CT Scans of New vs. Used SawStop

>, I have an altendorf handguard sliding table saw, which will stop as fast as the sawstop,

The alternative approaches from other industrial saw manufacturers that are "non-contact non-destructive" are interesting:

- cameras and machine learning used by Altendorf "Hand Guard": https://www.altendorfgroup.com/en-us/machines/altendorf-hand...

- inductive proximity (same science as Theremin[1]) used by Felder "PCS Preventative Contact System" : https://www.felder-group.com/en-us/pcs

- SCM "Blade Off" (not sure of detection method ... looks like inductive proximity) : https://www.scmgroup.com/en_US/scmwood/products/joinery-mach...

But I've heard reports from 3rd-parties that Altendorf's camera detection method is unreliable/glitchy and doesn't work as well as Felder's system. Maybe Altendorf fixed the bugs.

Also, Altendorf's philosophy of using cameras & ML instead of inductive proximity reminds me of Tesla's philosophy using cameras instead of LIDAR (Waymo).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin

EDIT ADD: >I'm not sure how comparable these alternatives are when two of them are "request a quote" kind of pricing, and the Altendorf is $7000+

My comment was about "industrial saws" so they're definitely not realistic alternatives to buying a jobsite SawStop for homeowners. I added italics to the adjective "industrial" to clarify this.

I love my sawstop, it's a great machine.

Often times when a product has some patent-protected feature, the product itself is substandard, but I have not found that case with sawstop. It's one of my highest quality tools.

It would be nice if the mechanism wasn't so destructive. I accidentally had an aluminum fence just a fraction of a mm too close, and it touched the blade. I was using a dado stack, and it did a number on the carbide teeth of the blades. Good dado sets are not cheap, nor is the sawstop cartridge.

Mostly unrelated, but I don't think SawStop is releasing its patent anytime soon like the article states. That SawStop press release was the CEO saying they would do so if the CPSC rule was passed, but the rule wasn't voted on. And even then they were only releasing one of their hundreds of patents.

The question that bothers me whenever SawStop comes up: why does it appears as if this isn't much of a thing outside of the US?

Or is it and I'm just not seeing it from my Dutch viewpoint?

Does anyone know of anyone who has written about this discrepancy with some numbers (emergency room admissions, SawStop sales) backing it?

Usually those fancy 3D displays are miserable on my phone, but the ones on this page pretty much just work. Lovely surprise.

My shop teacher seemed to think the band saw was more dangerous than the table saw. Was he wrong, or is it just that table saws are used so much more than band saws that they dominate the injuries?

What's the story on the patents? If it was invented in 1999, shouldn't they have expired in 2021?

I bought my sawstop shortly after my partner started working in the medical field, where they'd see saw related injuries or amputations come in weekly.

Saw was expensive, yeah.. but they hold their value on the second hand market, if you ever even see them for sale.

I had a cabinet maker over last week, after he noticed my sawstop he showed me his 2 partially missing fingers.

The company also isn't playing games, the saw is beautiful and a lifetime purchase.

Thanks to the author for not burying the lede. This is how an informative article should look like and it was a joy to read.

Is it feasible to stop the blade in comparable time by reversing the motor?

Not really related to the actual content of the post, but I use a Lumafield at work constantly and love it! The scan quality and software is amazing. Scanning electronics is so much fun, and so helpful!

Off topic but I wonder how broadly the idea of very expensive failure scenarios but human damage is avoided could be applied to industry at large...

Wait, so is it a one time function? Can the wire be reset?

I would be glad to see better table saw safety mechanisms, though I'm skeptical that 1. This will actually happen 2. That patent is the only one that will wind up mattering.

I can't help but wonder if a big part of the reason the number of incidents is so high is because we're intentionally hyperbolic about risks when it comes to warning labels, for liability reasons. As an example, many appliances will warn that you can never operate them with the covers off and doing so can cause death or serious injury. Okay fine, sure, it's not necessarily safe, and perhaps you could indeed kill yourself by accident doing so. However, in practice it's bullshit. People do this all the time, and you pretty much have to sometimes. How the hell are you even supposed to troubleshoot without being able to see what's wrong? Just guess?

So sometimes when it comes to warnings it's easy to empathize with the person who didn't take them very seriously, as we're pretty much conditioned to take warnings like this with a grain of salt.

Though honestly, when it comes to using a table saw, the thing I'm actually afraid of is kickback. Amputation risk is still very serious of course, but I feel safe enough with the many layers of mitigations I already use. I don't want to fall into complacency, but I also don't think I'm going to lose sleep over not having a SawStop table saw either. (I am not using my table saw often enough for it to be a terrible concern anyways.)

Does making tools more expensive really benefit anyone other than the companies which own the patents which make them more expensive?

Of these 30,000 injuries per year, how many happen when the blade guards are removed? How many happen when a push stick is not used? How many happen when a person stands in the direction that a piece of wood will be thrown by kickback? Once all those are subtracted are there enough injuries to count?

What if all tablesaw injury cases were tried by a jury of shop teachers?

The best advice I got in shop class was to slowly and quietly count to 10 on my fingers before throwing a power switch and in doing so to envision the operation from beginning to end and all the forces which would be involved, and to remind myself, that I wanted to be able to repeat that cut when the power was turned off.

SawStop goes on about how they will license their patent, but the licensing being offered is a very narrow one and doesn't seem to include the entirety of their patent portfolio, and they have fought very hard to keep tools with similar capabilities out of the U.S. market claiming patent infringement.