Costly day yesterday with SawStop

[kevin st john]

I am employed as a Registered Nurse and I can say I have yet to meet a person who planned on having an accident. With that being said, I just purchased a SS PCS 3.5 hp. And I am amazed at how well the assembly instructions were laid out.
Now, what sold me on the SS was the fit, finish, and the safety feature. To me it seems to be a simple way to prevent a major medical expense and I would rather spend the money saved on woodworking tools.
There will be a day when all saw manufactures will have some sort of safety device that activates. Insurance companies are going to require it because they are the ones who pay these huge bills when someone accident gets their fingers cut by a tablesaw. And those bills from table saw accidents most likely end in the six figure range, if not the seven figure range when you include all of the various surgeries that are required to save a digit or two on a persons hands.

[Jerome Stanek]

My concern with a Sawstop is that you need to get a job done and the brake triggers and you don't have a replacement and have to wait for one or taking the time to reset a new one that may make you hurry

[Robert Engel]

Fingers are preserved by paying attention.

Thank you very much. ;-)

[Thomas L. Miller]

Yes, a SS and the "consumables" (blade and brake) are priced at a premium. But, have any of you folks priced trauma care lately? If doing a cost analysis, that should be part of the equation.
Tom

[Warren Wilson]

This thread whets my appetite to hear reviews of the Bosch REAXX saw -- I hope they are going to meet their planned release date of June (and that Sawstop is unable to use the courts to prevent further technological innovation along this line).

[Ben Rivel]

This thread whets my appetite to hear reviews of the Bosch REAXX saw -- I hope they are going to meet their planned release date of June (and that Sawstop is unable to use the courts to prevent further technological innovation along this line).

Yes the REAXX does sound like a better solution, but since they only make a jobsite saw its not one thats going to compete much with the SawStop market as Im willing to bet they sell more contractor and cabinet saws than they do their jobsite saw.

[mreza Salav]

Why do all SS threads have to turn into name callings the other camp?!!
Whatever decision you make (to buy or not to buy the thing) respect others for their choices.

[Susumu Mori]

I believe many of us actually understand, or at least have a good sense about, accidents; how costly it could be and how damaging to our life, but I'm not sure if that is really the point.

We all know that there is clear danger to walk down or crossing busy streets. I have seen cars struck people in the middle of crossing. We all know how terrible it could be if we are struck by a car. Could be worse than a saw. But still, we walk around without protection. It doesn't mean much if someone tells us we need proper protection gears because accidents are horrific. Yes, accidents and trauma could be horrific, but we still walk with t-shirts. I guess the point is, we all balance the amount of risk (1 in million every time we walk a street) and cost/discomfort of extra protection. We usually think we can manage (or more precisely "take") the risk by reasonably careful in streets.

Everybody has different level of balance. Some of us feel the extra $500 and $100/each "pow!", do not warrant the risk reductions it offers. I'm not sure if that is a bad decision. Having said that I think many of us would welcome new safety features become available and competitions would make such techniques ubiquitous with much less costs. As Martin said, not only table saws but also many other operations because the table saw blade-touching could be only a fraction of the entire risk. It doesn't even address the kick-back which seems to have higher risk. And we sure don't want to spend $500 for each risk,,,,,

[Anthony Whitesell]

Thank you very much. :-) I agree but you won't convince SS purchasers they haven't made a good buy.

I think chopping a finger off on a miter saw is like, 3X more likely.
Maybe I need a "chisel stop" I've cut myself twice this year.

I don't normally chime in on the SS threads, but this post hits a chord with me. As my high school math teacher would say "statistics can prove anything". Mr. Gass has published this same point only you have to extrapolate the data for yourself. If you don't do the homework you see only what is written. That is, per the number of tablesaws in use the accident rate is X (one every 9 minutes per SS website). Also written is the most number people are injured while using a tablesaw. What is also written is less people are injured while using miter/RAS saws and bandsaws. In more reading you will find the prevalence of miter/RAS saws and bandsaws is significantly less than that of the tablesaw. But these are the absolute numbers. This is where the extrapolation starts. If you look at the numbers in percentages, bandsaws and miter/RAS have a higher percentage of users being injured (# of injuries divided by # of saws in use). So while one may debate the '3X' figure, I agree that (and Mr. Gass/SS does as well though not explicitly stated in their own writings) it is actually more likely that a given person will be injured while using a miter/RAS saw than a tablesaw. It just happens there are less miter/RAS saws in use therefore less people using them which translates into a smaller (absolute) number of people getting injured.

[Roger Feeley]

When I got my Sawstop, I wanted to know more and pressed their tech support. I wanted to know the timeline of a brake event.

Assuming detection as time index 0:
at 3 milliseconds, the blade has stopped
at 15 milliseconds, the blade has dropped below the bed of the saw.

The variable is detection. The blade needs electrical connection and for that, the saw teeth must make contact. For a young person, detection is easy because their hands aren't as dry. For an older person like myself with dry skin, the blade is going to have to find meat. So I would expect that I would at least need a band-aide.

So, the question here is twofold:
1. What a saw blade can do in 3 milliseconds.
2. How fast does your finger move and how far in 3 milliseconds.

I just googled table saw speed and found a site that says the average Unisaw blade spins about 4,000 rpm. So 4000 x 60 teeth would be 240,000 teeth passing per second. Multiply that by .003 (3 milliseconds) and we get 720. But that's not a good number. Remember that Sawstop told me that at 3ms, the blade HAS stopped. So the actual number should be much less than 720.

Back to SawStop. In that same phone call the tech support guy told me that the chip on the brake counts tooth touches. Also, any time there has been an actual finger-save, Sawstop wants that brake for analysis and will give you another one for free. The tech support guy told me that the average number of tooth touches for a finger save brake event is two.

But to the second question. How far and how fast can a finger move in 3/1000ths of a second? It depends. Are you pushing too hard on a board because of a dull blade and your hand slips and goes into the blade fast? Or are you making a normal cut and your hand just inches into the blade at the speed of the board. Or maybe you are reaching over the blade and don't have the guard on and you brush it. The grisliest scenario is that you have a heart attach and face plant into the blade (SS guy said it has happened). Yikes! Just too many variables.

I wrecked a stacked dado set with a brake fire with my SawStop. I have a Jess-em miter gauge with an extruded fence. It had (past tense) these really nice brass thumbscrews to hold it in place. I was using the dado set to nibble some wood away and didn't realize that those screws had come loose and my aluminum fence was moving with the wood. POW! and that was the end of the dado set. I still have the gauge but it has cam clamp screws so I can see the lever position easily. We live and learn.

[Dave Zellers]

You started with rpm so you need to divide by 60 to get to rps.

[Hoang N Nguyen]

Your math is a little off. 4000 rpm (rotation per minute ). You have to divided by 60 to get seconds which is 66.66 multiply by 60 teeth equals to 4000 teeth passing one point per second. Multiply by .003 will be 12 teeth contact within .003 seconds. At normal feed rate, that is just a nick.

[Dan Friedrichs]

In more reading you will find the prevalence of miter/RAS saws and bandsaws is significantly less than that of the tablesaw. But these are the absolute numbers. This is where the extrapolation starts. If you look at the numbers in percentages, bandsaws and miter/RAS have a higher percentage of users being injured (# of injuries divided by # of saws in use). So while one may debate the '3X' figure, I agree that (and Mr. Gass/SS does as well though not explicitly stated in their own writings) it is actually more likely that a given person will be injured while using a miter/RAS saw than a tablesaw. It just happens there are less miter/RAS saws in use therefore less people using them which translates into a smaller (absolute) number of people getting injured.

Yes, which is why if you were designing a device to prevent the maximum number of accidents, you'd concentrate on the table saw.

[Jim Bowers]

Send the blades the complete set and have them give you an estimate on the cost to replace the damaged teeth and have them sharpened

[glenn bradley]

Just dropped back in to see if this went predictably. Perhaps it will be a lesson in better social behavior from the security of our keyboards. There are a lot of good people here with a lot of valuable input on many topics. The result of some trigger topics is that any beneficial information gets missed by me as I routinely pass on most EZ-Smart, Festool and Saw Stop threads since this is where the bulk of them seem to go. Let's play nice ;-)