LunatechMar 31, 2024
SirBoostALot

All I can say is that if the Consumer Product Safety Commission goes along with this and the current high prices are maintained, people (specifically home woodwookers) will just improvise their own home-built table saws, either by modifying portable circular saws or by buiding table saws using standard electric motors salvaged from old appliances, furnaces, etc. I know this is possible because my dad built one using (I think) an old washing machine motor, and he used it to saw all the lumber he used to build his garage. Was it safe by today's standards? No way, but it did work and somehow he managed to not lose any fingers.

Home-built units will be even less safe that the currently available commercial models, but they will be affordable for people who are not in the construction trades, and they are really not that hard to build. Clearly nobody seems to have really considered the unintended consequences of this potential regulation.

Another alternative will be just using portable circular saws (with or without rip fences) which also aren't quite as safe but are very affordable, plus they tend to show up at yard sales. And I will be shocked if no videos appear showing circular saw to table saw conversions.

Don't get me wrong, the safe table saw is a great idea, and I would love to see this safety feature on every table saw if it is reasonably priced (adding not more than a few dollars to the cost above where current models are priced), but not if it means obscene profits for a single company that may be price gouging if the #CPSC allows it. Experienced builders are probably going to hate them anyway, because they may falsely trigger on lumber that is a little too "green" (ever seen how wet some pressure-treated lumber is right after you buy it?) and my understanding is that when the #safety mechanism is triggered it totally destroys the saw blade. Which is a small price to pay to save fingers, but if it turns out that it false triggers a lot then people will just find a way to disable the safety mechanism (to avoid having to continually buy and change out saw blades), defeating the whole purpose.

How much would you pay to make sure you never sawed off a finger?
https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-america/how-much-would-you-pay-to-make-sure-you-never-sawed-off-a-finger-20240331-p5fgdd.html

#ProductSafety #regulation #patent #ConsumerSafety #GovernmentPolicy #GovernmentOverreach

How much would you pay to make sure you never sawed off a finger?

What if the government said you had no choice but to pay up? And what if only one company held the patents for the safety mechanism?

The Age
Mar 31, 2024 at 6:11pmWeb
Show threadIan Hecht 🇨🇦Mar 31, 2024
@SirBoostALot I remember when those first appeared. Once they existed, all school table saws had to incorporate them for liability reasons. It was not cheap and they ruin the saw blade and the brake mechanism every time they're tripped.
Show threadSirBoostALotMar 31, 2024

@ianhecht Wonder if that may have influenced the decision to drop school shop classes in some cases?

I believe it would be possible (and very easy) to design a mechanism that does NOT ruin the blade and brake, for all we know they have already invented it but will not release it until just around the time their patents on the current mechanism expire! I can think of at least two ways to do it without even trying hard, but I don't have access to a machine shop to test any design. It would require a slight modification to the saw blades, that in the long run might possibly even save a little money on their production, but it's not a hard problem to solve.