This is an email I've just sent to Sawstop customer service - I thought I'd post here also for input from the Creek.
So there I was in my shop making some simple trivets by cutting a series of 1/4" dados in a square pice of wood. I'm using a Sawstop contractor's saw that I purchased a few months ago. I'd made a jig to hold the workpiece with a hold-down attached with a couple of screws. I completed one side of the project, flipped the piece over and rotated 90 degrees to do the other side (which generally results in a nice gridwork pattern) and was about halfway through when my saw popped and the blade vanished. bewildered at first, I figured out pretty quick that the brake had triggered for some reason. Since my fingeres were nowhere near the blade, it must have hit some metal in the wood...... I examined the workpiece and checked it again with a metal detector - no metal. I then realized that the dado blade must have hit the screws for the hold-down, checked the bottom of the jig, and sure enough - I could see evidence of two separate screws that had been hit on consecutive cuts. (DOH!!) But wait a minute - that means the brake DIDN't fire when it hit the first screw! How come? Is there a hidden sensitivity adjustment? I'm attaching pictures of the jig and the setup I used - as you can see there is a screw visible in the 4th and 5th dados from the left. The blade triggered while I was cutting in the 5th slot, but had not yet reached the 4th slot when working this side of the trivet - apparently it had been hit while working on the other side.. Difficult to explain but perhaps the pictures will explain it better. Any ideas why the brake didn't fire when contacting the first screw? (hopefully the sensitivity is better when chewing into fingers - I don't want to lose one finger only to have the saw fire on the second....)
Dave Sharpe