Key point here is the SawStop CEO is promising to open up the patent and make it available for anyone, so it's a bit more complicated than the typical regulatory-capture lawyer success story.
The 3-point seat belt is another time this happened and probably one of the few feel-good "this should be available to everyone" patent stories: Volvo designed it, decided the safety-for-humanity* benefits outweighed patent protections, and made the patent open for anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bohlin (*: at least the segment of humanity that drives cars)
I'd be curious to hear the cynical take here. If I was to wargame it, I would guess something like: SawStop doesn't want to compete with Harbor Freight and cheap chinese tool manufacturers -- that's a race to the bottom, and power tools have turned into ecosystem lock-in plays which makes it difficult for a niche manufacturer to win in. So they'd rather compete on just the safety mechanism since they have a decade head start on it. They're too niche to succeed on SawStop(TM) workbenches, and they forsee bigger profits in a "[DeWalt|Milwaukee|EGo|...], Protected by SawStop(TM)" world.
If you go listen to their CEO's testimony, he clearly states that the one single original patent behind the idea is now open but was expiring anyway. He brags about them spending a lot of money on R&D and needing to recoup that, reiterating that they have many other patents that aren't being opened that cover the exact implementation. He talked about them exploring those other methods, choosing not to patent them, and only patenting the best solution.
All his words. He's trying to explain that sure, the patent is open, but companies are still going to have to work harder than Sawstop because they have many more patents they refuse to open that cover the best and most logical implementation of this idea.
You're asking for a "cynical" take, but it's not really cynical! The CEO is trying to tell everyone, openly, and they're not listening. They are NOT altruistic, otherwise they would have opened the entire suite of patents. They are openly saying this singular patent is open, because it doesn't matter and that they will doggedly defend their other patents. Now, every other manufacturer will now need to navigate a minefield of patent litigation, and follow the path of subpar implementations that Sawstop ruled out during their R&D.
I don't know why everyone is ignoring his testimony and thinking the company is giving anything up, it's wild!
Why not just set the mandate to begin after most of these patents expire? I would really not brush off how serious of a safety problem this is, but honestly I’d rather the government either delay the implementation or buy out the patents because this is a blatant market failure of public interest that the government is well poised to address. Digit amputation incurs a public cost even in America.
If the patent covers something that was already in the first version of the device, it should be either patented before 2004 and thus expired, or patented afterwards and thus invalid due to prior art, no?
> Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
> 35 U.S.C. 101 has been interpreted as imposing four requirements: (i) only one patent may be obtained for an invention; (ii) the inventor(s) must be identified in an application filed on or after September 16, 2012 or must be the applicant in applications filed before September 16, 2012; (iii) the claimed invention must be eligible for patenting; and (iv) the claimed invention must be useful (have utility).
The prior art requirement isn't "there exists nothing like this before" but rather "this invention hasn't been listed before".
> A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
> The prior art requirement isn't "there exists nothing like this before" but rather "this invention hasn't been listed before".
Wow. So this is how "evergreening" works? You patent enough of it that nobody can replicate it, but not everything, then every couple of years you patent one more non-obvious detail even though it's already included in v1?
I always thought patenting has to happen before first public use. I wonder if that's different in Europe.
Kind of, not really though. You can't patent the same thing again.
> 35 U.S.C. 101 has been interpreted as imposing four requirements: (i) only one patent may be obtained for an invention;
You need to improve upon it and have a new claim.
If I was to patent A and make it, and then patent B which improves upon A at some point in the future, when A's patent expires someone else can make A and if they show that they're making A and not B, there's nothing I can do about it.
The issue is that often B is better than A (why make a 223,898 light bulb when you can make a 425,761 light bulb?) so while you could make A, its not commercially viable to do so.
The thing is that I've got a research line looking at making improvements on B and patenting C later which is a further improvement on B. The investment of time, knowledge, and resources to be able to do refinements of A to make B, C, and later D - that's where it's hard to get into it.
Someone else could improve on A to make B' and if it was different than how I did B, they could patent that. Though in the real world, this often involves in hiring away people who are familiar with A and investing a lot of time / money into making a B' that might get interpreted by the courts as too similar to B.
The cynical take is more that it's crappy blade guards that nobody uses that really should be improved, and it's not necessary to mandate SawStop-style blade breaking technology.
Bascially, mandating the more expensive blade brakes instead of standards around blade guards will eliminate cheap table saws from the market. And yes, this has happened before with radial arm saws - they are now basically non-existent in the US.
So it definitely benefits SawStop to give away this patent, as their saws will look a hell of a lot "cheaper" than competition.
SawStop often breaks the saw itself, not just the blade. There's alot of energy being put into the saw all at once, and I've seen examples where it fractured the mounts of the saw itself when it engaged.
That's of course great, if you're in the business of selling saws, not so great if you're in the business of buying saws.
I have been associated with four hackerspaces that have SawStop's.
I have seen an average of about one false firing a month--generally moisture but sometimes a jig gets close enough to cause something. I have seen 4 "genuine" firings of which 2 would have been an extremely serious injury. This is over about 8 years--call it 10 years.
So, 4 spaces * 10 years * 12 months * $100 replacement = $48,000 paid in false firings vs 4 life changing injuries over 10 years. That's a pretty good tradeoff.
Professional settings should be way better than a bunch of rank amateurs. Yeah, we all know they aren't because everybody is being shoved to finish as quickly as possible, but proper procedures would minimize the false firings.
Part of the problem with false firing is that SawStop are the only people collecting any data and that's a very small number of incidents relative to the total number of incidents from all table saws. SawStop wants the data bad enough that if you get a "real" firing, SawStop will send you a new brake back when you send them the old one just so they can look at the data.
Assuming of course, there is no possible way that you could otherwise reliably prevent those injuries that doesn't depend on a human's diligence. That is, of course, ridiculous, but, that's the nature of this regulation.
You're also not accounting for the cost of the blade, which isn't salvageable after activation, and those can get spendy.
Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market, which will, of course, prevent anyone from innovating a no-damage alternative to SawStop, which is certainly possible.
> Assuming of course, there is no possible way that you could otherwise reliably prevent those injuries that doesn't depend on a human's diligence. That is, of course, ridiculous, but, that's the nature of this regulation.
Well, the saw manufacturers could have done that before this regulation. However, they didn't. Only once staring down imminent regulation have they been willing to concede anything.
Bosch even has a license to the SawStop technology and had their own saws with blade stops. They pulled them all from being sold.
Sorry, not sorry. The saw manufacturers have had 20+ years to fix their shit and haven't. Time to hit them with a big hammer.
> Realistically, SawStop wants the data so it can lobby itself into being a permanent player in the market
Realistically, SawStop is so damn small that they're going to disappear. They're likely to get bought by one of the big boys. Otherwise, the big boys are just going to completely mop the floor with them--there is absolutely zero chance that SawStop becomes a force in the market.
Bosch pulled their saws from the US market because SawStop sued and forced them to. Then SawStop started lobbying to have their own design mandated on all saws. It was only later that SawStop said they'd allow Bosch (presumably in order to collect patent license fees).
As to this proposed mandate... If it's mandating any safety device, and Bosch and others can freely compete without everyone paying SawStop, I'm all for it. But if it's mandating the SawStop design, or would require all competitors to pay SawStop, forget it.
You have the order wrong, first they lobbied (2011), then Bosch introduced (2015) and pulled their saws (2017). Then SawStop reached an agreement in 2018. And the reason Bosch hasn't reintroduced it is apparently interference from cell phone signals. https://toolguyd.com/bosch-reaxx-table-saw-why-you-cant-buy-...
Similar background and experience with sawstop. I'm a huge proponent of SawStops but it's important to be as upfront as possible. It's $100 for the cartridge and then another $60-$120 for replacement saw blade.
Sweat dripping on the work piece (especially NoVA in summer with AC on fritz) was responsible for a fair share of the cartridge firing without contacting flesh.
This is a good amount of data but is $100 really the right cost for the replacement of a table saw if the saw itself is actually damaged, as OP says? Is it your experience that the saw is almost never damaged and the replacement cost is almost always the ~$150 dollar blade, or do you know how frequently these false firings damage the saw as well?
Well, only SawStop sells these saws, and I haven't seen anybody need to replace the saw after a firing. They just replace the blade and brake and get back to work.
Replacement cost is always brake and blade.
The blade is always dead. These things work by firing what looks to be an aluminum block directly into the blade.
I ran woodshop at a makerspace with multiple SawStops. We went through lots of cartridges and blades but never experienced damage to the rest of the saw. I have no idea where OP is getting that information/FUD.
Divided by four, right, so $12k? I would think the medical, rehab, lost wages/productivity, and disability costs of an average table saw hand injury would easily exceed $12k.
It is not that simple. Replacing a saw is a loss to the business owner, while an employee losing a finger by his own fault costs nothing to the company.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, this is not true. If you are injured at the workplace while performing your work duties and you are not actively intoxicated on drugs or alcohol, then you are entitled to medical care and worker's compensation for that injury. It is absolutely something that has a cost to the company.
This is both factually incorrect and not funny at all.
In addition, last I checked, modern medicine cannot reattach nerves so you lose a great deal of functionality of your finger or hand even if you save it.
If it engaged incorrectly, absolutely. If it saved my thumb and I have to buy a new saw as a result, it's hard to imagine a price point where I'd call the outcome not so great.
If it saves your thumb, sure. If you're ripping a wet piece of wood, no thumb risk at all, then, yeah, not so great.
Realistically, I don't like the tech or the methodology at all. Battle bots had saws that would drop into the floor without damage, and pop back up even, also without damage, and that was decades ago. That's the right model, not "fuck up the saw".
>Battle bots had saws that would drop into the floor without damage, and pop back up even, also without damage, and that was decades ago. That's the right model, not "fuck up the saw".
Might be wrong, but my own amateur reasoning has me believe that a table saw has far more kinetic energy than a battery powered battle bot, and that the SawStop must likely move the saw in microseconds, vs a battle bot which may comparatively have all the time in the world.
No, I mean they had table saw rigs that would bring the saw up/down into the floor with an actuator as a 'ring hazard', ie, your robot could be subject to sawing at any moment if they happened to be there.
The question is, how fast does it need to be? Likely not that fast really, certainly not microseconds, and an actuator could easily yank the saw down without damaging it if it detected you were about to lose a finger.
There's also no reason you couldn't use the same actuator to do fancy things, like vary cut depth on the fly, or precisely set the cut depth in the first place. Can't do any of that with a soft aluminum pad that gets yeeted into the sawblade when it detects a problem.
Basically, SawStop exists to sell saws. Those saws happen to be safer, but that's a marketing point, it's not what ultimately makes them money. Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.
I don't know - the marketing material actually says 5 milliseconds. That's the crux of the problem and I don't believe you can actually move the saw fast enough to not cause serious damage to the human without damaging the saw. The problem, as I understand it, is stopping the saw. The saw actuator only makes sense if it moves fast enough and given the saw stop works on detection, I'm not convinced you have that much time.
I'm considering the physical reality here - if the saw must be yanked down quickly, how much force must be applied to the saw to move it, and then can that equal and opposite force be applied to stop it without damaging the saw?
>Look at the incentives, you'll find the truth.
This is true of any safety device? The SawStop inventor created his company after trying to license it and eventually won in the marketplace after nearly 30 years. Surely his competitors would have released an actuator based solution if it is was possible rather than ceding marketshare of high end saws?
Bosch did release an actuator-based solution. They got sued by SawStop for patent violations and lost and pulled it from the market. SawStop's main patent just covers the concept of a blade brake, not a specific implementation.
The actual contention isn't whether an actuator-based solution would work, its if an actuator-based solution could stop the saw without damaging it (and therefore not give credence to the claim that SawStop is intentionally designing a poor solution in order to sell more blades).
As far as I can tell, REAXX also damages the blade.
>and therefore not give credence to the claim that SawStop is intentionally designing a poor solution in order to sell more blades
This is the most asinine argument I’ve heard yet, and I am not a fan of this regulation.
Blades are typically cheap and the ones that aren’t are often repairable after an activation. Also, Sawstop barely sells any blades - I don’t know a single woodworker or cabinet shop that runs their blades.
I think the speed that things can go wrong when using a table saw (or most power tools) is faster than some people, including some woodworkers, might expect. There's a good example video here (warning, shows a very minor injury):
While we're still not talking microseconds, I think it highlights that moving the blade out of the way needs to happen very quickly in some cases to avoid serious injury.
Sounds like you're perfectly positioned to start a SawStop competitor!
"Protect your equipment AND your fingers."
With the government potentially mandating these types of devices, you could be makin' the big bucks!
These incentives are clear, where's the truth?
(This is only somewhat facetious. I'm skeptical of your claims, but not enough to discount them out-of-hand. The industry honestly does seem ripe for disruption.)
I think the other key variable is how fast is your finger being advanced towards the saw blade and how much total depth of contact are you willing to accept and claim a victory. In an aggressive ripping the material you're holding towards the blade that might be 10 mph (~15 feet per second), if you're willing to tolerate a 1/16" depth of injury, you have about a half a millisecond.
If the rate of advancement is much slower (like a normal pace of feeding the stock into the saw accident), you have several milliseconds before reaching a 1/16" depth of injury from first contact to last contact.
An entry-level Dado blade can run about $100. The $10-12 sawblades can't make finish cuts that are worth a damn, because they chew through the work and tear splinters out rather than making precise nips at the front and back of each grain of the wood. For a saw blade an entry level blade that doesn't do this to your work can run you more like $60.
I know this because I've had to buy a table saw blade to replace a $10-12 one on my wife's table saw that someone threw on there because they were doing framing work.
How often do you use a saw? At $3500 a saw I care. I saw a lot of wood and inadvertently hit at least one staple/nail/screw per year. Over the last 20 years of using my saw that would be tens of thousands of dollars if even a portion of them damaged the saw. It would essentially price me out of doing woodworking.
SawStop works by detecting electrical conductance, and there are many reports of it misfiring when attempting to cut wood that isn't fully dry (i.e., there is moisture inside the wood, increasing its electrical conductance).
I'm aware. I'm not buying that a new saw blade and a replaced brake is too much of a cost over the peace of mind that you're at a significantly reduced chance of losing a finger.
And they're pointing out it's not just those two replaceable components - it's the _entire saw_ that they're risking destroying off a false positive that some woodworkers will hit frequently.
They are suggesting the blade retracted, broke the saw, in a situation in which there was no risk to the finger. Maybe there was a literally hotdog in the wood.
> If you're ripping a wet piece of wood, no thumb risk at all
Most people would rather go bankrupt than lose a finger. Fingers are kind of important. If I can choose to keep my house or my finger, I’m definitely choosing the finger.
So just divide the average net worth of a saw operator by the cost of a saw to get how many saws a finger is worth.
Exactly, homeless people living on the street should really be called familyless.
If I went bankrupt and lost everything I have a social safety net of family members who would put a roof over my head until I got on my feet again. Only people without that safety net end up on the streets. Or they have addictions that mean their family can’t take care of them anymore.
The guys I've seen lose fingers were all sleep-deprived and working flat out. The biggest risk to site safety is sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion.
I do it so seldom and am so careful not to put my fingers within 3 inches of the blade that this is a non-issue for me. This is another one of those "let's put 6 extra buttons that all need to be pressed to start the saw!" kinda situations that doesn't do anything to improve safety because the stop is the first thing you disconnect if it throws a false positive.
If we're concerned about job site injuries then let's address the real problem, which is that a lot of people using these things do so as fast as humanly possible with little regard for set up, site safety, or body positioning because the amount of money they will lose by doing that eats so much margin out of their piecework that it's not worth it. As usual we don't want to solve the hard problem of reducing throughput to improve safety, but we're perfectly happy to throw a part that is as expensive as the sawblade on the unit just to say we're doing something.
"If we're concerned about job site injuries then let's address the real problem, which is that a lot of people using these things do so as fast as humanly possible with little regard for set up, site safety, or body positioning"
Solving that sounds a lot harder to me than legislating that saws have safety features.
I tend to agree, assuming there are no false positives. Admittedly, I’m not sure how often that occurs, nor if we even can know that based on all the various work environments the cheap table saws are being used in today.
This is true, it can also fracture the motor mounts and not be noticed, until you are performing a difficult and aggressive cut and the motor mount breaks with a spinning motor attached and your board shoots across the room or into your face.
I ran the woodshop at a local makerspace. We went through a lot of sawstop cartridges...easily 10-15 a year. The saw was never damaged because of the cartridge firing.
I've seen all of the talking points, but a regulation probably is required simply to force liability.
The biggest "excuse" I have seen from the saw manufacturers is that if they put this kind of blade stop on their system that they are now liable for injuries that occur in spite of the blade stop or because of a non-firing blade stop. And that is probably true!
Even if this specific regulation doesn't pass, it's time that the saw manufacturers have to eat the liability from injuries from using these saws to incentivize making them safer.
As for cost, the blade stops are extremely low volume right now, I can easily see the price coming down if the volume is a couple of orders of magnitude larger.
We had one of these in my highschool woodshop - they would demo it once a year on the parents night because of the expense. I'd rather see this regulated in a way that says places like schools or production woodshops would need these from an insurance perspective, but home woodshops wouldn't be required to
Why are radial arm saws so dangerous? I have an old one and other than shooting wood into the shop wall when ripping, or holding the wood with your hand it seems pretty hard to hurt yourself. Circular saws seem way more dangerous, and the only injury I've ever had was from a portaband.
There used to be some pretty wild published advice on how to use a radial arm saw including ripping full sheets of plywood by walking the sheet across the cutting plane with the saw pointed at your stomach. They also travel towards the operator in the event of a catch because of the direction of the blade and the floating arbor. This makes positioning yourself out of the potential path of the blade critical and the one thing we know is that you can't trust people to be safe on a job site when they are in a hurry.
>There used to be some pretty wild published advice on how to use a radial arm saw including ripping full sheets of plywood by walking the sheet across the cutting plane with the saw pointed at your stomach.
So, similar to ripping plywood on a table saw, then? What makes one worse than the other here?
>They also travel towards the operator in the event of a catch because of the direction of the blade and the floating arbor.
So, like a modern sliding miter saw, then? What makes one worse than the other?
I have the original manuals describing how to rip using a radial arm saw. The blade is set at the level of your stomach and mere inches away from a spinning blade as you walk a sheet of plywood along it. There are so many ways for that situation to go wrong, and so few ways to make that situation safe. I have a beast of a radial arm saw, and I set it up to rip out of curiosity, and it would be insane to ever do it that way. It will cut your guts wide upon if you so much as slip.
And when that saw bites, and comes at you with enough force to be too much for you to react to. If parts of you are in the way, it'll rip right through them as it punches you in the jaw.
You do realize you linked to a discontinued product that costs over $5k?
This is what I actually expect to happen to the table saw market - they all become expensive, and the sub-$1k market (which is huge) goes away. Yes, you can find an RAS but it's about 10x the price of what they used to be.
So I stand by my statement: they're effectively non-existent, demand is gone after the 2001 recall by Craftsman, and most of the major manufacturers have stopped producing them. I expect the same thing to happen to table saws.
It took the better part of a decade to get close to the light quality that incandescent bulbs produced, and we're still not really 1:1.
For alot of things, that's fine, but I distinctly remember having to bring clothing over to a window because the bulbs I had would not render the color of it accurately enough to put an outfit together. That's partly the clothing manufacturer's fault for using cheap dyes that are prone to metameric failure, but still, annoying.
I'm still in the process of purging the early gen LED bulbs that I have with nicer, high CRI, High Ra, variants, and getting dimmable bulbs in the places where it matters, because around me, the incandescent rollout was more of a rugpull when LED's first came out, and I snagged a couple bulk cases of cheap LED bulbs to use that were... not great.
I do keep a few decorative 'eddison' bulbs, aka squirrel cage bulbs, for reading use, as they are very warm, like 2300k, and the light they produce is very comfortable to be in at night. They use a ton of power, but, because they're not running their filaments as hard as they could, they tend to last forever. I've had one go out in ~10 years because I had removed it for cleaning and dropped it while it was hot (and also because it was hot), the envelope survived but upon being turned back on it ran for about a second before failure.
All of that to say, yes, there were downsides, mostly short/mid term downsides, some that persist to this day if you're not clever or don't know what to care about.
You might be forgetting the decade of crappy compact fluorescent bulbs before reasonably-priced decent-quality LED bulbs became viable. Crappy, in that I don't think I ever owned one that lasted anywhere near their supposed 10-year life. And the long warm-up time for at least some models, but you didn't know which ones. And how to dispose of them properly. And the concerns with mercury when you broke one.
The "wasteful" infrared light turns out to have important health benefits. The same health benefits can be got from sunlight, but when indoor light was incandescent, people who couldn't get sunlight because they had to work all day would get at least some infrared from indoors lighting.
Short summary: 25 years ago, if you had asked a researcher what is the most important antioxidant in the human body, they would have answered vitamin C or maybe vitamin E. 12 years ago, they probably would have answered glutathione. Nowadays many researchers think the most important antioxidant is melatonin in the mitochondria. melatonin cannot get into the mitochondria, but serotonin can, and the mitochondria contains enzymes to convert that serotonin to melatonin -- and certain frequencies of light in the red and the near infrared greatly increase the rate of mitochondrial melatonin production.
Is it a serious journal? There are a lot of crappy journals, and it''s difficult to know if you are not in the area. It doesnt loook like a big editorial, so it's suspictious.
From the article:
> ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
> No external funding sources were used in this review.
That's also strange. It's not a smoking gun, but everyone gets some funding fro somewhere.
When my parents did a remodel in the '00s they wanted can lighting. They had to use a new, specific type of receptacle because of efficiency standards.
But since then we've found a better way using the old receptacles, which wasn't an option in the '00s. They don't really make those bespoke ones anymore. When my mom did a refresh to sell her house last year, she had to replace everything done in the '00s.
This last winter I was asked whether I knew if Tractor Supply still carried 100W bulbs since the person used them to keep a pipe in a barn from freezing and the current one had burnt out. The closest thing I could think of (that was easy to find) was a 275W heat lamp, but that uses a lot more power.
Standard oil invented tanker cars and built pipelines. Everyone else was stuck unloading 55 gallon drums from normal railcars beacuse of patents and relative lack of investment.
Then the government broke standard oil up, rather than revoke the patent or reform the system in away way, and prices got higher for consumers in the end.
This is often brought up as a success story. Patents never have worked as intended.
This patents a machine for pasteurization. The fact of pasteurization, getting milk to the target temperature, is not copyrightable. You would just have to use a different machine but you could still pasteurize.
I’m not utterly opposed to this regulation, but I do think SawStop stands to benefit. Even if the patents are open, it will take competitors a long time to develop new products. Meanwhile, SawStop will get the distribution that they don’t currently have. Just glancing at the HomeDepot website, I see that they sell SawStop but they are not stocked at my local store. I imagine that if this goes through, every Physical store in the country will need to stock their saws, at least until their competitors put out products. in the meantime, they can get much better economies of scale, and then try to compete on price
Bosch already has these table saws ready and available for jobsite-type of saws, they are sold in Canada I think. Techtronic Industries (Milwaukee, Ryobi) and Stanley Black & Decker (DeWalt) are huge enough to just push through and it will filter to all the brands they manufacture. Delta is smaller, but this is their bread and butter so probably they have some technology lying in wait.
The higher end table saws is probably a different story, they are even smaller manufacturers, but a lot of that stuff is different anyway.
Usually these types of laws come with a date in the future that they will actually be implemented giving such competitors time to figure these things out.
Yeah, i looked at the proposal in more depth and it proposes 36 months from publication until the rule takes effect [1]. That does seem like a lot of time (the proposal itself notes that this is longer than usual).
I guess the benefit to SawStop is that they sell a better product, but turns out most people won't pay 2-3x the price for the added benefit. If they can make everyone implement the same feature, then they still probably won't compete on price, but the price difference will go down, and perhaps people will pay a low to medium premium for a slightly better safety mechanism.
As far as regulatory capture goes, it doesn't sound particularly nefarious. I do believe that the folks at SawStop genuinely believe this is necessary regulation.
One thing I don't see mentioned with any of these discussions is that this massively increases the cost of using different kinds of blades on the saw. If you need to use a specialty blade that's a smaller diameter, it requires a matching special size safety cartridge. Dado stack? Another, even more expensive cartridge. I know most people typically have one blade on the saw and never change it or if they do, it's just another of the same size, but for those of us who do regularly swap out blades that aren't the standard 10" x 1/8", these types of regulations add both significant cost and time/frustration.
I'm all for safety and would love for there to be more options for this kind of tech from other saw makers, but I personally don't think regulation is necessarily the right way to do it. Just like there are legitimate cases for removing the blade guard, there are legitimate cases for running without this safety feature, especially one that would require several hundred dollars more investment even if the safety feature is disabled (On SawStop, you physically can't mount a dado stack unless you buy a special dado stack cartridge).
And if SawStop really wanted to improve safety for everyone... well I find it rather telling that they'll only open their patent if the regulation becomes law. Since they're effectively the only ones with the tech, with the regulation passed, buyers instantly have only one option for however long it takes for competitors to come to market with their own (which they'll be hesitant to do based only on a spoken promise by the patent holder). Instant pseudo-monopoly.
It takes 3 minutes to swap out the normal saw stop cartridge and put the one in for dado blades. Setting up the thickness and putting the dado stack on takes twice as long. If you are doing enough woodworking that you have a dado stack and specialty blades the saw stop cartridge is not that big of a deal.
Cynical take is that the SawStop feature adds enough cost to budget table saws that they will no longer be economically viable and you can only purchase mid-high end tables saws going forward.
Then I guess the question really is: do we think (probably less experienced) consumers should be able to buy table saws that can easily accidentally cut their fingers off, in a way that is preventable but too costly?
Table saws, in spite of being used far less than kitchen knives, account for far more digit amputations and more serious ones.
It is pretty uncommon and rather difficult to cause yourself a digit injury that cannot be recovered from with a kitchen knife. Bad technique is most likely to lop off the end of the fingertip which can fully regrow so long as the cut isn’t very deep.
Mandolines and meat slicers (guards are bypassed when cleaning which happens every 4hr, they also tend to be used by 16 year olds) are much much more dangerous but they tend to be dialed in quite shallowly which limits the damage.
Table saws are THE most dangerous thing for your fingers because of where people tend to put their hands when using the tool and how they can go right through your digits and how they’re dialled in to make thick cuts. The logic that well if we accept kitchen knives we shouldn’t have safety regulations on table saws doesn’t make sense because table saws are far more dangerous and unlike with kitchen knives it’s actually possible to enforce the default use of an effective safety mechanism which ensures a cut will usually be shallow enough to be recovered from. Of course some people will disable the brake excessively but the average person will likely keep it on most of the time.
You can argue we shouldn’t have this safety regulation because it will add costs to consumers, and point out that other safety approaches already exist, the safety paradox, but the comparison to kitchen knives doesn’t really make all that much sense. I’d argue adding saw brakes as a standard feature makes a ton of sense due to the high social cost of digit amputation and the inconvenient and frequently ignored use of other safety approaches.
> There's never an actual reason you need to put your fingers anywhere close to a moving blade.
But that's how it is: people do cut their fingers off on table saws. They all know what you said. And yet 30 K accidents per year in the US alone. It is a serious problem.
I never bought one because it's just too big of a risk.
Just because you're afraid of woodworking doesn't mean you should kill it for everyone. If this passes only professionals will be able to continue, which presumably is what the lobbyists want.
It's no different to Apple insisting that only they should repair Apple products, and hobbyists should be trusted.
You hit a knot in your 2x4 while on a table saw and you might be surprised when you see your fingers laying on the ground and you thought you were being safe too.
All table saws including cheap ones come with a stick used to do the termination of the cut and the instruction manual also says to use the stick. SawStop is probably more useful for experienced contractors pushing the limit to do faster cuts
You can hurt yourself with a whole array of tools, especially in construction. A sawzall is a pretty horrifying gadget really, for example, and that's likely more popular among homeowners than a table saw.
I can lose fingers with my recip saw, circular saw, oscillating multi-tool, or angle grinder; scalp myself with my dremel (long hair); put a nail through myself with one of my many nailguns; the list of potential risks associated with power tools is numerous.
I think table saw brakes are awesome and absolutely have a benefit for things like high school shop classes, but a properly functioning blade guard also does the job most times.
Based on the data we have about how people end up with finger amputations from hospitals I’d say the evidence that saw guards are inadequate in practice is strong.
I have a feeling these will be as ineffective. From SawStop FAQ:
"You can operate the saw in Bypass Mode which deactivates the safety system’s braking feature, allowing you to cut aluminum, very wet/green wood (see above) and other known conductive materials. If you are unsure whether the material you need to cut is conductive, you can make test cuts using Bypass Mode to determine if it will activate the safety system’s brake."
> The first thing people will do is turn on the bypass and never turn it off.
I have a feeling that you have never used a sawstop. You can not "turn on the bypass and never turn it off." As soon as you hit the stop paddle the bypass mode is disabled. You must reenable the bypass mode every time you want to pull the paddle. If someone is dead set on getting stuff done the bypass procedure gets old quickly.
Have you ever used a sawstop? How did you turn on bypass mode forever?
I honestly feel like the majority of this specific community would leave it on given the nature of our interests, and in general I think enough people will leave it on for the brake to be worth it, although this reality certainly does degrade the value of a saw brake mandate.
When I see saws at residential construction sites the blade guards are almost always removed.
If people are already bypassing the safety features then "add more safety features" is a dubious move. Gotta go fast, can't afford if the saw has a false positive, switch it all off. Changing behavior is likely going to be a lot harder.
I don't think the Sawstop will run when the brake isn't fully engaged. I admittedly only tried that once when first using it. But in this case, it's not optional - it's more like the airbag in a car. If it's on, it's working.
Seems like you have to do it for every time you switch it on, but on the jobsite saw it's not a key, just an extra button, so we'll see if people get in the habit of just always turning it off in case they have wet wood or other material.
Blade guards are the first thing removed in a commercial environment, and probably by a good number of hobbyists who think they'll get in the way. They also can make accurate cuts difficult to align since they partially obscure the blade.
Yeah, because people are foolish and disregard safety procedures. I don't think we can, or should even try to, structure society to keep people safe when they choose to disregard safety.
More experienced customers are likely using the saw more often so I wouldn’t presume this only or primarily benefits the inexperienced.
First digit amputation (100% recoverable) I caused myself happened after spending most of my life using a knife because I just got complacent and was cooking when I knew I was extremely fatigued. Wood is also a natural product where natural variance can cause a table saw to operate in unexpected ways that catch people off guard.
The hobbyist table saw owners I know (myself included) tend to be more careful around a saw. We have the luxury of time to setup and think about our cuts (and less complacency) than the folks shoving wood through a saw to meet a deadline or because the boss is telling them they need to make X amount of cabinets per day.
Gotta love false dichotomies. There are anti-kickback and guard solutions on the market today. They suck on the cheaper saws but it would be a hell of a lot less expensive to fix that than add a saw stop.
I think you'll pay high health insurance premiums regardless of whether anyone gets hurt because it's a parasitic industry and we live in a culture of bottomless greed.
My understanding is that the excess cost isn't so much the safety device itself but that cheap, flimsy table saws can't handle the extreme torque created by stopping the saw more-or-less instantly, so the device is limited to higher end equipment that's heavier and has better build quality.
If it costs 200$ to add the device and modify the saw to accept it and the original saw cost 300$ you've got a pretty massive increase. Also from some deep dive I saw apparently SawStop has basically cornered the entire premium market and the only market left for other saw makers was the low end range.
Another cynical take would be that SawStop has secretly invested heavily in a saw blade manufacturers to profit from more blades being destroyed when the stop event occurs.
Competitor's versions of this don't destroy the blade. The reason competition no longer exist is because SawStop sued based on the limb detection, not the blade repositioning tech.
Expect better than SawStop to appear when able, and this issue to go away.
I'm actually kind of surprised that any implementation destroyed the blade. Like I don't actually care that the blade is moving, I care where the blade is moving. It seems like a trigger to yank the blade under the table would be the easier and more obvious way to do it.
A few-milliseconds yank covering up to a couple inches of blade height feels like a harder engineering problem than "trigger brakes already right near the blade to grab the shit out of the blade"
So we're somewhat lucky from an engineering standpoint. Because the blade is circular the only interval of time that really matters is from detection to first movement away. Because it triggers on touch the difference between getting sawed and not is millimeters. The time from first movement to full retraction only needs to be fast on human scale time in case the person's hand is still moving into the blade. Name brand SawStop is actually fairly slow on the retraction because it uses the blade's momentum to drive it and that's plenty of speed.
However, the blade-preserving system puts the explosive between the table and the pivot that's already there for retracting the blade. The full explosion force is there to force the blade down and it ends up being faster than the SawStop. Which while cool the SawStop was already fast enough so it's all the same.
So I don't know, I guess to me I'm surprised that the solution we jumped to first was a brake when the action of moving it out of the way takes far far less energy. It's only the energy to move the weight of the blade and bar down at the requisite speed, instead of needing to absorb the full energy of the spinning blade.
> Because the blade is circular the only interval of time that really matters is from detection to first movement away. Because it triggers on touch the difference between getting sawed and not is millimeters. The time from first movement to full retraction only needs to be fast on human scale time in case the person's hand is still moving into the blade. Name brand SawStop is actually fairly slow on the retraction because it uses the blade's momentum to drive it and that's plenty of speed.
Do you mean in a system with both moving it away and a break?
The only time my fingers hit the blade of a table saw they were moving with a fair amount of momentum and hit first low on the blade - dropping the blade at the speed of gravity wouldn't have been enough.
I haven't seen an explosive system like you mention - is that what Bosch had for a bit? - so I don't know just how fast that is, though dropping a spinning-towards-you blade also seems to have some other potential risks of grabbing shit with it, too. If it's fast enough I wouldn't be concerned as much, but at relatively slow speed it seems maybe nasty.
I have had two brake activations in as many weeks, one on a dado stack (don’t ask). Neither destroyed the blade. Both blades will be back in service within a week.
Just putting out there: the popular idea that blades are always trash after an activation is not true.
That said, cheap big box store blades without carbide teeth will die a horrible death.
How much does it cost to repair a carbide toothed blade, and how accessible are shops that can perform those repairs? Is it realistic that most consumers would be able to get a blade repaired rather than just running to the hardware store and getting a new one? Not being snarky; I've just never been under the impression that repairs could really be done for less than the value of a new blade.
I’m paying about $50 service fees for the two blades currently out for repair. The 10” replacements cost over $200, and the 8” dado would require buying a new stack… around $250. The same folks who sharpen and true my blades do the repairs. They’re local to me here in Maine.
Ruminating a bit:
Cheaper blades are replaced more often with use and can’t generally be sharpened; SawStop tech doesn’t change the lifetime of a blade unless an activation happens. So, if you’re already willing to run to the box store for another blade semi-regularly, whether one survives activation perhaps isn’t material?
On the other hand, somebody who doesn’t regularly use their saw is probably both more price conscious and less likely to need sharpening/replacement often. I assume they care most about whether an activation forces them to buy a new blade (and a $100 brake). I suspect those are the people who propagate “SawStop = trashed blade”. For them, it’s true.
My first cynical reaction is to ask which politicians will benefit handsomely from stock trading with SawStop stock (assuming it's a publicly traded company) or through kickbacks of one kind or another.
I think SawStop table saws are terrific for woodworkers who work in their own shop. Less so for workers who have to bring their tools to the job site. Yes, I know that SawStop makes a portable table saw. When you're working at a job site, you have less control over the materials you're working with (as compared to the cabinet maker in his/her own shop). SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site. A common example mentioned is treated lumber, but I don't recall ever having cut treated lumber on a table saw. When I need to cut treated lumber it's with a hand held circular saw. I'm a part-time handyman (some evenings and weekends).
> SawStop technology isn't compatible with all materials that need to be cut at a job site
You can turn the tech off to make it work as a regular table saw, but it does require pre-existing knowledge about what may false-trip the saw. Having a job site saw fail on site without cartridges and blades in supply, or a newbie on the saw could be pretty bad.
Not overly prohibitive with training though, and is something that everyone will face if this becomes mandated.
afaik the patent was basically expiring in the next couple years anyway, even the small ancillary ones. They've been making and selling SawStop saws for the last 20 years and already made their bag. So, since SawStop has the experience designing and building the systems they want to wring out some good will and see which Big Saw manufacturer wants to pay them to get ahead of their competition.
Minor tangent- I view patents and especially physical invention as requiring more work yet patents last 20 years while copyright can last up to 120 years!
Compare the difference in effect between having a copyright on iOS and having a patent on "mobile device with a touchscreen display". In one case you can do a comparable amount of work to make a competitor, in the other competition is entirely prohibited.
Also, copyright terms are ridiculous. Historically patents and copyrights were both 14 years.
How about SawStop open their patent up first? They've already sued to prevent other tool manufacturers from making their own solutions to the problem, because they want theirs to be licensed. So even though they claim they will open their patent once the feature is enforced, what have they done in good faith to make us believe they won't move the goalposts to opening it, once they have captured the market?
Presumably there's a reasonable compromise whereby they provide a public license only valid in areas where such safety mechanisms are legally mandated.
SawStop was never against licensing the technology, and from what I'm reading about FRAND, it doesn't force the patent holder to open their patents, only to negotiate in a good faith manner that does not discriminate between licensees, meaning they cannot license the tech to DeWalt for $10/saw and try to make Bosch or Ryobi pay $100 per saw. It doesn't say they are forced to give away their IP for free.
Its extremely unlikely they would offer to open up the patent and then say "haha, fooled you!" once the law takes effect. It would do them more harm than good in the long run to lie to lawmakers & everyone else.
The patent[0] is over 20 years old so it should have expired regardless - except it got 11 years of extensions. That's a bit of an odd situation because SawStop was selling "patent-pending" saws since the very early 2000's...I'm not sure the extension guidelines were intended to give companies 30 years of exclusivity and protection - it would make more sense in a situation where they couldn't start profiting on the patent until the patent was finally granted. There's a reason they're supposed to be 20 years from "date of file" instead of "date of approval". The current system could encourage companies to try to get their patent applications tied up in appeals for as many decades as possible.
Regardless, it would have made sense for them to agree to FRAND [1] licensing >5 years ago which might have accelerated standards adoption.
> I am a patent agent and I just took a look at the patent office history of the 9,724,840 patent. It is very interesting because it spent a long time (about 8 years) being appealed in the court system before it was allowed. While patents are provided with a 20 year life from their initial filing date (Mar 13, 2002 for this patent) there are laws that extend the life of the patent to compensate the inventor for delays that took place during prosecution. The patent office initially stated that the patent was entitled to 305 days of Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) and that is what is printed on the face of the patent. But the law also allows for adjustment due to delays in the courts, which the patent office didn’t initially include. So SawStop petitioned to have the delays due to the court appeal added and their petition was granted indicating that it was proper to add those court delays to the PTA. So the PTA was extended to 4044 days, meaning that this patent doesn’t expire until 4/8/2033!
> The other interesting thing about this patent, is that its claims are very broad. Claim 1 basically covers ANY type of saw with a circular blade that stops within 10 ms of detecting contact with a human as long as the stop mechanism is “electronically triggerable.” It would be VERY difficult to work around this patent and meet the CPSC rules. So the fact that SawStop has promised to dedicate this to the public is at least somewhat meaningful.
> BUT, SawStop has many other patents that it has not dedicated to the public. I have not analyzed their overall portfolio, but is is very likely that the other patents create an environment that still makes it difficult to design a saw in compliance with CPSC rules. So it is entirely possible that the dedication of the one broad patent was done to provide PR cover while still not creating a competitive market.
If I had 3 years to implement a safety feature based on a patent to meet new legal requirements I would be concerned about getting sued for edge cases the patent holder worked out.. Injurues are reduced but buyer beware may no longer apply to the remaining injuries especially if even other new implementations avoid edge case largely by accident, I.e. slightly different materials and other factors not considered when only one manufacturer was attempting the feature.
1. Many of SawStop’s patents either expired or about to expire.
2. Bosch already has a similar tech but was prohibited to sell their saws with it in the US. I think soon all the patents that were basis for this ruling going to expire.
3. SawStop already by acquired by TTS(same company that owns Festool). They may have plans to integrate it in their line up somehow and safety tech becomes less of a differentiator.
And my even more cynical take is that FTC only considered requiring safety tech after a nod from the industry leaders.
If the technology is allowed under free-use or a free limited license, that'll change things.
Right now, no one can put it on their saws without having to either risk the patent fight or pay whatever Sawstop wants, with the later probably being so high, there is a reason other brands don't have "Equipped with sawstop technology!" badged on them.
There's some amount of altruism, but no one is cutting their own throats either. At least some corporations are run by humans.
A patent expires, but forcing competitors to adopt a technology you already incorporate raises everyone else's costs, so it's not always bad for business.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies aren't clamoring to buy out SawStops and hand-deliver them to everyone with a table saw, asking them to install them at no cost in exchange for an insurance discount.
It's idiotic that health insurance companies don't pay for gym memberships and reduce your premiums if you deliver them screenshots of your workouts and pictures of making healthy food at home.
That's what a sane insurance company that wants to increase profit margins would do. Get out there in the field and reduce the number of times they need to pay.
Confession: The 3-point seat belt always feels like an eyeroller to me. It's not complicated, and the kind of thing that many others would have come up with soon enough anyway. The real injustice was in classing it as the kind of deep, mind-blowing, hard-won insight that deserves a patent.
> It's not complicated, and the kind of thing that many others would have come up with soon enough anyway.
Counterpoint: a lot of inventions seem obvious in retrospect, especially if you've used them routinely for most of your life. Doesn't mean they were obvious at the time.
The 3-point seat belt is another time this happened and probably one of the few feel-good "this should be available to everyone" patent stories: Volvo designed it, decided the safety-for-humanity* benefits outweighed patent protections, and made the patent open for anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bohlin (*: at least the segment of humanity that drives cars)
I'd be curious to hear the cynical take here. If I was to wargame it, I would guess something like: SawStop doesn't want to compete with Harbor Freight and cheap chinese tool manufacturers -- that's a race to the bottom, and power tools have turned into ecosystem lock-in plays which makes it difficult for a niche manufacturer to win in. So they'd rather compete on just the safety mechanism since they have a decade head start on it. They're too niche to succeed on SawStop(TM) workbenches, and they forsee bigger profits in a "[DeWalt|Milwaukee|EGo|...], Protected by SawStop(TM)" world.