![]() Publicly they’ve offered several arguments: The number of saw injuries and their impact are exaggerated the market for popular, lightweight saws, which cost as little as $100, would be destroyed by the added expense of SawStop SawStop may stop a blade when it touches conductive materials like metal or very wet wood, usually destroying the blade. Gass says a power tool executive warned him, “If you guys don’t cooperate with us, the industry is going to get together and squish you.”įor more than a decade, toolmakers and the Power Tool Institute, their trade group, have defended the design of conventional table saws and their decision to not adopt SawStop or a similar safety device. Tens of thousands of digits have been sliced off in the past decade, but the rest of power tool industry has snubbed the technology and carried on as before. However, SawStop still makes the only saws with skin-sensing technology, and accounts for a tiny fraction of total saw sales. “I mean, we’re dealing with human beings.” ![]() “You couldn’t wipe the smile off him after this,” Wheeler says, adding that he, too, was “totally ecstatic.” All saws should have this technology, Wheeler says. A photo on SawStop’s website shows Seymour beaming in triumph as he displays his thumb, which looks like it has a paper cut. (SawStop also has acknowledged two reports of amputations.) Wheeler bought two of the company’s first saws. In March 2006, Carl Seymour, a foreman at his shop, accidentally touched a whirring blade. Since it started making table saws in in 2004, SawStop has recorded 2,000 “finger saves”-customer reports of accidents likely to have caused disfiguring injuries with conventional saws, but that resulted in minor cuts or a few stitches at most. At an average cost of $35,000 each, these accidents lead to more than $2.3 billion in societal costs annually including medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering. Those kinds of injuries are all too common: Each year, more than 67,000 workers and do-it-yourselfers are injured by table saws, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (PDF), resulting in more than 33,000 emergency room visits and 4,000 amputations. ![]() Watching SawStop in action, Wheeler thought: If only this had come along sooner. Wheeler felt awful about the injuries, the loss of two good workers, the $95,000 in medical bills, the doubling of his workers compensation rates. Not long before, two of his employees had been maimed within a few weeks of each other. As the operator of a wood shop in Hot Springs, Arkansas, he was all too aware of the unforgiving nature of table saws. The saw was equipped with a safety device called SawStop that could distinguish between wood and flesh and then stop the blade fast enough to prevent a gruesome injury. As the hot dog touched the whirring saw, the blade came to a dead stop in about three one-thousandths of a second, leaving the dog with only a minor nick. A man took an Oscar Meyer wiener and pushed it into the blade of a table saw spinning 4,000 times per minute. Gerald Wheeler caught the hot dog demonstration at the International Woodworking Fair in Atlanta in 2002. A longer version of this story appears at FairWarning. ![]()
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