency standards? I am
| glad that my lightbulbs are now 10 watts instead of 60w.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Flicker and color temperature. They also used to be
| expensive for renters who wouldn't see out their
| lifetimes.
| floxy wrote:
| 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| itishappy wrote:
| R = V^2 / P = (110V)^2 / 100W = ~120O
| paradox460 wrote:
| I'm facing this issue with my hens. Most reptile stores
| sell ceramic heaters in lightbulb form, and they gave
| done the trick nicely
| jtriangle wrote:
| 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.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| 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.
| RajT88 wrote:
| 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.
| dtnewman wrote:
| 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
| jmholla wrote:
| 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.
| dtnewman wrote:
| 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
| prpl wrote:
| 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.
| deelowe wrote:
| Bosch pulled their saws from the market. Speculation is
| that they were unreliable or posed some sort of liability
| risk.
| beacon294 wrote:
| There are competing systems both international and domestic
| that have been forced off the shelves by sawstop.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It's not outrageous that a business's investors are rewarded
| for an innovation that benefits humanity.
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| reaperman wrote:
| 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...
| gentleman11 wrote:
| This should be the top comment
| SilasX wrote:
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > 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.
| SilasX wrote:
| Correct. But not this one.
| traviswt wrote:
| 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!
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| 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.
| jmole wrote:
| If there is a mandate, then they have to license the patents
| under FRAND terms.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Interesting, didn't know about that aspect of US law. Don't
| see any reason to delay an implementation then.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| FRAND terms which will be buried in litigation for the next
| 20 years.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > 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?
| shagie wrote:
| 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.
| bennyhill wrote:
| 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.
| mr_tristan wrote:
| 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.
| jtriangle wrote:
| 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.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| 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.
| jtriangle wrote:
| 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".
| junon wrote:
| 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.
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| 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
| vkou wrote:
| 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'.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| And many people _have_ experienced those ratios.
| Retric wrote:
| Many older woodworkers lost fingers often multiple
| fingers in multiple accidents.
|
| So, the risk is really quite high here.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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.
| zarzavat wrote:
| 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.
| zorgmonkey wrote:
| 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).
| junon wrote:
| 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_.
| hirsin wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| That just means the tech is not ideal, not that I want
| table saws without it.
| deelowe wrote:
| It works on conduction and capacitance. It's not immune
| from false positives.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| "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.
| 83 wrote:
| 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.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _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.
| jtriangle wrote:
| 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.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _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?
| Junk_Collector wrote:
| 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.
| nemothekid wrote:
| 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.
| abirkill wrote:
| 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/cutti
| ng_...
|
| 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.
| itishappy wrote:
| 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.)
| neuralRiot wrote:
| > 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.
| patapong wrote:
| Bosch used to have a system called Reaxx that could pull
| the saw out of the way without damaging it.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Sawblades are consumables and cheap enough (some are
| ~10-12 bucks) that it's probably a worthwhile cost.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| 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.
| beerandt wrote:
| 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.
| atomicUpdate wrote:
| 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.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| 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.
| delfinom wrote:
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| 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.
| dhc02 wrote:
| N=few, but thank you for sharing this actual anecdata for
| those of us interests.
| jtriangle wrote:
| >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.
| bsder wrote:
| > 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.
| nullindividual wrote:
| > 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.
| spicybbq wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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.
| tristor wrote:
| 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.
| nightpool wrote:
| 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?
| bsder wrote:
| 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.
| whyenot wrote:
| > 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.
| bsder wrote:
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| https://www.grainger.com/product/DAYTON-Radial-Arm-
| Saw-120V-... here you go
| mr_tristan wrote:
| 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/SearsCraf
| tsmanPowerAndHandTools1...
|
| 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.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| 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
| galangalalgol wrote:
| 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.
| Junk_Collector wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'm amazed that the patent hasn't expired yet. I was sure I
| heard of this more than 20 years ago.
| 0x0203 wrote:
| 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.
| dfc wrote:
| 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.
| clutchdude wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| Why must there be a cynical take? Sometimes things really are
| as great as they seem.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| 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/...
| nricciar wrote:
| question is how much are your fingers worth
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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).
| bsder wrote:
| > 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%.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Almost 20 years of never coming close to losing a finger, I
| pay attention when I'm doing anything dangerous.
| japhyr wrote:
| 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?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| "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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I think it's more like "how much is a 0.03% risk of losing a
| finger worth?"
| ChoGGi wrote:
| 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.
| xkqd wrote:
| 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.
| avemg wrote:
| 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.
| vundercind wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Curious, what's the origin of the term stripper here?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| jdsully wrote:
| strip away the features that aren't 100% necessary
| anonymousab wrote:
| 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.
| wisemanwillhear wrote:
| Indeed... "Build A Table Saw In 10 Minutes"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhORUN6oCUc
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The people doing unsafe shit around table saws already
| know the danger today. So let them take the risk, and
| deal with the consequences.
| foobarian wrote:
| 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?
| banannaise wrote:
| 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.
| bragr wrote:
| 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
| shrubble wrote:
| 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...
| adolph wrote:
| 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
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > 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.
| delichon wrote:
| 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?
| evancordell wrote:
| 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.
| Delphiza wrote:
| 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.
| rimunroe wrote:
| 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.
| thatguymike wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > 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?
| cwillu wrote:
| Pretty much any circular saw made in the last twenty
| years has a brake.
| throw0101a wrote:
| 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.
| oooyay wrote:
| > 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I try to stand away from the plane of rotation of the
| blade.
| rimunroe wrote:
| Yeah, you should never stand in line with it.
| rimunroe wrote:
| 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 1-3deg 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| 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)
| theossuary wrote:
| 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?
| 15155 wrote:
| 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?)
| keketi wrote:
| 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.
| 15155 wrote:
| This guy is standing in the correct place (clearly
| experienced) but is pushing with the wrong apparatus and
| technique.
| DannyBee wrote:
| See: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/01/2
| 023-23...
|
| 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)
| rimunroe wrote:
| Thank you! This matches what I've heard, and what I'd
| expect just from the general geometry of things
| gorkish wrote:
| IMO overhead router is way worse than a table saw, but
| compared to its usage, the table saw wins by far.
| fatbird wrote:
| 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.
| 15155 wrote:
| Would a push stick have helped this situation?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "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)
| robodan wrote:
| 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "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...
|
| or
|
| 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.
| robodan wrote:
| > 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| 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.
| qwertygnu wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| samatman wrote:
| > _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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Plus a few sacrificial digits to get the lawsuits through
| that prove to the manufacturers that their liability is
| real, serious and large.
| nxobject wrote:
| 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.
| samatman wrote:
| 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.
| nxobject wrote:
| (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.)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "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.
| npunt wrote:
| > 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > 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.
| DannyBee wrote:
| "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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| superkuh wrote:
| > 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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?
| mguerville wrote:
| 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...
| pjdesno wrote:
| $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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| > 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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?
| lostlogin wrote:
| > 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.
| germinator wrote:
| 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.
| drewrv wrote:
| Do you think the government should regulate workplace safety?
| germinator wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| What's the difference between a _hobby_ table saw and a
| "professional" one?
| trey-jones wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| [ ] 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"
| germinator wrote:
| 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.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| huytersd wrote:
| 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.
| gorkish wrote:
| Stumpy Nubs absolutely did once run his hand through a saw;
| by your ridiculous definition he is absolutely qualified to
| have an opinion.
| huytersd wrote:
| 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.
| drewrv wrote:
| > 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.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| It'd be very trivial to attach a "business of X size" or even
| just a business at all requirement to the law.
| plz-remove-card wrote:
| > 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.
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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).
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > 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.
| anonymousab wrote:
| 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.
| huytersd wrote:
| 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.
| huytersd wrote:
| 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).
| drewrv wrote:
| 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.
| gammarator wrote:
| > 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.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| huytersd wrote:
| 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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| A circ saw is definitely not safer if you're ripping boards!
| throw7 wrote:
| I'm all for safer equipment, but the tech is expensive. I am
| hesistant if a gov't mandate wipes out cheaper alternatives.
| ne8il wrote:
| 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.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| 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.
| nprateem wrote:
| 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.
| avar wrote:
| "Rabbit" (dado) blades aren't illegal in the EU.
| dfc wrote:
| 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.
| pjdesno wrote:
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| 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.
| banannaise wrote:
| 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.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| Can't they just mandate what the employer is allowed to buy?
| marcusverus wrote:
| > 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
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| marcusverus wrote:
| > 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.
| DeRock wrote:
| 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.
| akamaka wrote:
| 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...
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| 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).
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| this tech has been on the market for decades
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| 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.
| roflchoppa wrote:
| 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.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I'm going to guess you were putting a lot of pressure on the
| wood, pushing it through the blade ?
| roflchoppa wrote:
| I'm not sure what happened to be honest. I'm just glad I
| caught myself...
|
| Mom would have been pissed.
| throw0101a wrote:
| 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(r) 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._
| lenerdenator wrote:
| This is gonna put so many hand surgeons near high schools with
| shop classes out of work.
| RyanAdamas wrote:
| 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 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?
| danols wrote:
| Does anyone know why SawStop never bothered to enter the EU
| market?
| dboreham wrote:
| 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.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| 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.
| pubby wrote:
| 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.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > 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.
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| Do you think it would be legal for Kreg to sell you an
| adapter to put a circ upside down ;)
| hk1337 wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| 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 ?
| thereisnospork wrote:
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| 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.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| 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.
| paulddraper wrote:
| That's funny, I was just thinking about how affordable things are
| nowadays; we should really make them pricier.
| gorkish wrote:
| 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.
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| Color me jaded, but isn't this just business as usual in the
| U.S?
| pyb wrote:
| 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.
| wil421 wrote:
| 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.
| whartung wrote:
| 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.
| TSiege wrote:
| 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?
| slackfan wrote:
| 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.
| pwthornton wrote:
| 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.
| jstanley wrote:
| 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.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| 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!
| WesternWind wrote:
| 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| 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?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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.
| ImJamal wrote:
| We should require bubble wrap on every person. Not
| mandating it costs society time and money.
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Show me the cost-benefit analysis that a lack of bubble
| wrap is causing a huge number of ER visits and
| amputations every year, and we'll talk.
| ImJamal wrote:
| Since nobody walks around in bubble wrap I don't think
| there would be any existing cost-benefit analyses.
|
| I was using bubble wrap as a joke thing more than an
| actual suggestion. My point is, just because something
| would lower the number of costs to society doesn't mean
| we should start mandating it.
|
| An example of something that for sure saves lives and
| lowers public costs is mandating adults wear helms on
| bicycles.
| A1kmm wrote:
| > An example of something that for sure saves lives and
| lowers public costs is mandating adults wear helms on
| bicycles.
|
| That's potentially a bad example. The largest cause of
| mortality (or lost quality-adjusted life years - QALY) is
| from cardiovascular events, and those events are
| inversely correlated to physical activity levels. Cycling
| is physical activity, and helmet laws, where passed, have
| typically coincided with a marked decrease in cycling.
|
| Under some reasonable assumptions, helmet laws cause less
| cycling, which causes less physical activity in the
| population, which causes more cardiovascular events, and
| the overall negative QALY impact outweighs the relatively
| small positive impact from fewer head injuries
| (especially compared to government pro-helmet safety
| messaging that has been optimised to minimise cycling
| deterrence while increasing helmet uptake as an
| alternative policy).
| Mawr wrote:
| > An example of something that for sure saves lives and
| lowers public costs is mandating adults wear helms on
| bicycles.
|
| For sure huh :)
|
| See my older post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39658466
|
| TL;DR:
|
| "Cycling UK wants to keep helmets an optional choice.
| Forcing - or strongly encouraging - people to wear
| helmets deters people from cycling and undermines the
| public health benefits of cycling. This campaign seeks to
| educate policy makers and block misguided attempts at
| legislation."
|
| &
|
| "Enforced helmet laws and helmet promotion have
| consistently caused substantial reductions in cycle use
| (30-40% in Perth, Western Australia).
|
| The resulting loss of cycling's health benefits alone
| (that is, before taking account of its environmental,
| economic and societal benefits) is very much greater than
| any possible injury prevention benefit."
|
| &
|
| "Cycling levels in the Netherlands have substantial
| population-level health benefits: about 6500 deaths are
| prevented annually, and Dutch people have half-a-year-
| longer life expectancy. These large population-level
| health benefits translate into economic benefits of EUR19
| billion per year, which represents more than 3% of the
| Dutch gross domestic product between 2010 and 2013.3."
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Yes, and the point I was making is that _some safety
| interventions make sense_ and are not at all analogous to
| trying to cover everyone in bubble wrap.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| If you had an iota of a real point to make, you wouldn't
| need to resort to these sorts of ridiculous analogies.
|
| How about sticking to arguing against the actual thing
| you have an issue with, on its actual merits and
| drawbacks. I understand that it's less attractive because
| it requires actual research and knowledge instead of just
| throwing "BUBBLE WRAP EVERYTHING!!!" comments over the
| fence, but HN deserves better than this drivel.
| ein0p wrote:
| 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.
| streb-lo wrote:
| 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.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Doesn't using seatbelts still reduce cost then, as it can
| prevent you from having to pay for first responders?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| ipqk wrote:
| 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?
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| We have required safety gear to participate in most
| sports leagues too...
| onedognight wrote:
| These rules are sponsored by "Big Shin-guard" and
| everybody knows it.
| jtbayly wrote:
| By law?
| lokar wrote:
| 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.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| It's mostly head trauma is both cases, the kidneys should
| be fine
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It's not only your life at risk.
|
| A British road safety advert:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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!
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| This is a hilarious example of Hacker News tech bro style
| libertarianism, right down to the part where you think
| that you can just use your intuition as a substitute for
| knowing literally anything about car safety. Outside of
| ridiculous dumb money VC-funded startups, you can't
| actually parachute into an industry and just make shit
| up.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What is? My post?
|
| Double check it, I haven't claimed to have any evidence,
| and I'm saying that the life-saving aspect is sufficient
| to mandate seatbelts.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| 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.
| thorncorona wrote:
| Are you against public health measures in general?
| gnuser wrote:
| 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...
| TSiege wrote:
| What is the point of society if not to look out for one
| another? Protecting you in the end makes me safer too
| spacephysics wrote:
| 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.
| GendingMachine wrote:
| 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.
| thegrim000 wrote:
| 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.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Unfortunately FDR's justices overturned that aspect of the
| constitution long ago.
| EarthAmbassador wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| burnte wrote:
| > 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.
| mindslight wrote:
| This is 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 legislation of individual behavior simply to keep the
| financial cost of such services down, perhaps the juice isn
| 't worth the squeeze.
| burnte wrote:
| I really don't care, frankly. I'm just tired of grown
| adults stamping their feet and yelling "Idawanna!"
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| 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.)
| avar wrote:
| 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.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| They're holding it wrong?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| avar wrote:
| 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.
| cm2187 wrote:
| But again, it's your life, your body, your choice.
| avar wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Safe work practices require humans to follow through on
| using them. Safety features don't.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Not if you're sat in the back and in a crash fly forward
| and kill the person in front of you.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| 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
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| 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.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| 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.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| 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.
| bdowling wrote:
| 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.
| pnw wrote:
| 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...
| Junk_Collector wrote:
| 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.
| luma wrote:
| 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.
| chx wrote:
| 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.
| luma wrote:
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| 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.
| luma wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| throwiforgtnlzy wrote:
| 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.
| davidee wrote:
| 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
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| 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.
| luma wrote:
| 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.
| meowface wrote:
| >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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" 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._
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I recommend the movie "Walk the Line" for folks on the fence.
| Entertaining and might learn a thing or two.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| > Amazed at the amount of people here who would clearly be
| against seatbelts if they were to be made a legal requirement
| today.
|
| Every single legal requirement is one more tool for corrupt
| scum to use against me. I oppose evry law except those that
| enforce the Bill of Rights.
|
| I want my pothead neighbor to have a nuclear weapon. It's
| better than cops running speed traps.
|
| Those who have been crushed by tyranny know what I mean.
|
| > So many people are certain it won't happen to them.
|
| You seem convinced that tyranny will not happen to you. I can
| not comment further.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| I genuinely can't tell if this is satire or not. Like, I know
| that this is something people will often say as an unoriginal
| attempt at a humorous reply, but I am...genuinely unsure.
| sharperguy wrote:
| 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.
| BWStearns wrote:
| 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.
| dfc wrote:
| I have good news for you and your fingers. This will not
| increase the price of your next table saw by 10x.
| mey wrote:
| 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/
| nostromo wrote:
| It's expensive because of the patent holders, not the
| technical complexity.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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)?
| dfc wrote:
| 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.
| ipqk wrote:
| 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.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| 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
| wvenable wrote:
| Yeah this needs to be met with invalidation of patents. If
| the government mandates something, it has to be possible
| without patent infringement.
| alphazard wrote:
| 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.
| grep_name wrote:
| 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.
| Eridrus wrote:
| 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.
| dugmartin wrote:
| 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.
| garbageman wrote:
| 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.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Hooray, it's about fucking time.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > 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.
| fortran77 wrote:
| 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.
| pksebben wrote:
| 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.
| jlawson wrote:
| 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?
| chung8123 wrote:
| 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).
| mplewis wrote:
| 30,000 people are injured by table saws a year. That's a
| material issue.
| paradox460 wrote:
| 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
| rkagerer wrote:
| Is SawStop the only current manufacturer of a brake product?
| CivBase wrote:
| 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.
| Mawr wrote:
| Well that's a lame video.
|
| Watch this: https://youtu.be/SYLAi4jwXcs?t=139
| adamcharnock wrote:
| 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?
| loufe wrote:
| 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.
| AugustusCrunch wrote:
| 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.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| 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.
| redm wrote:
| 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.
| laborcontract wrote:
| 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.
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| 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.
| petee wrote:
| 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.
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