There is a company called Saw Stop which developed a safety system for table saws that detects when a finger touches the blade and applies a brake to the blade to stop the user from getting more than a minor injury.
It’s cool technology, but it’s expensive. A compact Saw Stop table saw us $900. The standard is $2,300.
Replacement brakes are $120.
If that is where this ended, I wouldn’t be posting.
Saw Stop, which is owned by the parent company for Festool, has lobbied to have the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) Saw Stop like safety brake on all new table saws sold in the United States.
Currently Saw Stop is the only manufacturer of this product and therefore would have an instant monopoly.
There is also questions over how Saw Stop would enforce its patent. Saw Stop has said publicly that it would open the patent to the public if the new rule is passed, but it’s still enforcing it the meantime. So their promise is no guarantee of anything.
What this comes down to, is that their is the potential here for a rule change that would make it impossible to go to Lowes or Home Depot and buy a $99 table saw. You might have to buy a safety table saw for several times that.
I am the owner of a $99 after Holiday clearance sale Kobalt table saw. It’s great for $99.
If I had to pay $500 for it, I wouldn’t have bought it because I’d never recoup that value from my saw.
One Congresswoman seems to get this and wants to block the Saw Stop rule.
A new rule mandating finger-detection technology in table saws could raise costs by hundreds of dollars and result in a government-mandated monopoly.
I introduced a bipartisan bill to protect consumer choice and block this mandate until the patents for this tech are made public. pic.twitter.com/vQ26gCvWKG
— Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (@RepMGP) May 15, 2024
She’s right.
The internet attacked her.
we should respect the consumer's choice to have their fingers chopped off by a table saw https://t.co/gkf2QQaz3b
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) May 17, 2024
Hi ma'am. Greatly respect your work on allowing fingers to be cut off. Thank you
— mr Biden sir youre cheugy (@LaborPal) May 16, 2024
Ah yes the “Let corporations cut off fingers” bill
— 🆓 (@comemenism) May 15, 2024
"You should cut off your own fingers!" is quite a platform to run on.
— Jonathan Vankin (@jonvankin) May 15, 2024
you’re literally pro-fingers getting chopped off lmao
— Mike Figueredo (@HumanistReport) May 16, 2024
Fighting for the right of working-class Americans to lose their fingers! pic.twitter.com/IS7NY97sfS
— Craig Lawrence (@clawrence) May 17, 2024
This is just a sampling.
I’m absolutely convinced every single one of these people has never used a table saw.
I don’t think any if them has ever used a power tool.
These are all soft handed people who do nothing buy touch keyboards all day.
There are two important factors.
Saw Stop saws are very expensive. A portable jobsite Saw Stop Saw is $1,700. A jobsite Saw by Ryobi or Kobalt could be had for $300. Even a DeWalt is $600.
Ignoring the patent, there are embedded costs from adding circuit boards, sensors, and the electronics for the brake.
Low cost homeowner hobbyists table saws will disappear.
Businesses will have to pay out significantly more for saws.
Likely, small businesses and independent contractors will simply stop using table saws and switch to circular saws.
The reality is that most table saw injuries come from improper use. Failing to use guards or pushing tools.
Businesses, tradesmen, and hobbyists have been using table saws for years without being injured because they use them correctly .
But these doofuses know they can’t be trusted to use a saw without hurting themselves so they want safety mandated, at the expense of cost efficient saws.
They take a stance of moral superiority instead of incompetence.
People like this should be ignored, because they are the sorts of idiots who stab themselves trying to take the pit out of an avocado, they can’t run a table saw.
The Government° already has a rule for table saw guarding. See 29 CFR 1910.212, Machine Guarding. Nothing about quick acting brakes. What is required Isa guard that encloses the blade and moves to accommodate the work. Even for a Saw Stop saw. Yes, I inquired of them and they admit they must install the blade guard to be OSHA compliant. Just like the $300 – $600 ones.
They are the same morons who assume that anyone with a gun will negligently shoot themselves at the first opportunity.
And the ones who are trying to mandate so-called “smart guns” even though they don’t really exist and certainly do not work.
I suppose they also are people who don’t know what a chain saw is.
That’s even more dangerous than a table saw! NO guarding required (nor necessary or desirable for intended use)!
Yeah, no kidding. I do wear loggers chaps and steel toed boots when using a chain saw, but that only offers some marginal protection to some parts of the body. For the rest, the only protective device available is the one between my ears.
I’m really tired of people demanding I spend money to protect Me from Myself. Given the option I’d choose a vehicle without airbags. Table saws are in use Everywhere. People have learned to keep their fingers. Safety techniques are touted on every YouTube channel I’ve seen. Popeye was right. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances. If I WANT the safety saw,I’ll BUY ONE.. WTF part of Freedom are these people unable to grasp?
Wouldn’t surprise me if 90% of those comments are AI bots
Yeah, I need to buy one of those $300-or-so table saws – good enough for my purposes – while I still can, even if I don’t yet have a place to set it up.
And it’s no surprise that Big Brother’s little obedient servants are out spreading the talking points. It’s their calling in life.
It would surprise these partisan finger waggers to know that most wood workers have a complete set of fingers thanks to better saw guards, and better awareness. The disappearance of radial arm saws and the increase in blade brakes helps. (by blade brake I mean the kind that stops the blade when you release the trigger instead of coasting).
I’m sure they would be aghast at my $40 garage sale Ryobi with no guard at all.
years ago I read about a guy who bought a tablesaw without the “bone guard” sensor.. yes, he cut off a finger.. sad part is the jury awarded him 2 MILLION!! until we enact “if you are stupid you can’t have this” laws this is the stupidity we will face. this also comes from years of the “news” feeding us the government should DO something to prevent injury…. remember America?? where if you were stupid you didn’t last long…
I’ve known a lot of government regulators in my time. They all follow the same pattern of thought:
1) There is a cost to making a regulation that allows injury. Given the opportunity to avoid injury, not taking that opportunity means that the regulatory agency becomes *responsible* for allowing it. That can be a career killing finding.
2) There is *no* such thing as opportunity cost. If someone doesn’t buy a widget because regulations increase the cost, they will sitll not become an injury and thus not be a liability. The possibility that their lifestyle or health or whatever degrades because of the loss of opportunity to use the widget may be real but — and this is most important — it is not within the purview of the regulator and thus not the concern of the regulator.
3) Cost is unimportant. These people are not evaluated on any other basis than the goal of the regulation. If the problem is a practical one of money, then there is another agency whose job it will be to take care of it — by subsidy, tax changes, whatever. Which, in turn, means more regulation. It’s like higher education. Nobody cares that the cost of a college education has skyrocketed over the past decades because for every increase in cost, there was an increase in subsidy plans, which gives regulators more direct control on who has access to education. Everybody in the government wins.
I saw this first hand in a jurisdiction where someone noticed that old people are more likely to fall and suffer a hip fracture in a house with steep stairs. So, the health folk promulgated a regulation that stairs had to have a gentler grade. Builders pointed out that making the the stairs less steep meant that it would take more steps to go up a floor. In fact, it would essentially mean losing one room for the enlarged stairwell. This, in turn, would raise the price of a multi-bedroom home by $20-$30K. This, in turn, would mean that approximately 10K people in the county would no longer be able to afford such a house. So, in order to save one hip fracture, about 5000 people would be rendered unable to buy a home. (Note these numbers are from memory and are likely off a bit). The response by the regulators was that the issues with home buying were simply not their problem. That was the problem of the housing people. Their problem was senior health. Since this would help senior health, anything else was irrelevant.
If this passes, there will be a sharp increase in those tables that let you mount a circ Saw upside down to a table.
Hardly safer.
Much less safer.
I used table saws and routers for furniture making. I treated them with the same care I treat firearms and explosives. All four can hurt you badly if you don’t pay attention, use the safe guards available, and sometimes make an additional safeguard (pusher piece for some table saw operations, jig to hold small piece for routers.) I don’t want a “finger saver,” because it will malfunction at some point, and ruin the tool. I suspect that it will also make some people even more careless around the table saw.
Good point. Safety devices should never be a substitute for correct and cautious operation, but in reality sometimes they are applied that way.
Its like trying to legislate safety into a chainsaw, its an inherently dangerous product and the only real way to avoid injury is to know what you are doing with it. And that is the problem, it relies on people to be rational actors and educated about what they are doing, to include the tools they are using, but nanny government wants to treat everyone like the lowest common denominator intellectually disabled person who needs supervision chewing and swallowing lest they suffocate from an airway obstruction.
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Finger cutting is not even the biggest danger IMO, kickback is probably way more likely and deadly.
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Table saw is the scariest tool I own and that’s only because I don’t have a radial arm saw. The torches might be second place for dangerous and scary, probably followed by my 60 year old lawn equipment.
Liberal: We should mandate these safety devices, they only double (or triple) the cost of the item!
Also Liberal: Why can’t I afford a table saw?
If these are mandated, it will not be long before there are YouTube videos on how to disable the sensor because people won’t want to pay the $120 for a replacement brake. (It also trashes the blade.)
Someone (Bosch?) brought out a competing product about 5 years ago.
Festool sued them immediately and shut it down.
So, no, I don’t believe they will give up their patent.
Add an amendment to the StopSaw mandate that will require all computer keyboards in America to be embedded with AI-powered protocols that monitor all messages as they’re being typed and don’t allow Woke, hateful, bigoted, anti-Semitic, or anti-patriotic content to be sent. Include a rider that all existing keyboards — including those intrinsic to the device (a.k.a. laptop keyboards) and virtual keyboards (think: smartphones and tablets) — must be retrofitted with the technology within 180 calendar days, and anyone caught with an unmodified keyboard faces federal felony hate crime charges.
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This will make a $20 USB keyboard cost, what … $500? And God only knows what it will cost to retrofit every laptop and existing USB keyboard in America. At least smartphones and tablets can be done with a software update, but again, at what cost?
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But it’s a small price to pay to keep the vitriol down, and anyone against it is obviously in favor of online bigotry and harassment.
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While we’re at it, let’s add another amendment that will force all vehicles sold or owned in the U.S. to be GPS monitored and speed-controlled, so they can drive no faster than 10 mph under the posted limit. (If the posted limit IS 10 mph, the car can’t move at all.) This will include emergency vehicles and aircraft. Speed kills, and every 5 mph you go over 65 mph reduces your fuel efficiency by 10% (or some such), so this will save both lives and the planet. And anyone against it obviously wants kids to die in car crashes and kill Mother Earth.
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See if those soft-handed weenies like that.
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As an aside, I shouldn’t be surprised anymore that none of the critics of Republican-proposed legislation ever actually read the bill or bother to learn the “why” of the proposal. I thought corporate monopolies and government-enforced crony capitalism were bad things, but apparently it’s only bad when Democrats don’t like it.
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I really should know better by now.