He is opposed to this but expects it to pass. His best argument is that it would effectively outlaw affordable low end "contractor" portable job-site style table saws. I have one of those, a cheap $150 Ryobi. It would be more like $450 with the SawStop feature and I would not have been able to afford it.
I'd be using a circular saw instead. Maybe that is a bit safer, and at least it's more affordable until they require the same tech in circular saws. But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?
"He is opposed to this but expects it to pass. His best argument is that it would effectively outlaw affordable low end "contractor" portable job-site style table saws"
"job site saws" account for 18% of the market, just to put this in perspective.
It is also totally wrong. The submitted comments to the CPSC suggest an increase of $50-100 per saw, even with an 8% royalty (which will no longer exist).
That is from PTI, who is the corporate lobbying organization of the tool saw manufacturers and plays games with the numbers.
In the discovery of the numerous lawsuits around design defects in table saws, it turns out most of the manufacturers had already done the R&D and come to a cost of about $40-50 per saw.
Everything else is profit.
We already have riving knives and you name it, and injury cost is still 4x the entire tablesaw market.
It's worse if you weight it by where injuries come from.
For every dollar in job site saws sold, you cause ~$20 in injuries.
The one dollar goes to profit, the $20 is paid by society, for the most part (since they are also statistically uninsured).
Let's make it not regulation - which seems to get people up in arms.
Here's a deal i'd be happy to make (as i'm sure would the CPSC) - nobody has to include any safety technology.
Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible for their weighted share of blade injury costs (whether the user is insured or not).
If the whole thing was profitable, this would not be a problem.
Suddenly you will discover their problem isn't that there is technology being mandated, but they don't want to pay the cost of what they cause.
(In other, like say cars, you will find the yearly profit well outweighs the yearly cost of injuries)
> Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible for their weighted share of blade injury costs (whether the user is insured or not).
But what does this even mean? You don't injure yourself with existing saws if you follow safety protocols. Then people don't and get hurt, which is entirely from not following safety protocols.
The manufacturers can already be sued if they make a product which is dangerous even when used appropriately.
> Suddenly you will discover their problem isn't that there is technology being mandated, but they don't want to pay the cost of what they cause.
Or each manufacturer will file a patent on their own minor variant of the technology such that no one else can make a replacement cartridge for their saws, then sell cartridges for $100+ while using a hair trigger that both reduces their liability and increases their cartridge sales from false positives.
Meanwhile cheap foreign manufacturers will do no such thing, provide cheaper saws and just have their asset-free US distributor file bankruptcy if anybody sues them. Which is probably better than making affordable saws unavailable, but "only US companies are prohibited from making affordable saws" seems like a dumb law.
"The manufacturers can already be sued if they make a product which is dangerous even when used appropriately."
In most states they will get comparative negligence, if they get sued at all.
The traditional way of doing what i suggest is paying into a fund that people make claims against without having to sue.
As for the rest, yes, you can game it, but that's easy to fix as well - you can require they have sufficient assets/surety to cover if you sell in the US. This is done all the time.
It is quite easy to ensure a level playing field, and we know, because this is not the first situation something like this has occurred in.
Also note they already can't sell saws this dangerous in europe. Between losing the european market and the US market, there isn't a lot of market left.
> The traditional way of doing what i suggest is paying into a fund that people make claims against without having to sue.
Which only trades one cost for another, because now there is less checking going into ensuring that the person responsible is the person paying the claim. Why should innocent people have to pay more for tools to cover claims by other careless customers who injure themselves through their own negligence and no fault of the manufacturer?
> you can require they have sufficient assets/surety to cover if you sell in the US.
And now nobody can start a small company making tools because they can't afford to post the bond.
> this is not the first situation something like this has occurred in.
It is indeed not the first time we've passed an inefficient rule that imposes higher costs on innocent customers.
> You don't injure yourself with existing saws if you follow safety protocols. Then people don't and get hurt, which is entirely from not following safety protocols.
For what it's worth, this argument could be applied to anything extremely dangerous that just so happened to have some safety protocols written for it. It's an argument in a vacuum.
Having safety protocols doesn't matter if it's something deployed in situations where people are under a lot of stress or tired from working a lot and are still required to work. Ensuring safety requires us going beyond 'you should have followed the rules', you have to consider the whole context and all the facts. The facts show Tablesaws are footguns.
> For what it's worth, this argument could be applied to anything extremely dangerous that just so happened to have some safety protocols written for it. It's an argument in a vacuum.
Some products are extremely dangerous, like construction explosives, or cars. And yet many people operate them safely for years without incident. Other people get themselves killed. That doesn't mean it's the manufacturer's fault if one of their customers decides to go to a bar and then get behind the wheel.
Conversely, some products are dangerous when used as directed, for example certain poisonous plants that herbal sociopaths will advise you to eat, which provides an obvious distinction with sharp objects whose manufacturers explicitly advise you not to stick your fingers in.
> Having safety protocols doesn't matter if it's something deployed in situations where people are under a lot of stress or tired from working a lot and are still required to work.
It isn't the manufacturer that caused you to be stressed or tired or created any obligation for you to work under those conditions.
> Ensuring safety requires us going beyond 'you should have followed the rules', you have to consider the whole context and all the facts.
There is no "ensuring" safety. You can very easily mangle or kill yourself with a kitchen knife if you use it wrong, but whose fault is that?
> My post was not about manufacturers or liablity, so I don't know why you're arguing that here.
Because that was the context of the post you replied to.
> To turn your car example around, a ton of regulations exist for safety features in cars. Why not for table saws?
Regulation of this type generally falls into two categories.
The first is sensible new safety technologies that are in the process of being adopted by the market anyway. Legislators then race to mandate them so they can try to take credit for the resulting safety improvement that would have happened regardless.
The second is incumbents who have invented something weak and then discover that their "feature" is failing in the market because it's burdensome to use or isn't worth the cost, so they try to have it mandated.
Both of these are dumb. The second one is more dumb, but we can get a better understanding of how by noticing the problem with the first: It's mandating a particular technology. Now nobody can invent something better because better is different and different is prohibited.
It also eliminates nuance and context. For example, package delivery trucks are required to have seat belts like anything else. But the drivers don't use them, because they'd be getting in the truck, putting on the seat belt, driving ten feet to the next house and then taking it back off again. It would be better to design the vehicle to be driven while standing up and then use some alternate mechanism to restrain the driver in the event of a crash, like a padded barrier at the level of the driver's chest and waist which would still be in place even when the driver only expects to be in the vehicle for ten seconds. But that's not allowed, so the mandate precludes a passive safety feature in favor of a manual one that the drivers often don't use.
> Let's make it not regulation - which seems to get people up in arms. [...] Instead manufacturers are 100% responsible
I've long been of the opinion that mandatory underwriting is superior to regulation for most things. At least: housing, medicine, and consumer products. Maybe not airplanes, but then again, maybe.
If a manufacturer of table saws was required to be underwritten for claims of injury, they'd find it in their best interest to make those saws as safe as practical.
This itself requires regulation: no skating out of it by having customers sign bullshit waivers, and of course some department would have to audit businesses to see to it that they're complying. But the sum of that is much less costly to taxpayers, and also avoids all the cost-disease which results from a regulatory regime whose interest is in producing paperwork, and which has no incentive to change, streamline, or remove a regulation, once it's in place.
My internal cyncism says we may as well end up with a regime similar to healthcare insurance in the US which puts a lot of the costs on consumers ahead of time, and is otherwise hidden – a scheme where, in theory, people often get compensated for horrific accidents, but where (a) the better the compensation you want, the higher the upfront cost (of the saw), and (b) the more horrific the (saw-related) accident and the higher the potential cost to the insurer (manufacturer), the more hoops the consumer will have to jump through to prove that their injuries were due to unavoidable injury/whatever the standard is for non-frivolous claims. There's "ideal" insurance, and there's insurance in pattern, practice, and procedure, and the US is the worst example of that.
There's every incentive for a jobsite to use the cheapest saws, and cross their fingers; there's every incentive for a manufacturer to make it as painful as possible to ask for compensation. Either way, if you're working for an el cheapo contractor on an entry-level wage, you're probably screwed.
It's a fair comment, but I want to note that insurance in business and insurance for individuals operate on a rather different basis. Insurance companies are better behaved when they know they have to be, and businesses as a class are able and willing to pursue their interests in court.
The great success story for underwriting is consumer electrical devices, where Underwriters Labs was responsible for many decades in which such devices didn't burn people's houses down. That's been undermined by lax global trade policies, I no longer even trust that a UL logo on something means UL was involved, it might easily have been added in China.
It's understandable that many people hear "we need less regulation" as "corporations should have more carte blanche to screw everyone over", but I sincerely believe this would both reduce friction and cost for business, and maintain or even improve the standards for safety and the environment which regulation is intended to provide.
"Fine.. but for every dollar in job site saws sold how much useful output do they produce"
This is accounted for in the economic benefit calculation, and is estimated at somewhere around 650million-1billion total.
Even if you add sales + economic benefits, it's less than cost injuries.
The CPSC has done this analysis (3 times now), as have others, as part of the breakeven analysis.
It's honestly a bit frustrating when lots of HN is just like "i'm sure X" without spending the 30 seconds it would take to discover real data on their opinion.
> Even if you add sales + economic benefits, it's less than cost injuries.
Provided no new error modes are revealed, like overall reduction in safety due to over reliance on safety systems and their perceived infallibility even under prolonged conditions of zero maintenance.
Not that this has _ever_ happened before.
> The CPSC has done this analysis (3 times now)
They've done this before and have been appealed before and have had their "rulings" overturned before. They should stick to recalls. Attempting to use estimates to ban products is not, to me, valid due process.
> "i'm sure X"
You're using quotes around something I didn't even remotely say. I said, "my suspicion is." Your response is one government agency has done estimates that we should just worship?
A bone headed take if I ever saw one. Yes, society has rules. That's what society is. You can't kill anyone either, I suppose that's an affront to your personal freedoms, too?
Socialized medicine provides equity. It removes the cost to live a healthy life. It is a fact that society works better when everyone is happy and healthy.
And the saw frame has to be much stronger to handle the force of stopping that blade. Throwing $50 of new parts on an existing frame just means you throw the whole saw away after it triggers.
Every time this triggers, you need a new cartridge and blade ($40+) and time to swap them in. If I was sure this was saving a finger (as the dramatic stories in the press state), then I wouldn't think twice. But it probably just wet wood or something else conductive causing a false trigger. Show me the false rate data please.
I'm pretty sure saw stop will send you a new cartridge in the case of any false triggers. you just need to send them the old cartridge so they can analyze it and try to avoid similar false trips.
The BOM on this cartridge is not $99 or even close :)
Sawstop has said this themselves.
"And the saw frame has to be much stronger to handle the force of stopping that blade. Throwing $50 of new parts on an existing frame just means you throw the whole saw away after it triggers."
None of them required significant saw frame changes, and none of them require blade replacement. All have been tested repeatedly to respond and prevent injuries in the saem time (or even faster) than sawsotop.
The saw frames can already handle stopping the blade, even in job site saws (and definitely in any cast iron trunnion table saw). Please give any data that suggests it can't?
Again, i'm also telling you what the manufacturers said. Go read the discovery yourself, don't argue with me about what their own data said.
"But it probably just wet wood or something else conductive causing a false trigger."
This is wrong.
"Show me the false rate data please."
I cited it in another post, and honestly, i'm not going to spend my time trying to convince you your particular set of opinions is wrong. There are lots of people with lots of them
Why don't you do the opposite - this data is easy to find and there is a ton of it - discovery in table saw design defect lawsuits, tons of submissions and hearings in the CPSC, etc. Why don't you read a bunch of it, preferrably prior to forming and asserting strong opinions.
That's a good way to become better informed.
This thread already has plenty of misinfo in it (job site saws are a small fraction of the market, for example, despite people thinking it's the majority), it doesn't need more.
> what the manufacturers said
You expect me to believe that? Really now. And the BOM is not the only cost, but +$50 on the BOM is probably +$100 retail.
What will the manufactures try to extract is the better question? Answer: As much as they can.
The only other saw with similar technology (Bosch) to hit the US market cost 50% more than the similar SawStop product. They had to pull it due to patent issues (despite attempting a different approach), so we don't have good market data on how well it sold.
This just reeks of regulation forcing everything to be more expensive. I'd rather just see the patent go away and see what the market really does. I really can't image this technology being added to low end saws for less than $150 retail and then you have the per activation costs. It really kills the low end market, when a minimal saw is $500.
So, basically, your opinion is both more right and more valuable than the manufacturers own emails, R&D costs, BOM's, and retail costs produced in discovery.
Why? Because otherwise you might have to admit that you actually have zero data to back the opinion you offer in the last sentence.
As for Bosch, they have admitted they priced the Reaxx very high on purpose hoping to capture a premium user and avoid regulation. They knew they were going to get sued off the market. In fact, they were later granted patent rights for free and once that happened, suddenly, well, you know, we don't wanna. Because it was (as discovered later) literally intended to stave off regulation through game playing, not do something real.
Of course, you would know this if you would bother to read any of the actual data i pointed you at
I'm remarkably aware of what happened here - i attended the CPSC hearings and also have read all the lawsuit data.
But please, continue to just not produce any real data to back up your view because then you might actually have to change it.
I'm not going to respond further unless we are going to have a real conversation here that doesn't consist of me producing data and facts and you just saying "yeah well i like my view better".
Product market fit is a real thing. I'm a typical low end table saw user. You can ignore me at your peril, but many people will have similar values.
I just finished a flooring project that made use of the table saw. My low end $350 saw was perfect for the rip cuts. There isn't another tool that would do it as well, but I might be tempted to try if a low end table saw starts at $500 (which is already way lower than the cheapest SawStop sold today). Do you have data on safety of alternate ways to solve a problem when the obvious solution has been priced out of reach?
As far as what manufacturers promise, I want to see the contract. We been promised "it will be so cheap you won't even notice" so many times that I just assume is marketing bluster from the get go. They will charge what the market will bear and they will exit if there isn't enough profit. Things they said in a committee room are meaningless. The only thing we know for sure is that what has worked so far is about to get banned.
Obviously I don't have time to do all the research you have done. I'm just a typical low end user who is looking at what it will cost me and what options are likely to disappear.
Isn’t that the entire point? Weekend warriors and small operators are going to be those getting injuries. Those with massive operations are likely using high spec gear already.
I live in a country (NZ) with fairly aggressive workplace safety legislation. We also have a single payer for accidental injuries and time off work (The Accident Compensation Corporation). It helps keep the courts clear but also means they have a lot of visibility into injury types and help work to prevent common accident methods.
Don’t delve too deep into the dark side of their work, its grim.
I think that misses an important argument he makes which is that all table saws should be equipped with better (higher quality, more effective) blade guards and riving knives. Much cheaper to implement and nearly as effective as sawstop.
The problem is woodworkers will do dumb things like remove both of these things from their saws to do unsafe cuts. You can even find youtube videos of people confidently asserting they're useless and just get in the way (They are not).
There’s no reason to do it though. The sawstop is in the body of the tablesaw. It doesn’t get in the way. The only reason I can see someone try to disable it is that really wet (and I mean soaking) wood might set it off.
Yes, but shifting the defaults from "something they take off because it is annoying every time they use it" to "something they turn off for specific types of cuts and otherwise never notice" can be a huge game changer for tool safety.
> The problem is woodworkers will do dumb things like remove both of these things from their saws to do unsafe cuts.
I have seen videos without them, with people saying that they have older saws and that is how they are used to work. But not that they are useless. Especially not the riving knives. One interesting argument I have seen from someone: currently the recommended way is to have a blade just a tad bit over the top of the piece, but he was taught to have it much higher. His point was that in such set up there was more vertical pressure down from the blade rather then horizontal and thus lower risk of kickback. Not sure if his idea has merit, but interesting thought.
Blade guards and riving knives are not enough. You would also need a kickback arrestor at the very least (even though the sawstop does not fix that issue).
I think you're on a reasonable path with your thinking there. Something I learned a couple of years ago is that table saws are particularly popular in the US. It varies from country to country, but in some places circular saws on tracks are the norm for the same purposes, especially on job sites.
These aren't very popular in the US so you don't see the dedicated "track saws" in stores here that are common in the UK for example. You can pretty easily buy a Kregg Accu-Cut which is a similar idea that you bolt onto your existing circular saw, but it's a little bit annoying compared to purpose-built track saws that are a tidier design and often plunge cut as well so it's simpler to start the cut. But you can also get proper track saws online, and I'll probably pick one up eventually to replace my Accu-Cut.
I don't think this is a perfect solution, getting cabinetry precision with a track saw might be tricky. But no one's doing that with a portable contractor table saw anyway. And the track saws are even more portable. I think the table saw concept is a better fit for larger, fixed tools, which I would guess probably have a better safety record than portables (larger table, cleaner environment, etc) even without sawstop technology. And I think it's more feasible to have good quality guards that will be less annoying on a fixed tool than a portable one, where they have a tendency to break off.
The US has space and pick up trucks that can fit plenty of table saws. Big tools in general are more accessible and affordable in the US. I have not seen as many people owning large tools like table saws, metal mills and lathes as in the US.
While I understand the name is not meant to be taken literally, I'd be curious to know the opinion of someone like Jamie Perkins who does actually have 'stumpy' fingers because of a woodworking incident:
I've seen jointer near-miss videos and the adult education woodworking class I took is even more terrifying in retrospect. I knew table saws were dangerous and assumed they were the most dangerous. At least with a table saw the fingers can often be reattached. Jointers and router tables just make hamburger.
I'm becoming a much bigger fan of mounting an uneven piece of wood to plywood and running it through the table saw to get that first edge.
The common theme is that when the blades catch the wood and the hand is gripping it, the hand tries to follow the wood. If you get very unlucky the wood escapes about the time your hand is nearing the blade and momentum carries you in. For routing tables it’s the curved pieces that’ll get ya. Snag, spin, bzzzt.
I believe my instructor suggested but didn’t mandate a two pusher technique with the jointer, where the left hand pushes the wood against the back plate and forward while the right helps stabilize. Less pressure on the hand with a vector toward the blade. Seemed safer to me.
Pushing sticks should save you because the hand never gets close to the table. But those thin plastic pushers aren’t enough elevation. I think Stumpy Nubs has a video about how people (and how many of them) get injured by those things. I’ve never been brave enough to watch it.
I don’t understand how you can hurt yourself with a jointer (presuming you’re using a push stick and pad to push the wood down from the top). There’s no risk of kickback and most jointers these days come with spring loaded blade guards that only expose enough of the blade that the wood makes contact with.
I'm a fan of Stumpy Nubs but I disagree with his economic analysis here. Saw Stop has effectively had a monopoly on this type of saw, so of course they've been pricing it high. When Bosh came out with their own version it only made sense to price it at a comparable level to their only competitor. For them to massively undercut Saw Stop would leave money on the table.
There will be some cost in re-engineering the cheap saws to handle a sensor and brake. But those costs will be amortized over time and the materials themselves will be incredibly cheap. We're talking about a capacitive sensor and a chunk of sacrificial metal.
There will also probably be some cost saving innovation around the tech. Since Saw Stop is a premium brand coasting on patent-enforced monopoly they haven't had to invest in R&D the way Dewalt, Bosh, and Makita will.
Circular saws are not just "a bit" safer. They cause far fewer injuries despite getting more use in construction. Table saws really are a menace.
I'm not in favor of this regulation because I don't like the idea of the government regulating hobbies, and I think it ends with some tools and hobbies getting banned altogether... but we should make this much clear.
There’s only one reason to use a tablesaw- repeatable cuts and nothing else can really do that. It’s also indispensable for any kind of furniture building.
I think there's a better argument for it, because there's some power asymmetry at play between the employees and the employer. It's harder to say "no" if you need this job to pay your bills. I still wish we had clear limits and tests for this, though. Instead, we have bureaucracies that keep expanding even after they tackle the most pressing issues.
For hobby work, the government is protecting me from me, and there are no winners in that game. I'm not imagining some hypothetical dystopia. The hobby landscape in Europe is already far more constrained than it is in the US.
The setting. There are countless safety regulations that apply only to workplaces. This isn't OSHA regulation. This is coming from the consumer protection agency.
The hobby table saw is the one I have in my basement that I use by my own choice, on my own time. The professional one is the one somebody else pays me to use everyday. They might be identical, that doesn't matter.
I'm going to be the guy that buys for cheap the "professional table saw" that got liquidated in the event that some new safety tech is legally mandated. 100% if I choose to buy it for my personal use, the government doesn't get to say I can't because I might hurt myself.
That said, I've never liked the table saw very much as a tool. The use-case is narrow, and yeah, you have to pay attention and be careful.
[ ] Check here is you testify, under penalty of perjury, that you are purchasing this saw solely for your own personal use, that you warranty you will never outside of premises that you own and control, that you will never undertake paid or unpaid work with this saw for any 3rd party, and that in the event of an accident with the saw, you will not seek public assistance with medical care.
"very good sir, let one of my colleagues help you load that into your car"
That's a good point. I would think that a circular saw or track saw is more dangerous. You tend to be hunched over the blade in an awkward position. I use a table saw over a circular saw because, for me, it seems safer.
I would love if someone could chime in with actual statistics here, but I've always heard that table saws are the most dangerous common power tool in the US by raw injury count alone. I have a weak assumption that more people have circular saws than have table saws. This seems unsurprising to me, because both track and circular saws are used with the blades faced away from the person. I can't speak to track saws, but I've never had a board launched at me by a circular saw. People also tend to over-extend themselves over tablesaws, and have their hands inches from the blades.
For table saw vs band saw, NEISS tries to track table saw vs hand saw vs radial arm saw vs band saw vs powered hack saw vs ...
It's hard, obviously, since it depends on effective coding of at point of injury.
As of about a decade ago (i don't have access to later data):
78% of injuries are table saw
9% band saw
8% miter saw
5% radial arm saw
Circular saws and track saws would be in the "other powered saw" category, and accounts for less than 1% of injuries.
blade contact was 86% of the injuries
While this data is a decade old, the data trends have been relatively stable (even the track saw one)
The simple reason that track saws don't show up meaningfully is there aren't enough sold - these aren't sale-normalized numbers, and the number of track saws vs table saws sold appears to be about 100x difference.
The main trend is that radial arm saw decreases and goes to miter saw and table saw.
This happens naturally since there are not a lot of sales of radial arm saws anymore.
(But also shows you how dangerous RAS are - despite them not really being sold, they are highly overrepresented in percent injuries)
> I would love if someone could chime in with actual statistics here, but I've always heard that table saws are the most dangerous common power tool in the US by raw injury count alone.
I don't have data, but there are various threats with a table saw.
1. Overconfidence / complacency. Things like reaching across the blade, not using push sticks, etc.
2. Kickback. It happens because you pinch the workpiece between the blade and the fence. Knowing how to properly configure a fench, featherboards, and how to use the kerf and ribbing knife is important.
3. Shop clutter. People tripping and/or slipping around their saw.
SawStop style tech vastly improves most of these scenarios. Kickback, though, turns a workpiece into a very large projectile. Where you stand matters a lot.
To be clear: I was asking for data about relative frequencies of accidents with varying tools, not about risks from table saws.
But yes, those are all risks. Additionally, like most tools a poorly maintained table saw is more dangerous.
The table saw I grew up using was from the 1940s, so was about 50 years old by the time I started using it in the late 90s. Its fence was always around 1-3° out of alignment. Absolutely no safety features whatsoever. The motor was fairly weak too, and the surface was rough, so you needed to use a bit of force while cutting, which obviously increases the risk of slipping into the blade.
I got a SawStop last year for my new house's shop and was pleasantly surprised by how little force I needed to use to guide workpieces along it while cutting.
Sawstop prevents one specific mode of improper use, and it's not even the most common danger present with table saws: kickback.
No matter how good or experienced you are with a table saw, you will have it launch material like a projectile backwards at some point (kickback.) Don't be standing behind it when it happens - instead, be on the other side of the fence.
If you're on the safe side of the fence, you likely don't have enough arm length to comfortably cut your fingers off anyway. (And why weren't you using a push stick?)
Also, when you drop a circular saw it stops spinning. Table saws won't shut off automatically if you lose your balance or something unexpected happens in your environment.
I'm actually for this change, though normally I'm not a fan of trying to mandate the use of technology to solve social problems (like vehicles installing distraction sensors). The table saw manufactures are caught in a stalemate legally speaking, where adding a massive safety feature like this can be seen as a tacit admission that previous generations of saws are unsafe. This could lead to a massive (expensive) recall, like what happened with radial saws. This seems like the perfect example of when a government should step in and brake the local maxima to ensure better safety for its citizens.
If all this legislation does is push more people to use low-end track saws on foam, I think that's a huge safety win. In the shop, the only woodworking tool I'm more weary of than a table saw is a jointer. Interestingly both have large spinning blades on the surface of a large flat surface. I wonder if that design in general needs to go by the wayside?
Intuitively, the table saw seems more dangerous to me (and I'm typing this with a finger with three pins in it from a table saw injury) because you're manipulating the circular saw directly, and thus more consciously. With a table saw you're manipulating the workpiece into the blade, which is indirectly a threat--in my case, the wood kicked, knocking my finger into the blade.
A circ saw might not be, but a tracksaw is much safer for breaking down sheet goods. Just not as fast as blasting a sheet of plywood through a job site saw.
Maybe but I presume the Chinese will jump in to subsidize that through mass production and we will all end up with saw stop enabled $250 contractor saws.
I mean, we have effectively outlawed cheaper vehicles that could probably have worked for a lot of needs. And... that largely seems like a fine thing?
I think it is fair that a holistic analysis of the legislation would make a lot of sense. I would be surprised to know that changing a saw from 150 to 450 would be a major change in its use. But, I could be convinced that it is not worth it.
I will note that is also taking at face value the cost of implementing the tech. In ways I don't know that I grant. I remember when adding a camera to a car's license plate was several hundred dollars of added cost. And I greatly regret not having one on my older vehicle. Mandating those was absolutely the correct choice. My hunch is when all saws have the tech, the cost of implementing will surprisingly shrink.
Maybe some power tools that get only occasional use could be fine with a better rental market. Not long ago I bought a ceramic tile cutter because renting one for 3 days was more expensive that buying one outright, but if that market went towards more expensive but safer models I'd reconsider and would do just fine with renting. And then tradespeople who need these tools more than 10 days per lifetime need to buy upscale anyway...
That feels like evidence for my point? We have causal evidence that safety regulation works. Sometimes we relax those rules. Often new technologies require adjustments. Still largely seems correct?
$150 is the cost of a really good table saw blade - a decent one would be half that. If you're using the saw at home, $150 is only 2-3x more than the shop vac you'll need to clean up after anything. At a job site, it's a lot less than the cost of the nailgun you'll use once you've cut something.
If these were the actual concerns, you can start the discussion at jurisdiction. Starting the debates with costs, though, sorta belies that concern?
Then, a problem you are going to run headlong into is that there are plenty of things that you can argue should not be done at different levels, but that are effectively controlled at a larger level. As a fun example, who makes sure that turmeric coming into the US doesn't have too much lead? Why can't/don't we leave that up to the individual states to fully deal with? Probably more fun, what about state laws that cover how much space is required for live stock for shelved products?
This video is a great overview of the history and the recent hearings, came here to link it.
Not sure I agree with his conclusion though - once all manufacturers are required to include the technology, surely they will still compete on price and find ways to get cheaper models to market? They will be unencumbered by the risk of patent violation to innovate on cheaper approaches to the same problem.
He also argues for riving knives and blade guards as an alternative, which are great, but not all cuts can be made with them in place.
As a hobby woodworker that sometimes makes mistakes, I've wanted a SawStop for a long time but have been stymied by the cost, so maybe I'm just being optimistic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxKkuDduYLk
He is opposed to this but expects it to pass. His best argument is that it would effectively outlaw affordable low end "contractor" portable job-site style table saws. I have one of those, a cheap $150 Ryobi. It would be more like $450 with the SawStop feature and I would not have been able to afford it.
I'd be using a circular saw instead. Maybe that is a bit safer, and at least it's more affordable until they require the same tech in circular saws. But shouldn't I be the one to weigh the value of a risk to only myself against the value of my fingers?