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Photo Gallery Building a birdhouse on the old oak workbench in his grandfather’s garage is one of the oldest bonding activities for a young lad. A closer bonding experience is holding a wet rag to stubs where your fingers used to be as your grandfather drove you to the hospital.
Cutting wood is both invigorating and dangerous, where the smell of freshly cut wood lingers over a razor-sharp rotating saw.
Precaution after precaution is always taken before and during a cut, but someone always ends up mutilating a finger. So after all the gloves, guides and gauges, what is the safest way to cut wood on a table saw?
The answer is the SawStop, a revolutionary table saw that has various fail-safes, but with one unique feature.
“The moment the saw touches something other than wood, the blade is instantly stopped and retracted into the table,” said Jack Neuber, the Marine Corps Community Services manager of the wood hobby shop here.
Neuber, who suffered a table saw injury himself, can tell from experience the definite advantages between conventional table saws and the SawStop.
“Cutting your hand on any other table saw can result in months of physical therapy and hundreds of dollars,” said Neuber. “With the SawStop, the worse you’ll get is a little nick on your finger.”
When one of the saw’s teeth makes contact with your skin, the blade sends a current to a braking mechanism which shoves a metal block into the saw, immediately stopping it while retracting it down into the table. The process takes all of a few milliseconds; only three of the saw’s teeth would make contact with your skin, enough to make only a little cut.
“In 2003 the Consumer Product Safety Commission released a study that said table saw-related injuries averaged 60,000 a year,” said Mark Pennington, the SawStop marketing director. “Though we have no average on how many ‘finger saves’ we have, we know we’ve impacted that injury average substantially.”
What also makes the SawStop so successful is that it doesn’t focus simply on its blade-braking feature. Along with smoother adjusts to the height and angle of the saw, other safety features such as a knee shut-off button and standard riving knife, which keeps the wood from kicking off the saw, makes the SawStop a well-rounded next generation table saw.
With an almost guaranteed accident-free capability as well as improved performance, the SawStop and its makers have a lot to brag about. Hitting the markets by storm, the SawStop is aiming to drastically reduce table saw accidents while also providing a higher quality cut.
“Out main goal along with safety was not to sacrifice that safety for performance,” said Pennington.
As the product’s Web site states, “It’s truly the ‘Rolls Royce’ of table saws.”
