Notes from Howard's Sabbatical from Working. The name comes from a 1998 lunch conversation. Someone asked if everything man knew was on the web. I answered "no" and off the top of my head said "Fidel Castro's favorite color". About every 6-12 months I've searched for this. It doesn't show up in the first 50 Google results (this blog is finally first for that search), AskJeeves says it's: red.
Monday, August 14, 2006
A Safer Table Saw
Here's the story of Stephen Gass who invented a Table saw that can differentiate between wood and flesh and can stop in a fraction of second. The video showing a test with a hot dog is impressive. The industry's reaction to this is not.
The saw guard that's displayed there is totally useless and has been taken off. That's because the vertical "strut" that mounts it to the rear of the table, if not absolutely perfectly lined up on the same plane of the saw, will get in the way of the piece of wood as it passes by. And of course it's impossible to keep lined up. This is a popular thing with table saws, to dump the blade guard. Yeah, this technology needs to be commonplace.
Although interestingly, this saw weighs probably 400 lbs. Once I am ready to move it from my garage to my new workshop I will need 3 guys to come over and help. I wonder how much more it would weigh with the sawstop technology.
2 comments:
So I own this one:
http://tinyurl.com/o3sln
The saw guard that's displayed there is totally useless and has been taken off. That's because the vertical "strut" that mounts it to the rear of the table, if not absolutely perfectly lined up on the same plane of the saw, will get in the way of the piece of wood as it passes by. And of course it's impossible to keep lined up. This is a popular thing with table saws, to dump the blade guard. Yeah, this technology needs to be commonplace.
Although interestingly, this saw weighs probably 400 lbs. Once I am ready to move it from my garage to my new workshop I will need 3 guys to come over and help. I wonder how much more it would weigh with the sawstop technology.
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