![]() Tens of thousands of digits have been sliced off in the past decade, but the rest of power tool industry has snubbed the technology and carried on as before. ![]() However, SawStop still makes the only saws with skin-sensing technology, and accounts for a tiny fraction of total saw sales. “I mean, we’re dealing with human beings.” “You couldn’t wipe the smile off him after this,” Wheeler says, adding that he, too, was “totally ecstatic.” All saws should have this technology, Wheeler says. A photo on SawStop’s website shows Seymour beaming in triumph as he displays his thumb, which looks like it has a paper cut. (SawStop also has acknowledged two reports of amputations.) Wheeler bought two of the company’s first saws. In March 2006, Carl Seymour, a foreman at his shop, accidentally touched a whirring blade. Since it started making table saws in in 2004, SawStop has recorded 2,000 “finger saves”-customer reports of accidents likely to have caused disfiguring injuries with conventional saws, but that resulted in minor cuts or a few stitches at most. At an average cost of $35,000 each, these accidents lead to more than $2.3 billion in societal costs annually including medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering. Those kinds of injuries are all too common: Each year, more than 67,000 workers and do-it-yourselfers are injured by table saws, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (PDF), resulting in more than 33,000 emergency room visits and 4,000 amputations. Watching SawStop in action, Wheeler thought: If only this had come along sooner. Wheeler felt awful about the injuries, the loss of two good workers, the $95,000 in medical bills, the doubling of his workers compensation rates. Not long before, two of his employees had been maimed within a few weeks of each other. As the operator of a wood shop in Hot Springs, Arkansas, he was all too aware of the unforgiving nature of table saws. The saw was equipped with a safety device called SawStop that could distinguish between wood and flesh and then stop the blade fast enough to prevent a gruesome injury. As the hot dog touched the whirring saw, the blade came to a dead stop in about three one-thousandths of a second, leaving the dog with only a minor nick. A man took an Oscar Meyer wiener and pushed it into the blade of a table saw spinning 4,000 times per minute. Gerald Wheeler caught the hot dog demonstration at the International Woodworking Fair in Atlanta in 2002. With my saw I don't need that and I just just my fence locked at 90 degrees to the table.A longer version of this story appears at FairWarning. I do a lot of resawing of Oak and I would not want to have to follow a line by eye with a post type resaw guide, it just takes too much effort. By keeping the kerf open the saw dust can escape and keep the blade cooler. When a blade gets hot it loses it's temper and won't perform correctly. When my saw has a new blade, and under proper tension it will cut 1/16" veneer nice and straight, up to 8" thick each time.Ĭherry is difficult to work sometimes and you may want to insert a wedged shim into the cut as soon as you have enough open kerf. A blade that's dull on one side will favor the opposite side. I use Timberwolf blades myself and occasionally I get one that won't cut straight, but it's rare. Too much tension, if that's even possible is better than not enough. The blade may not have enough tension IF you go by the indicator on the back with the spring. The "rough sawn" wood may not be at 90 degrees to the fence or may be curved slightly. The blade should be centered on the wheels. The blade may be dull on one side or both.
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