Sawstop Dado brake fired

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Merely hitting metal ( without more) will not cause the blade brake to trigger.
That metal would have to be in contact with another electrical field like the saw iron top or yourself.

You prolly found some mineralized bit of wood with enough conductivity between your hand and the blade to trigger the brake. The minerals in the wood with the moisture in the air that the wood absorbed might well be enough to trigger a delta in electrical fields sufficient to trigger the brake.

[Rob Price]

Anyone with a SS find themselves constantly waiting for the brake to fire? I think that if I owned one, I would be a basketcase just waiting for it to go off due to some electrical anomoly...

I'm not a basket case, but after putting my shiny new WWII in there I held my breath for the first few cuts. You get over it and forget it's even there. I do think I will try the tape trick in case that can prevent a misfire...

[Paul Ryan]

Anyone with a SS find themselves constantly waiting for the brake to fire? I think that if I owned one, I would be a basketcase just waiting for it to go off due to some electrical anomoly...

I have never worried about mine firing for no reason. I have changed blades alot this week and haven't even had to adjust the gap. The saw will not run if the gap isn't right. I use 4 different blades often including a dado and none of them require the gap to be adjusted. The way I figure is the brake isn't going to fire unless I do something stuip, that includes trying to cut my finger off.

[Doug Morgan]

Found this entry while searching the net. I just had a cartridge fire when using my saw stop. But this was very strange since the saw had not gotten up to speed. The brake fired just a moment after starting the saw. The blade did not even misform the brake or drop below the table top.

The saw had been in use the day prior. I was cutting some old cedar. Everything was fine.

The second day I came out to finish the project, and turning the saw on, the brake activated. I didn't even get the chance to make the first cut.

I had activated one over a year ago due to error on my part so I knew what to expect when one did actually activate, but this had me stumped.

I wrote a email to the support team at SS and they responded by asking me if I had changed the blade, made any adjustments, and what procedure I used.

I told them that I had not changed the blade, made any adjustments and used the procedure from the manual sent with the system. I took pictures directly after the brake activation with the blade still above the table top and the brake barely catching the blade.

[Will Overton]

Makes me wonder if the inventor wet his hands first before filming that demo where he deliberately stuck his finger in the spinning blade.

Steve had his hand in a bucket of ice before the test. This was necessary, not because of the saw, but because the lights used for stop action photography would have burned his skin in just a few seconds.

[Brian Penning]

Here's the reply (very quick response) from Tom Berkley of Sawstop:

Hi Dave,

We have been experimenting with insulting the surface of the brake cartridge with a strip of packaging tape. This aides in keeping metal fragments from being a problem. You can try this without any concerns for affecting the operation of the safety system. Let me know if I have answered your questions.

Thanks,
Tom

Does he mean placing the tape on the curved surface of the aluminum part that hits the blade?

And no, I never worry about waiting for the brake to fire. Don't even think about it.

[John Coloccia]

Anyone with a SS find themselves constantly waiting for the brake to fire? I think that if I owned one, I would be a basketcase just waiting for it to go off due to some electrical anomoly...

I use mine everyday and it doesn't do anything except act like a table saw. I'm careful not to accidentally run my fingers or parts of my jigs through the blade, but then again I'm careful about that on any saw. I'm a couple of years into it now, and I can't say that I really think about it at all. To me, it's just my table saw.

[Ted Wong]

I have never worried about mine firing for no reason.

SS has done a lot to tweak the cartridge sensitivity, electronic controls and firmware since the first iteration came out back in 2004 (?).
In the beginning we must have had a dozen or so misfires
The last couple of years we have seen almost no spontaneous misfires.

[Ted Wong]

Found this entry while searching the net. I just had a cartridge fire when using my saw stop. But this was very strange since the saw had not gotten up to speed.

Same has happened to me on more than one occasion.