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In 2015, 4,700 people in the US lost a finger or other body part to table-saw incidents. Most of those injuries didn't have to happen, thanks to technology invented in 1999 by entrepreneur Stephen Gass. By giving his blade a slight electric charge, his saw is able to detect contact with a human hand and stop spinning in a few milliseconds. A widely circulated video[1] shows a test on a hot dog that leaves the wiener unscathed.
Now federal regulators are considering whether to make Gass' technology mandatory in the table-saw industry. The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced plans for a new rule in May, and the rules could take effect in the coming months.
But established makers of power tools vehemently object. They say the mandate could double the cost of entry-level table saws and destroy jobs in the power-tool industry. They also point out that Gass holds dozens of patents on the technology. If the CPSC makes the technology mandatory for table saws, that could give Gass a legal monopoly over the table-saw industry until at least 2021, when his oldest patents expire.
At the same time, table-saw related injuries cost society billions every year. The CPSC predicts switching to the safer saw design will save society $1,500 to $4,000 per saw sold by reducing medical bills and lost work.
"You commissioners have the power to take one of the most dangerous products ever available to consumers and make it vastly safer," Gass said at a CPSC public hearing on Wednesday.
[1] SawStop Hot dog Video - Saw blade retracts within 5 milliseconds of accidental contact - YouTube.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday August 12 2017, @02:06PM (1 child)
Table saws are rapidly nearing their post-professional era. Kind of like how metal shops don't have or use horizontal mills or shapers anymore so you can't buy them new. Or how most home electronics were not assembled on an assembly line using hand soldering irons. Or how most cooks, professional and amateur, have oursourced butchering services from their kitchens for better or worse.
They'll always be a place for stuff like custom crown molding installation inside houses, well, probably, but the days of table saws on factory floors are already gone, too productive and cheap to use automation and CNC.
I would not be entirely surprised with ever increasing automation and technology if the table saw market eventually disappears except for hobbyists and retro people.
For example people don't buy table saws because they're cool machines, they buy them because they want controlled predictable perfect cross cuts on a piece of wood, for example. Well... you're gonna need a CNC wood mill for market pressure anyway, and with advanced machine vision and robot arm clamping tech, you could casually toss a 2x4 on the mill bed and the machine vision will figure out a perfect 90.000 degree cut on both ends at precisely 92 5/8 standard wall stud length (or WTF it is, I think thats standard wall stud length?) regardless how you toss the 2x4 on the mill bed. In fact you can toss 5 or 10 studs at a time on the mill bed and the robot arm will feed material in and out and nicely stack it. And you need the mill to do millwork onsite anyway. So why purchase and haul a table saw that does an inferior job more slowly and more labor expense?
I would not be surprised if in 10, 20, 30 years people look back on using old fashioned table saws like most woodworkers look back on using jointers hand planes from the middle ages, well, that's very interesting and historical and makes interesting TV coverage but that ain't happening in my shop thanks!
The impact on structural engineering and building codes of aerospace grade onsite CNC manufactured tolerances is interesting to think about. No more "pound to make it fit" or "the house will settle eventually making that gap disappear"
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday August 13 2017, @05:41AM
Metal shops don't use horizontal mills anymore huh? That would be news to the machine tool industry. I would say most high volume machining is done on horizontals. As far as table saws go, you might as well claim that hammers are going out of fashion. Why put a process on a $200k+ machine when you can do it at least as fast on a $500 table saw?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek