SawStop vs Non SS Table saws poll....Accidents and accidental firings

[Jim German]

Keep in mind the results of this poll are fundamentally flawed and skewed in favor of the Sawstop. Even if you were a fairly early adopter of a Sawstop, you have only been using the saw for 7 years. Whereas a good portion of people here have been using tablesaws for 30+ years. To get an accurate measurement of how useful Sawstops are at preventing injury, you need to compare injuries per hour of use.

[Andrew Pitonyak]

Caught a kickback in the gut some years back. I just purchased a SS because it has better safety features than my previous saw (ie, riven knife). I think that pretty much any saw would have given me the riven knife, but the SS gives me a bit more safety with respect to fingers.

[Jay Jolliffe]

I've had two accidents that required stitches on a table saw. Now I own a SS & owning this saw I am still careful what I do on it. I treat it like it doesn't have the break cartridge....Yes & I did buy it because of the accidents.

[Ron Natalie]

You can get a kickback on just about any saw with a bad setup/bad technique. Mitre gauge+fence screwup or poorly aligned fence will jam the piece into the back of the blade before the knife. Small off cuts can just bounce into the blade as well.

[Brian Ashton]

Voted "SS Owner: Brake fired accidentally", assuming firmware bugs erroneously popping the brake fall into this category. I had one go, then put in a new brake and it fired too. SS replaced them both at their expense. Since the firings were on startup I was able to salvage the blade too. As an engineer, I know things don't always go right "out in the wild", and I am more than willing to accept stuff like this.

I've not had a tablesaw injury yet myself, but was present when my dad had a pretty bad one.

Mike

I've always been on the side that has said the technology would be to flakey in such an environment and there would be a significant number of false triggers... But I was actually surprised at how high they have been admitted to here.

[Neil Brooks]

I've always been on the side that has said the technology would be to flakey in such an environment and there would be a significant number of false triggers... But I was actually surprised at how high they have been admitted to here.

Hmm.

In talking to the "false trigger" group, we'd find out how many were truly "false" vs. "I did something silly, and the brake did what it was supposed to."

I suspect there's some of each, in there, but wouldn't want to guess at the ratio.

[Glen Blanchard]

I am a SS owner, but didn't respond to the poll. I activated my brake when the corner of my aluminum miter gauge fence nicked the blade. This was not really an accident per se (although it was accidental). Clearly operator error. I have never had a false trigger in (what must now be) about 5 yrs of ownership.

[David Hostetler]

The poll itself is flawed as the potential answers just don't go deep enough, and raises more questions than it answers. Such as...

Those SawStop, and non Saw Stop owners that have had injuries, what sort of injuries were they? If they are a flesh to blade injury, was the guard in place at the time of accident?

I have found that not all, but what appears to be a large majority of saw accidents involving flesh to moving blade come from the user bypassing safety devices... In these cases sure the SawStop tech would have helped. Assuming the brake wasn't turned off... So it's not really the SawStop feature so much as using the safety devices on a saw, SawStop or not that tends to keep your digits in place...

[Prashun Patel]

Man, how many times does John have to say it: the poll is flawed and not complete - and he knows it. He still chooses to ask the question. What's the harm?

We're on an Internet forum, for Pete's sake! He's not writing a PhD on this data, nor should any readers use the data in their's.

Even if he designed the questions with all the scientific rigor of a Gallup, the sampling population of SMC is not necessarily accurately representative in ANY poll.

Jeez, John. I feel for you.

I mean, it's like if my wife asks me, "Honey, do I look fat in this dress?" and I say, "Well, that's a bad question". Wait a second, I resemble that remark

[John Coloccia]

Man, how many times does John have to say it: the poll is flawed and not complete - and he knows it. He still chooses to ask the question. What's the harm?

We're on an Internet forum, for Pete's sake! He's not writing a PhD on this data, nor should any readers use the data in their's.

Even if he designed the questions with all the scientific rigor of a Gallup, the sampling population of SMC is not necessarily accurately representative in ANY poll.

Jeez, John. I feel for you.

I mean, it's like if my wife asks me, "Honey, do I look fat in this dress?" and I say, "Well, that's a bad question". Wait a second, I resemble that remark

LOL...I've given up on that.

I have to say, though, I'm a bit surprised by the numbers. Half of us fire are firing the brake. Yikes. More injuries than I would have thought, too. I can only assume they're all kickbacks or things like that, but I don't know.

[Neil Brooks]

I think this poll is a communist plot!

I remember reading that ... Mao Tse-Tung is buried in one of those ....

Hm.

[Jerome Hanby]

I haven't been injured myself, but my wieners all have nicks...

[Gary Max]

I would rather have a hammer that never missed the nail---------ouch

[Van Huskey]

Why doesn't anyone complaining about the poll do their own? I think anyone who tries will find out of difficult it is, in the format given. A question like this needs to be done in a flow chart manner with far more than 10 possible answers. John, did what HE wanted to do, John knew it wasn't perfect but maybe HE can glean what he hoped for out of it. This reminds me of a "simple" poll I put up one time just trying to get an idea how many people made part or all of their living via woodworking, I ash it and use the word "pro" to signify those who made their living working with wood. It became a huge discussion about professionalism and I suppose some people got their feelings hurt when their idea of "pro" was being reduced to anyone that did their type of work, not just ones that rose to the level of craftmanship they felt they exibited. Reminds me of a statistic I heard just last night, though I am not saying it is fact, apparently when people are ask about positive attributes 90% of people respond they are above average in that regard... I digress.


I am a non-SS owner and have been injured. My only injuries thus far have been minor kickbacks, hopefully with a newer saw with a riving knife thsoe are now behind me, even though better technique at the time could have prevented the kickbacks or at least made sure they didn't hit me. The day may come when I regret not having a SS, just like I may rue the day I didn't buy a Mercedes that helps stop itself before it hits an object...

Finally, someone, anyone that has complained about the shortcomings of the poll, start one yourself seeking to answer the same basic question as John presented and see how it goes...

[John Coloccia]

I wonder the same thing, Van. All I really wanted to see was:

1) rough injury rate on non-SS saws
2) rough rate at which people are tripping the brake for whatever reason
3) whether anyone is actually injuring themselves on the SS

And so far, according to those polled the basic answers are

1) somewhere shy of 20%

2) about half...maybe it's 30%....maybe it's 70%. What's it's NOT is 100% or 10%, i.e. it's not everyone but lots of us trip the brake, and a significant number do it accidentally. That's more than I thought it would be.

3) about half the people that COULD injure themselves are saved by the brake. Frankly, I'm surprised that so many have injured themselves. Maybe it's not half....maybe it's 30% or 70%. What it's not is 0%, which is about where I expected it to be. It seems to be significantly higher.

The mistake everyone makes is assuming that I'm trying to make a rate comparison between SS and non-SS saws. I'm not. I have no interest in any of these companies, what anyone happens to use in their own shop, nor what anyone happens to think about what's in my own shop. As callous as it sounds, I really just don't care. I have my own shop to worry about. I just wanted to get a rough idea of what's going on out there because it seems to come up a lot. Now I can say, "Yeah, lots of us do trip the brake by accident", and "Don't be complacent because the injury rate is still SIGNIFICANT on this saw". I don't know what the rate is, but even with this small, completely unscientific sample, there's a definite and significant signal there that you can't ignore.