There is a table saw accident every 9 minutes on average. Approximately 40,000 Americans go to hospital emergency rooms every year with injuries sustained while operating table saws. About 4,000 of those injuries – or more than 10 every day – are amputations.
Those are terrible statistics. Forget the $2 billion those injuries cost our country every year, the human cost in pain and suffering and lost physical capabilities is appalling.
One company has engineered a solution. SawStop has built a line of table saws that can’t cut your fingers off. Sound impossible? Here’s how it works.
The blade in a SawStop table saw carries a small electrical charge which is constantly monitored. When the saw is cutting wood, nothing happens since wood is not conductive. You on the other hand conduct electricity. When you touch the blade, you draw current away from it and the safety system can sense the resulting voltage drop. It’s exactly the way touch lamps work.
When the system senses contact with skin the braking system springs into action, literally. A fuse releases a powerful spring that drives an aluminum brake into the blade, stopping it instantly. The blade comes to a complete stop in the time it takes for two or three teeth to make contact with the skin. The momentum of the blade drives it beneath the table and power to the motor is shut off. All that happens in less than 5 milliseconds! Touch a spinning SawStop blade and –bam- it stops and disappears. An accident that could have resulted in an amputation winds up being just a nick on the skin.
Once you figure out what happened and realize you still have all your fingers, you can reset the saw in as little as 5 minutes. You’ll need to replace the brake cartridge, which costs about $69, and your blade. Depending on what you spend on blades that might set you back $150. Compare that to the cost of a trip to the emergency room. Table saw injury expenses can climb into the tens of thousands of dollars when you consider direct medical costs and indirect costs such as time away from work.
A table saw, even with the SawStop braking system, is still a dangerous machine that must be treated with respect. Table saws have guards that fit around the blade to protect against injury but sometimes they get in the way and operators remove them. And even a guard can’t prevent all injuries. A built in safety system provides protection even with the guards removed.
People often will say “I’ve been doing this for years. I know how to be safe.” The problem is that it only takes a slip or a moment of inattention. Experienced operators do get hurt. There’s a reason they call them accidents.
Be sure to engineer safety into everything you do. And remember that the most powerful tool in your shop is your brain. Think before you start.
Let’s be safe out there.
