As featured recently on Toolmonger, the SawStop table saw features a safety system that starts by inducing an electrical signal onto the blade. If your fingers (or any other part of your body) come in contact with the blade, the signal changes and the blade retracts within milliseconds, leaving your fingers with only a scratch. SawStop currently offers only one product, the table saw, but they’re working on some other stuff. These two quick videos give a first look at future SawStop products.
Note to viewers: imagine that the hot dog is your favorite finger.
SawStop [Corporate Site]
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4 Responses to It’s Just Cool: SawStop Prototypes
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I would hate to see the number of half-fingers on the floor in their engineering lab as they work out the bugs in the technology.
This is dumb. It’s been five years and they can’t even get their contractor saw out. These videos have been on their site for that whole time as well. I doubt we’ll ever get other tool with the sawstop system.
If they believe in the system to save fingers (as opposed to making money) as the site says, license it for free and get it saving fingers/hands by getting it integrated into big name brands.
that second video is a terrifying tool. I don’t care what kind of safety features it has, it gives me the screaming heebie jeebies. A guillotine in reverse. *SHUDDER*
People deserve a little something for their ideas.
The fact that you’d have to redesign the machine from the ground up in order to incorporate this technology is probably more discouraging than a licensing fee. The existing manufacturers have many machines, all of which would have to be re-engineered to allow for the addition of contact detection technology.
Even with a high licensing fee, these big players would be raking it right now if they had taken the plunge to license SawStop contact detection technology. So it’s not as if they would have been hurt overall. They just didn’t want to take on the liability or redesign the machines they have been making for decades. Too bad.